Iconic Works of Art by Feminists and Gender Activists: Mistress-Pieces 2021004638, 2021004639, 9780367707446, 9780367707453, 9781003147770

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Iconic Works of Art by Feminists and Gender Activists

In this book, contributors identify and explore a range of iconic works – “MistressPieces” – that have been made by feminists and gender activists since the 1970s. The first volume for which the defining of iconic feminist art is the raison d’être, its contributors interpret a “Mistress-Piece” as a work that has proved influential in a particular context because of its distinctiveness and relevance. Reinterpreting iconic art by Alice Neel, Hannah Wilke and Ana Mendieta, the authors also offer important insights about works that may be less well known – those by Natalia LL, Tanja Ostojić, Swoon, Clara Menéres, Diane Victor, Usha Seejarim, Ilse Fusková, Phaptawan Suwannakudt and Tracey Moffatt, among others. While in some instances revealing cross influences between artists working in different frameworks, the publication simultaneously makes evident how social and political factors specific to particular countries had significant impact on the making and reception of art focused on gender. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, visual studies and gender studies. Brenda Schmahmann is Professor and the SARChI Chair in South African Art and Visual Culture at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa.

Cover image: Usha Seejarim, Cow’s Head. 2012, iron and hanger. Photograph courtesy of the artist and Les Cohn.

Routledge Research in Gender and Art

Routledge Research in Gender and Art is a new series in art history and visual studies, focusing on gender, sexuality and feminism. Proposals for monographs and edited collections on this topic are welcomed. Feminist Subjectivities in Fiber Art and Craft Shadows of Affect John Corso Esquivel Artist-Parents in Contemporary Art Gender, Identity, and Domesticity Barbara Kutis Feminist Visual Activism and the Body Edited by Basia Sliwinska Modern Women Artists in the Nordic Countries, 1900–1960 Edited by Kerry Greaves Transnational Perspectives on Feminism and Art, 1960–1985 Edited by Jen Kennedy, Trista E. Mallory, and Angelique Szymanek French Women Orientalist Artists, 1861–1956 Cross-Cultural Contacts and Depictions of Difference Mary Kelly Iconic Works of Art by Feminists and Gender Activists Mistress-Pieces Edited by Brenda Schmahmann For a full list of titles in this series, please visit https://www.routledge.com/ Routledge-Research-in-Gender-and-Art/book-series/RRGA

Iconic Works of Art by Feminists and Gender Activists Mistress-Pieces

Brenda Schmahmann

First published 2021 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 selection and editorial matter, Brenda Schmahmann; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Brenda Schmahmann to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Schmahmann, Brenda, 1960- editor. Title: Iconic works of art by feminists and gender activists: mistress-pieces/edited by Brenda Schmahmann. Description: Abingdon, Oxon; New York: Routledge, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021004638 (print) | LCCN 2021004639 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367707446 (hardback) | ISBN 9780367707453 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003147770 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Feminism and art. | Feminism in art. | Masterpiece, Artistic. Classification: LCC N72.F45 I26 2021 (print) | LCC N72.F45 (ebook) | DDC 700.1/03–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021004638 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021004639 ISBN: 978-0-367-70744-6 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-70745-3 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-14777-0 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd.

Contents

List of Figuresvii List of Contributorsxi Acknowledgementsxv Introduction

1

BRENDA SCHMAHMANN

PART I

Reconfiguring Domestic Life

21

1 The Aesthetic Labour of Protest, Now and Then: The Women’s Peace Camp at Greenham Common (1981–2000)

23

ALEXANDRA KOKOLI

2 “Middle Fingers up, put them Hands High”: Rethinking Tracey Moffatt’s Scarred for Life (1994)

38

JACQUELINE MILLNER AND CATRIONA MOORE

3 Bodies, Borders and Law: Tanja Ostojić’s Looking for a Husband with EU Passport (2000–2005)

52

HILARY ROBINSON

4 Household Matters: Usha Seejarim’s Venus at Home (2012) and the Politics of Women’s Work

68

BRENDA SCHMAHMANN

PART II

Critiquing Gender Violence and Abuse

85

5 Reading Hannah Wilke’s S.O.S. Starification Object Series (1974–1982) in the Era of #MeToo

87

MARISSA VIGNEAULT

vi  Contents 6 Private Trauma, Public Healing: Hannan Abu-Hussein’s The Vagina Series

102

TAL DEKEL

7 Transgressive Martyrs in Diane Victor’s Wise and Foolish Virgins (2008)

115

KAREN VON VEH

8 Swoon’s Medea (2017) as a Feminist Intervention: Re-producing the Maternal

130

PAULA J. BIRNBAUM

PART III

Great Goddess Iconographies

145

9 Ana Mendieta’s Silueta Series (1973–1980): In and Out of Feminism

147

SHERRY BUCKBERROUGH

10 Clara Menéres’ Woman-Earth-Life (1977) and the Politics of Censorship, Concealment and Vandalism

162

LAURA CASTRO

11 The Female Body and Spirituality in Ilse Fusková’s El Zapallo (1982) Series

177

MARÍA LAURA ROSA

PART IV

Body Politics

191

12 Who Is Afraid of Natalia LL? Consumer Art (1972–1975) and the Pleasures and Dangers of Feminist Art in Communist Poland

193

JOANNA INGLOT

13 An Icon for the Aged: Alice Neel’s Self-Portrait (1980)

210

PAMELA ALLARA

14 Phaptawan Suwannakudt’s Akojorn (1995): Connecting Women

223

YVONNE LOW

15 Into the Grave and Back: Psychosomatic Passage through Grief in Lindi Arbi’s Unearthed (2009)

236

IRENE BRONNER

Index

251

Figures

0.1

0.2

0.3

0.4

1.1 1.2 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4

Judy Chicago, The Dinner Party, 1974–1979, mixed media, 48 × 48 ft, Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, Collection of the Brooklyn Museum. © Judy Chicago. Reproduced with permission from DALRO. Judy Chicago, The Dinner Party, 1974–1979, Installation view of Wing Three, featuring Virginia Woolf and Georgia O’Keefe place settings, Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, Collection of the Brooklyn Museum. © Judy Chicago. Reproduced with permission from DALRO. Mary Kelly, Post-Partum Document, 1973–1979, Installation in six parts. Installation view of Post-Partum Document, The Complete Work 1973–79 at The Generali Foundation, Vienna, 1998. © Mary Kelly. Courtesy of the artist and Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York. Mary Kelly, Post-Partum Document: Documentation I: Analysed Fecal Stains and Feeding Charts, 1974, Perspex unit, white card, diaper lining, plastic sheeting, paper and ink, 1 of 31 units, 11 × 14 in. 28 × 35.5 cm. © Mary Kelly, Courtesy of the artist and Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York. Sally Payen, Fence and Shadow, Invisible Woman and the Telephonic Tree. 2017, oil on canvas, 160 × 200 cm. Courtesy of the artist. Margaret Harrison, Common Reflections, 2013, installation view, Northern Art Prize 2013, Leeds Art Gallery. Courtesy of the artist and Leeds Art Gallery. Photograph by Simon Warner. Tracey Moffatt, Job Hunt, 1976, from Scarred for Life, 1994, offset lithograph, 80 × 60 cm, Edition of 50 + AP 9. Courtesy of the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney. Tracey Moffatt, Useless, 1974, from Scarred for Life, 1994, offset lithograph, 80 × 60 cm, Edition of 50 + AP 9. Courtesy of the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney. Tracey Moffatt, Doll Birth, 1972, from Scarred for Life, 1994, offset lithograph, 80 × 60 cm, Edition of 50 + AP 9. Courtesy of the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney. Tracey Moffatt, Heart Attack, 1970, from Scarred for Life, 1994, offset lithograph. 80 × 60 cm, Edition of 50 + AP 9. Courtesy of the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney.

2

3

4

5 26 31 39 40 41 42

viii  Figures 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 4.1

4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 5.1

5.2

5.3

5.4 6.1 6.2 6.3 7.1 7.2

Tanja Ostojić, The “Ad” from Looking for a Husband with EU Passport, 2000–2005, Participatory web project/combined media installation. Photo – Borut Krajnc Copyright/courtesy Tanja Ostojić. 56 Tanja Ostojić and Klemens Golf, Crossing Over, 2001, seven-minute DV video. Video-still. 58 Tanja Ostojić, From Looking for a Husband with EU Passport, Wedding photo: Srđan Veljović 2002. Courtesy Tanja Ostojić 59 Tanja Ostojić, Looking for a Husband with EU Passport, 2000–2005, Installation view, Kustpavillion Innsbruck, 2008. Photo – Rupert Larl. Copyright/courtesy Tanja Ostojić 60 Usha Seejarim, three of the components of Hairstyles, 2012. Hairstyles: Heart (left); Hairstyles: Landing Strip (middle); Hairstyles: Triangle (right). Installation constituted from mops. Photographs courtesy of the artist and Les Cohn. 73 Usha Seejarim, Cow’s Head, 2012, iron and hanger. Photograph courtesy of the artist and Les Cohn. 75 Usha Seejarim, The Builder’s Wife, 2012, ironing board, wooden builder’s trowel, plug. Photograph courtesy of the artist and Les Cohn. 77 Usha Seejarim, Three Sisters In Law, 2012, brooms and bangles. Photograph courtesy of the artist and Les Cohn. 79 Usha Seejarim, Affairs of the Home, 2012, ironing board and signage boards. Photograph courtesy of the artist and Les Cohn. 81 Hannah Wilke, S.O.S. Scarification Object Series, 1974–1982, MOMA, New York. © 2020 Marsie, Emanuelle, Damon and Andrew Scharlatt, Hannah Wilke Collection & Archive, Los Angeles/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Right Society (ARS), NY. 88 Hannah Wilke at S.O.S. performance in the exhibition “Five American Women in Paris”, Galerie Gerald Piltzer, Paris, 1975. © 2020 Marsie, Emanuelle, Damon and Andrew Scharlatt, Hannah Wilke Collection & Archive, Los Angeles/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Right Society (ARS), NY 92 Gilles Edme Petit, after François Boucher, Le Matin, La Dame a sa Toilete, 1745–1760, etching and engraving, 31.5 × 21.5 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1953 (53.600.1042). 95 “American Beauties” playing cards, illustrations by Gil Elvgren, Stancraft Products, 1960. 97 Hannan Abu-Hussein, “Untitled”, from the Vagina Series, 2002. Mixed media. Photograph courtesy of the artist. 104 Hannan Abu-Hussein, “Untitled”, from the Vagina Series, 2003. Mixed media. Photograph courtesy of the artist. 106 Hannan Abu-Hussein, “Vagina Blankets”, from the Vagina Series, 2007. Mixed media. Photograph courtesy of the artist. 109 Diane Victor, St. Catherine. Left-hand panel of The Wise and Foolish Virgins, 2008, charcoal stain drawing on paper, 190 × 120 cm. Photograph courtesy of the artist. 116 Diane Victor, St. Agatha. Right-hand panel of The Wise and Foolish Virgins, 2008, charcoal stain drawing on paper, 190 × 120 cm. Photograph courtesy of the artist. 117

Figures ix 7.3 8.1 8.2 8.3 8.4 9.1 9.2

9.3 9.4

10.1 10.2 10.3 10.4 11.1 11.2 11.3 11.4 12.1

Diane Victor, St. Mary. Middle panel of The Wise and Foolish Virgins, 2008, charcoal stain drawing on paper, 190 × 120 cm. Photograph courtesy of the artist. 118 Swoon, Medea, 2017, mixed media installation. Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art, Cincinnati, Ohio. Photograph courtesy of Tod Seelie. 131 Swoon, Medea, 2017, detail. Mixed media installation. Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art, Cincinnati, Ohio. Photograph courtesy of Tod Seelie. 133 Swoon, Medea, 2017, detail (The Devouring). Mixed media installation. Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art, Cincinnati, Ohio. Photograph courtesy of Tod Seelie. 134 Swoon, Medea, 2017, detail (Memento Mori). Mixed media installation. Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art, Cincinnati, Ohio. Photograph courtesy of Tod Seelie. 137 Ana Mendieta, Imagen de Yagul (Image from Yagul), 1973. © The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection LLC Courtesy Galerie Lelong & Co. Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY. 150 Ana Mendieta, Untitled: Silueta Series, Mexico From Silueta Works in Mexico, 1973-1977, 1976. © The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection LLC Courtesy Galerie Lelong & Co. Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY. 151 Ana Mendieta, Untitled: Silueta Series, 1979. © The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection LLC Courtesy Galerie Lelong & Co. Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY. 152 Ana Mendieta, Guacar (Esculturas Rupestres) [Our Menstruation (Rupestrian Sculptures)], 1981. © The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection LLC Courtesy Galerie Lelong & Co. Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY. 157 Clara Menéres, Woman-Earth-Life. 1977, Acrylic, earth and grass, 80 × 270 × 160 cm. Alternativa Zero Exhibition, Galeria de Belém, Lisbon. © Courtesy the heirs of Clara Menéres. 167 Clara Menéres, Woman-Earth-Life. 1977, 2nd version. Concrete, earth and grass (detail). c. 150 m2. XIV Biennial of São Paulo, Brazil. © Courtesy the heirs of Clara Menéres. 169 Clara Menéres, Woman-Earth-Life. 1977, 3rd version. Concrete, earth and grass (detail). c. 150 m2. Park of Serralves Contemporary Art Museum, Porto. © Courtesy the heirs of Clara Menéres. 171 Clara Menéres, Body-Landscape with Motorway I, 1978, pastel drawing on paper, 50 × 70 cm. © Courtesy the heirs of Clara Menéres. 172 Ilse Fusková, El Zapallo invitation card, 1982. Ilse Fusková Archive. 181 Ilse Fusková, El Zapallo, 1982, colour photograph. Ilse Fusková Collection. 182 Ilse Fusková, El Zapallo, 1982, colour photograph. Ilse Fusková Collection. 183 Ilse Fusková, El Zapallo, 1982, black-and-white photograph, 35 mm. Ilse Fusková Collection. 184 Protest at the National Museum in Warsaw, 29 April 2019. Photograph courtesy Robert Kuszynski/Oko.Press. 194

x  Figures 12.2 12.3 12.4 12.5 13.1 13.2 13.3

13.4 13.5

14.1 14.2 14.3 15.1 15.2 15.3 15.4

Natalia LL, Consumer Art, 1975, colour photograph, 60 × 50 cm. Courtesy of the artist and lokal_30. 195 Natalia LL, Consumer Art, 1972, black-and-white photograph, 60 × 50 cm. Courtesy of the artist and lokal_30. 199 Natalia LL, Consumer Art, 1974, colour print, unique piece, 89.5 × 81 cm, Grażyna Kulczyk Collection. Courtesy of the artist and lokal_30. 200 Natalia LL, Post-Consumer Art, 1975, photograph. Courtesy of the artist and lokal_30. 203 Alice Neel, Self-Portrait, 1980, oil on canvas, 101.9 × 153 cm, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution. © Estate of Alice Neel, 1980. 211 Alice Neel, Linda Nochlin and Daisy, 1973, oil on canvas, 141 × 111.8 cm. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Seth K. Sweetser Fund. © Estate of Alice Neel. 212 Alice Neel, Ethel Ashton, 1930. Oil on canvas, 61 × 55.9 cm. Tate Gallery, London. Presented by the American Fund for the Tate Gallery. Courtesy of Hartley and Richard Neel, the artist’s sons, 2012. © Estate of Alice Neel. 215 Alice Neel, Pregnant Woman, 1971, oil on canvas, 101.9 × 153 cm. Private collection, Singapore. © Estate of Alice Neel. 216 Joan Semmel, Aura, 2016, oil on canvas, 72 × 60”, 182.88 × 152.4 cm. Courtesy Alexander Gray Associates Gallery, New York. Courtesy Alexander Gray Associates Gallery, New York. 217 Phaptawan Suwannakudt, Wat Tha Suthawat Angthong (detail), 1994. Medium: acrylic, gold leaves and tempera on wall. Photograph by Aroon Peampoonsopon. 227 Phaptawan Suwannakudt, Akojorn (No-Go Zone), sketch of installation, 1995, pencil on postcard-sized paper. Image supplied by the artist. 229 Phaptawan Suwannakudt, Nariphon III b (second within the triptych), 1996, acrylic on silk, 90 × 90 cm, collection of Ken and Beverley Carruthers, Sydney. Photograph by John Clark. 232 Lindi Arbi. Self (after exhumation), 2009, Plaster, approx. 150 × 100 cm. Destroyed. Photograph courtesy of the artist. Photograph courtesy of the artist. 237 Lindi Arbi. Second Self (after exhumation), 2009, Plaster, found object, polyurethane and soil, 200 × 100 × 65 cm, Spier Collection. Photograph courtesy of the artist. 238 Lindi Arbi. Clay Self, 1 of 5 (before burial, detail of wet clay lustre), 2009, Clay, approx. 180 × 250 cm. Destroyed. Photograph courtesy of the artist. 239 Christine Dixie. Even in the Long Descent I-V, 2007. Etching and mezzotint on paper, each panel: 116.5 × 69.5 × 6.3 cm. Photograph courtesy of the artist. 243

Contributors

Pamela Allara is an Associate Professor Emerita of Brandeis University and currently a Visiting Researcher in the African Studies Center at Boston University. The author of a monograph on Alice Neel, Allara taught modern and contemporary art at Tufts and at Brandeis Universities. Her recent research has investigated social activism in contemporary South African art. In 2018, she co-curated with gallery director Joe Ketner, William Kentridge: Triumphs and Laments, for the Emerson College Urban Arts Gallery. Recent publications include “Shrouds on the Somme’s Body”, in a catalogue on Paul Emmanuel, edited by Karen von Veh (2020). With Dr. Mark Auslander, she has established the blog art beyond quarantine, where she writes posts about artists responding to the global pandemic. Paula J. Birnbaum is a Professor of Art History and Academic Director of the Museum Studies Program at the University of San Francisco. Her research focuses on modern and contemporary art in relationship to gender and sexuality, as well as institutional and social politics. She has published extensively on 20th-century French women artists, with a new book, Chana Orloff: A Modern Woman Sculptor of the School of Paris, forthcoming with Brandeis University Press. Her chapter on Swoon is part of a larger project on feminist street art and global visual culture, with a related essay in Revisioning the Contemporary Art Canon in a Globalizing World, edited by Ruth E. Iskin (2016). Irene Bronner is a Senior Lecturer with the South African Research Chair in South African Art History and Visual Culture, in the Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture, at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa. Her research interests centre on feminist studies in the visual arts, with a focus on gender, contemporary Southern Africa, and issues engaging with memory, affect and the aftermath of trauma. She was selected as a participant in the 2020 CAA Getty International Program. She has published in local and international journals, recently in Woman’s Art Journal and Textile: Journal of Cloth and Culture. Sherry Buckberrough is Emerita in Art History at the University of Hartford, Hartford, Connecticut. She is known internationally for her scholarship on Sonia and Robert Delaunay, including two books and numerous articles. She is now preparing a book on the “virile women” in the circle of the journal Montjoie in Paris in the years before World War I. She has curated exhibitions and written on many modernist

xii  Contributors and contemporary women artists, including Barbara Hepworth, Louise Bourgeois, Louise Nevelson, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Carolee Schneemann and Ana Mendieta. Laura Castro is a researcher at the Research Centre in Science and Technology of the Arts (CITAR) and Assistant Professor at School of Arts, Universidade Católica Portuguesa, Portugal. Her research interests are in the display of art, museums and exhibitions, art and gender, public art and landscape. She co-edited with José Guilherme Abreu Public Art in the Era of Digital Creativity – International Conference Proceedings (2017). Her recent articles include an exploration of embroidery and textiles in contemporary Portuguese art in H-ART. Revista de historia, teoría y crítica de arte (2020) and a study of Portuguese artists’ residences and studios in Culture & Musées (2019). Tal Dekel is Head of the Visual Literacy Studies Program and Head of the Curating Program at Kibbutzim College in Tel Aviv, Israel. She also teaches in the Art History Department at Tel Aviv University. Specialising in feminist theory, transnationalism and ageism, she is the author of Gendered: Art and Feminist Theory (2013), Transnational Identities: Women, Art and Migration in Contemporary Israel (2016) and Women and Ageism: Gender and Art in Israel (in Hebrew in 2020). Joanna Inglot is Edith M. Kelso Associate Professor of Art History at Macalester College, USA. She works on contemporary and feminist art. She has received numerous national grants and awards, including Fulbright Fellowship, American Council of Learned Societies, International Exchanges Commission Grant (IREX) and the National Endowment of the Humanities. Her first book was The Figurative Sculpture of Magdalena Abakanowicz: Bodies, Environments, and Myths, while her second was WARM: Feminist Art Movement in Minnesota, 1970s-1990s, which appeared in conjunction with an exhibit on the subject that she curated at the Weisman Art Museum in Minneapolis. She is currently writing a book on feminist art in Eastern Europe from 1989 to the present. Alexandra Kokoli is a Senior Lecturer in Visual Culture, Middlesex University London, and Research Associate at VIAD, University of Johannesburg. She has published widely on the fraught but fruitful relationship between feminism and psychoanalysis, visual activisms and contemporary art practices informed by and committed to feminism. Her recent books include The Feminist Uncanny in Theory and Art Practice (2016) and Tracey Emin: Art into Life (2020) which she co-edited with Deborah Cherry. Her research into the aesthetics of feminist anti-nuclear activism at Greenham Common is supported by the Paul Mellon Centre (2019) and the Leverhulme Trust (2020). Yvonne Low is a Lecturer in Asian Art at the University of Sydney. Her research interests include colonial histories, cultural politics of art development, women artists and feminist art history and digital art history. She has published over 40 articles in books, peer-reviewed journals and exhibition catalogues, and is on the editorial committee of Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia. Her most recent books include Awesome Art Indonesia (children’s series) (2020) and Ambitious Alignments: New Histories in Southeast Asian Art (2019) which she

Contributors xiii co-edited, and her most recent projects include “Gender in Southeast Asian art histories symposium” (2019) and Archiving Womanifesto exhibition (2019). She is currently co-developing a digital publication on Womanifesto: An Online Anthology and a digital project on Visualising Feminist Networks. Jacqueline Millner is an Associate Professor of Visual Arts at La Trobe University, Australia. She has published widely on contemporary Australian and international art in key anthologies, journals and catalogues of national and international institutions. Her books include Conceptual Beauty: Perspectives on Australian Contemporary Art (2010), Australian Artists in the Contemporary Museum (with Jennifer Barrett, 2014), Fashionable Art (with Adam Geczy, 2015) and Feminist Perspectives on Art: Contemporary Outtakes (co-edited with Catriona Moore, 2018). She has curated major multi-venue exhibitions and public programs including Curating Feminism (2014), Future Feminist Archive (2015), Femflix (2016), and received several prestigious research grants and residencies including from the Australia Council, Arts NSW, Regional Arts Victoria, Bundanon Trust and Cite Internationale des Arts, Paris. Catriona Moore is a Senior Lecturer in Australian and contemporary art at the University of Sydney. She has researched and published on women artists and feminist art since the 1980s, and is a founding member of the Australian research cluster Contemporary Art and Feminism. Her most recent book is Feminist Perspectives on Art: Contemporary Outtakes, co-edited with Jacqueline Millner (2018), with whom she is co-authoring the book Contemporary Art and Feminism. Hilary Robinson is a Professor of Feminism, Art, and Theory, and Director, Centre for Doctoral Training: Feminism, Sexual Politics and Visual Culture at Loughborough University, UK. Former leadership positions include Head, School of Art & Design, University of Ulster, Belfast; and Dean, College of Fine Arts, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, USA. Her books include Visibly Female: Women and Art Today (1987); Reading Art, Reading Irigaray: The Politics of Art by Women (2006); Feminism-Art-Theory 1968-2014 (2015); The Art of Feminism: Images that Shaped the Fight for Equality 1857-2017 (2018; co-authors: Lucinda Gosling, Amy Tobin) and A Companion to Feminist Art (2019; co-ed: Maria Buszek). She is currently working on two monographs: Feminism and Art: A History and ReSisters: Art, Activism, Feminist Resistance. María Laura Rosa is a Professor at Buenos Aires University, Argentina, and a researcher at the National Scientific and Technical Research Council, better known as CONICET. Interested in feminist art from Argentina, Brazil and Mexico, she has published more than 20 articles or book chapters. She has also authored, edited or co-edited books, the most recent of which are De cuerpo entero. Feminist Debates and the Cultural Field in Argentina 1960-1980 (2021), Ilse Fusková. The Freedom of Walking Alone (2019), Legacies of Freedom. Feminist Art in Democratic Effervescence (2014) and Share the World. The Experience of Women and Art (2017), co-edited with Soledad Novoa. Brenda Schmahmann is a Professor and the SARChI Chair in South African Art and Visual Culture at the University of Johannesburg. Interested in gender and women

xiv  Contributors artists in South Africa as well as the politics of public art, she has published more than 80 articles or book chapters and organised two large-scale travelling exhibitions on feminist topics. She has also authored, edited or co-edited eight books, the most recent of which are The Keiskamma Art Project: Sustaining Hope and Livelihoods (2016), Public Art in South Africa: Bronze Warriors and Public Presidents (2017), co-edited with Kim Miller and Troubling Images: Visual Culture and the Politics of Afrikaner Nationalism (2020), co-edited with Federico Freschi and Lize van Robbroeck. Marissa Vigneault is an Assistant Professor of Art History at Utah State University and a 2019-2020 Senior Fellow in the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Her research focuses on the role of performance and performativity in modern and contemporary art, with particular attention on the construction of identity in visual culture (fashion, burlesque and films). Dr. Vigneault’s publications include essays in Women’s Studies and the anthology Contemporary Art and Classical Myth, as well as numerous essays for museum catalogues. She is currently lead book reviews editor for Panorama, the online peerreviewed journal of the Association of Historians of American Art. Karen von Veh is a Professor of Art History at the University of Johannesburg. Her research is on gender and the transgressive use of religious iconography in contemporary South African art. She has authored or co-authored two books and a catalogue on South African artist Diane Victor – Little History (2018) edited by J. van Eeden, Burning the Candle at Both Ends (2012) and Taxi 13 Diane Victor (2008) with Elizabeth Rankin. Recent publications include a chapter on South African feminism in A Companion to Feminist Art (2019), edited by Maria Buszek and Hilary Robinson; an article “Classical Mythology as Satire” in IKON: Journal of Iconographic Studies (2020) and a chapter in a catalogue, Paul Emmanuel (2020), which she also edited.

Acknowledgements

I am indebted to the University of Johannesburg for their ongoing support of research I undertake, and for creating an environment in which enabling projects – such as this book – can be realised. The beautiful and well-equipped facilities I am in the happy position of occupying, thanks to the University of Johannesburg, created a perfect environment for hosting a conference from which this volume emanated. That conference would also not have been possible without generous funding from the National Research Foundation (NRF) of South Africa, and nor indeed would my covering various expenses that are necessarily incurred when undertaking any publication initiative. Please note, however, that any opinions, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed here are those of the authors who have contributed to this project, and the NRF accepts no liability in this regard. I am grateful to Isabella Vitti for her enthusiastic response to my book proposal, for her prompt and helpful engagement with queries and for her professional shepherding of the text from a conception in a prospectus to a volume that, following a thorough referee process, was accepted for publication. And I am indebted to Katie Armstrong for support in taking the project through the various stages of production, for always attending to my queries quickly and helpfully, and who, like Isabella, has been consistently enthusiastic about this project. Thank you also to Ashraf Reza, a project manager at KnowledgeWords Global Ltd, for carefully and efficiently managing the copyediting and typesetting of the book, and the rest of the staff at Routledge and Taylor & Francis who have contributed in important ways to the publishing of this volume. Lastly, I would like to thank all the various contributing authors whose chapters are included here. It is your outstanding and original research that has made Iconic Works of Art by Feminists and Gender Activists: Mistress-Pieces possible. Brenda Schmahmann

Introduction Brenda Schmahmann

If one were asked to name “iconic” feminist works, what examples would come to mind? Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party (1974–1979: Figures 0.1 and 0.2) in the Brooklyn Art Museum might perhaps suggest itself. Inverting the Last Supper into a celebration of female contributions to societies across the ages, it also recognised art-making processes – ceramics and embroidery – that tended to be marginalised in discourses about fine art. This ambitious initiative spoke to art and design inheritances while simultaneously suggesting new potential aesthetic directions for feminist art. Or perhaps one might think of a work that was contemporary with The Dinner Party but nevertheless wholly different in its approach – Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document (Figures 0.3 and 0.4), which was first exhibited at the Institute for Contemporary Arts in London in 1976. In opposition to historical representations of the mother and child in the West, which are almost invariably idealised, it focused only on traces of the relationship between the artist and her infant son through components such as charts, diarised records, liners of nappies (diapers) and infant vests. Drawing on psychoanalytic theory to explore how a maternal role is constituted within a social framework rather than being a “natural” product of biology, it was also transgressive in examining motherhood from the mother’s point of view. Both works were controversial. Much of the criticism of Chicago’s initiative was from within the feminist movement. Viewed as an example of cultural feminism, it became representative of, as Jane Gerhard (2013, 24–25) notes, “essentialism, separatism, and an emphasis on alternative women-centred culture” and, by the early 1980s, at odds with a greater emphasis by feminists on “activism waged collectively, focused on structural power, and committed to dismantling systematic expressions of gender and gender discrimination” (Gerhard 2013, 25). There were also charges levelled against Chicago that she exploited volunteers, concerns that The Dinner Party was insufficiently diverse in the range of women it commemorated as well as ambivalence about the appropriateness and political efficacy of its vaginal imagery. Although dismissals of Post-Partum Document were often commentaries in tabloids that sensationalised its inclusion of the soiled liners of nappies, Kelly’s exhibition also raised concerns among some feminists that its meanings were opaque. Whereas The Dinner Party had broad appeal, Post-Partum Document, Margot Waddell and Michelene Wandor argued in a letter to the feminist magazine, Spare Rib, was “not so much participatory as excluding and exclusive”, with its various framed objects coming across as “disconnected visual clues to some academic discourse which do little more than expose the ignorance of the viewer” (Waddell and Wandor 1977, 4).

2  Brenda Schmahmann

Figure 0.1  Judy Chicago, The Dinner Party, 1974–1979, mixed media, 48 × 48 ft, Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, Collection of the Brooklyn Museum. Source:  © Judy Chicago. Reproduced with permission from DALRO.

But if The Dinner Party continues to be perceived as noteworthy, this is not necessarily because many or all feminists are any more persuaded by the tenets of cultural feminism than they were previously. Rather, it is because, in addition to being audacious in scale and remarkable in terms of its technical accomplishment, the work can be looked at not simply as about history but as an exemplar of a history – that is, as a key example of feminist ideas that held sway in the 1970s. In the words of Frances Borzello, “its sympathetic analysis of women’s history, and the directness of its formal choices (craft, size, drama, and bold imagery) make it an unrivalled symbol of a period when artists believed that art could speak for women everywhere” (Borzello 2014, 308). The Post-Partum Document too can be viewed retrospectively as formative. Revealing how psychoanalytical approaches might be deployed within a feminist art practice, the work and other subsequent large-scale installations by Kelly created an experience for many female viewers that was personally empowering. As Margaret Iversen (1997, 84) observed, “we leave Kelly’s installations much more reflexive about the identities we try on, the things we think might make us whole and the fantasies we entertain about others”. Crucially also, Kelly suggested ways in which literal representations of the female body might be avoided in favour of traces of a relationship: in other words, rather than being “iconic” (i.e. in the sense

Introduction 3

Figure 0.2  Judy Chicago, The Dinner Party, 1974–1979, Installation view of Wing Three, featuring Virginia Woolf and Georgia O’Keefe place settings, Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, Collection of the Brooklyn Museum. Source:  © Judy Chicago. Reproduced with permission from DALRO.

that Charles Peirce used that term rather than how I am deploying it in the title for this volume), it favoured the index.1 This too would have impact. As Iverson suggests, Kelly’s “distinctive avoidance of iconic representations of women set a precedent for the ‘constructivist’ feminist position” taken up in works by other women artists working in neo-conceptual frameworks (Iversen 1997, 35). In Iconic Works of Art by Feminists and Gender Activists: Mistress-Pieces, contributing authors identify and explore a range of additional works by feminists and gender activists that might be regarded as notable in the sense that they have proved influential in particular contexts because of their relevance and distinctiveness, but which have not hitherto necessarily achieved the level of international recognition accorded Chicago’s Dinner Party or Kelly’s Post-Partum Document. Or they may seek to explore works that have either been given no prior recognition at all or which have been interpreted in narrow or inadequate ways and their potential radicalness misconstrued or missed. The topic is also underpinned by recognition that, given the momentous political and cultural shifts that have occurred since second-wave feminism began to exert impact on aesthetic practices in the West in the 1970s, new works engaging with gender will necessarily be inflected or shaped by different sets of

4  Brenda Schmahmann

Figure 0.3  Mary Kelly, Post-Partum Document, 1973–1979, Installation in six parts. Installation view of Post-Partum Document, The Complete Work 1973–79 at The Generali Foundation, Vienna, 1998. Source:  © Mary Kelly. Courtesy of the artist and Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York.

concerns. Relatedly, new concerns have impact on how earlier works are interpreted and received, enabling different perspectives about them. How might early feminist work on the politics of the gaze be read in light of the #MeToo movement? Or how has increased political conservativism in numerous contexts had impact on the exhibition of feminist work in recent years? These questions and others are explored within this volume. At the same time, however, contributing authors recognise that the enterprise of seeking “iconic” individual feminist works is not without its own contradictions. The most obvious of these is that art made in feminist frameworks almost invariably troubles conventional understandings of what constitutes “great” art. The Dinner Party and Post-Partum Document provide examples of this. While so different from one another, both initiatives share a defiance of modernist understandings of the “Masterpiece” as the grandiose creation of a single inspired creator. Besides including art forms such as embroidery and ceramics which have been associated with domestic beautification rather than the public realm as well as denigrated as craft, The Dinner Party was a group piece orchestrated by Chicago rather than, in fact, her own entirely individual endeavour. 2 Kelly’s piece, meanwhile, refused conventional markers of an artist’s “hand”, with making seeming a matter of compilation rather than “creation” in the obvious or conventional sense. And if her analysis of the stained liners of her son’s nappies spoke of her own induction into a maternal role, it also commented ironically on the mark-making considered emblematical of much

Introduction 5

Figure 0.4  Mary Kelly, Post-Partum Document: Documentation I: Analysed Fecal Stains and Feeding Charts, 1974, Perspex unit, white card, diaper lining, plastic sheeting, paper and ink, 1 of 31 units, 11 × 14 in. 28 × 35.5 cm. Source:  © Mary Kelly, Courtesy of the artist and Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York.

6  Brenda Schmahmann modernist art practices and the gendering underpinning it. While not generally construed as excrement, pigment is frequently associated with semen and is thus viewed in some sense as a literal “outpouring” of creative male bodies. This idea, implicit in discourse about Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings, finds overt expression in Renoir’s notorious remark that he “painted with his prick”.3 As The Dinner Party and PostPartum Document both made evident, albeit in different ways, identifying an iconic feminist work involves not looking for a female equivalent of the “Masterpiece” but for a work which in fact complicates the very idea of such a magnum opus. The contradictions and impossibility of identifying a tidy female equivalent to the “Masterpiece” is implicit in the notion of a “Mistress-Piece”. This is not an original observation. “Mistress-Pieces” is indebted to “Old Mistresses”, the ironical term that Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock used within the title of their ground-breaking and influential volume first published in 1981.4 Noting that there is no “female equivalent to the reverential term ‘Old Master’”, the authors of Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology did not purport to remedy the near absence of women artists from most histories of Western art but rather to unpack the gendered underpinnings of art historical discourses. Observing that the term “artist” had “become equated with masculinity and masculine social rules – the Bohemian, for instance – but notions of greatness – ‘genius’ – too had become the exclusive attribute of the male sex”, the authors revealed that the phrase “woman artist” had become one that “does not describe an artist of the female sex, but a kind of artist that is distinct and clearly different from the great artist”. Observing that unequal relations of power underpinned such genderings, Parker and Pollock made clear that this was not simply a matter of coercion but also manifest “through exclusion from access to those institutions and practices through which dominance is exercised” (Parker and Pollock 1981, 114). Old Mistresses gave brief attention to some recent feminist art works from the 1970s – among them Chicago’s Female Rejection Drawing (1974), Sylvia Sleigh’s Philip Golub Reclining (1971) and Kelly’s Post-Partum Document – but the overwhelming focus of the book is on historical examples and the biases and gendered marginalising that had shaped responses to them (or lack thereof) in discourse. The authors’ sustained focus on recent feminist art practices would occur only later, in 1987, with the publication of Framing Feminism: Art and the Women’s Movement 1970-1985, an anthology of writings which they prefaced with two introductory essays (one by both editors and the other by Pollock alone). Iconic Works of Art by Feminists and Gender Activists: Mistress-Pieces, while making reference to Old Mistresses in its title, is more aligned to Framing Feminism (Parker and Pollock 1987) in the sense that the focus of the volume is on art practices developed in the 1970s and 1980s rather than on earlier histories. However, in contrast to both Old Mistresses and Framing Feminism which focused on women artists in the West, Iconic Works of Art by Feminists and Gender Activists: Mistress-Pieces turns its attentions to artworks from a diversity of geographies. There is an enormous body of work on feminist art practices in the West. Along with Framing Feminism, two of the most well-known and widely read texts (at least for English-speaking readers) seem to have been Lippard’s From the Center: Feminist Essays on Women’s Art a compilation of her early feminist art criticism (Lippard 1978), and Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard’s edited volume The Power of Feminist Art: The American Movement of the 1970s, History and Impact (Broude and Garrard 1994). Only since the 1990s has there been an orientation towards assuming

Introduction 7 an international focus. Generations and Geographies in the Visual Arts: Feminist Readings (Pollock 1996), provides one example of this shift. Global Feminisms: New Directions in Contemporary Art (2007), the catalogue for an exhibition curated by Linda Nochlin and Maura Reilly at the Elizabeth Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum and the Davis Museum and Cultural Center at Wellesley College, and Wack: Art and the Feminist Revolution, a volume accompanying an exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, also in 2007, are two others. Indicating increased alertness to the ways in which feminist practices and the readings thereof are multifaceted, volumes such as these reveal growing awareness that constructions about feminism are contingent upon context, complicating endeavours to track it as any singular movement. Postcolonial thought has enhanced awareness of the ways in which earlier scholarship on feminist art practices tended to depend implicitly on concepts that knowledge and enlightenment emanate from a Western metropole towards geographies constituted as on its periphery. In her essay included in Wack: Art and the Feminist Revolution, Marsha Meskimmon (2007, 324) emphasised the difficulties of such a construction: The chronological delimitation of 1970s feminist art implies a cartography focused upon the United States and emanating outward from it – first toward the United Kingdom, as an “Anglo-American axis”, then through Europe (white America’s cultural “home”), and, when venturing very boldly, touching upon the wider context of the Americas, Africa, and Asia. This temporal cartography elides two dubious patterns: first, a tendency for a certain kind of United Statesbased feminist art practice and discourse to be taken as an unmarked normative category, thereby foreclosing differences both within and beyond the American context, and second, an implicit assumption that the “feminist revolution” will come to us all, eventually. Challenging a privileging of the West as the centre, and the assumptions underpinning it, was also a concern of Global Feminisms. For Reilly (2007, 16), that exhibition involved “an examination of the complex relationality between the center and the periphery, the local and the global”. Avoiding simply obliterating alertness to differences between women and their contexts, the exhibition was instead influenced by Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s “feminist solidarity/comparative studies model” which, Reilly (2007, 16) observes, “aims to dismantle restrictive dichotomies (us/them, center/periphery, white/black) in favor of an examination of themes about the individual and collective experiences of women cross-culturally”. Iconic Works of Art by Feminists and Gender Activists: Mistress-Pieces has been conceptualised in such a way that it too complicates and unsettles dichotomies. Re-thinking which works underpinned by feminism or gender activism may warrant being deemed “iconic”, the volume is focused on examples from not only the West but also Eastern Europe, Africa, South America, Central America, Australia, Asia and the Middle East. Chapters are arranged within broad generic themes that invite consideration of both commonalities and distinctions between examples of feminist art practice in different geographies. The impetus here (as with the use of themes as a curatorial organisational principle in Global Feminisms) is linked to Mohanty’s idea that a feminist solidarity or comparative studies model upsets binaries such as

8  Brenda Schmahmann “centre” and “periphery”, and concomitantly the unequal relations of power that underpin them (Mohanty 2003). It also allows for alertness to historical specificities that shape processes of gender oppression as well as resistance, rather than creating the impression that a subjugation of women and articulations of refusal in all geographies are entirely congruent with those in the West and can necessarily be understood as manifestations of the same forces. While encouraging solidarity between women and recognition of areas of commonality between them, the choice and arrangement of discussions of iconic works of art in this volume are also undertaken with mindfulness of differences and local particularities. All the works selected for focus in Iconic Works of Art by Feminists and Gender Activists have either not been discussed in any depth previously or have been examined in ways that contributors to the volume argue to be limited or dated. The identification of case studies is advantageous in the sense that it offers more opportunities for in-depth engagement than would be the case if the volume had cast its net more broadly. Furthermore, in focusing on one work or series per chapter, Iconic Works of Art avoids the difficulty of traditionalist art historical monographs that, as Parker and Pollock (1981, 68–69) observed in Old Mistresses, are “often supported by a catalogue raisonné of all the paintings and drawings so that a group of works is given coherence because it is seen to issue from the hand of an individual”. The volume is about works that warrant new or different scrutiny rather than being about celebrating individuals and their “oeuvres”. The contents of the volume have been organised into four parts – “Reconfiguring Domestic Life”, “Critiquing Gender Violence and Abuse”, “Great Goddess Iconographies” and “Body Politics”. Each includes between three and four chapters, with the date of the works that are their focus determining the order in which they are arranged: the reader is thus taken through different periods as well as different geographies. This arrangement encourages readers to see links but also distinctions between these different manifestations of feminism at different historical moments and in various spaces. It should be noted that the volume had its genesis in a conference I convened at the University of Johannesburg in November 2018. A selection of presentations were developed into chapters, and additional authors who were not at the conference were approached for contributions to enable the volume to include examples from all six continents. But the book does not pretend to give equal focus to all geographies, and, given the locale of the conference which gave rise to it, it is unsurprising that three of its chapters are focused on South African artists. Yet if the decision to focus in depth on selected works means that the contexts explored are necessarily selective, media deployed by the artists whose works are featured vary in ways that may be expected of a study where the net had been cast rather more widely. Encompassing performance and photography as well as sculpture and installation, works discussed in this book are also paintings or drawings – but, in the case of those in traditional media, ones that are worked in such a way as to trouble convention. Modes of making that tend to be associated with domestic spaces and, in many contexts, the province of women – works involving textiles and made with a needle and thread, for example – also feature here. Indeed, as a totality, the book features works that, in their articulation of feminist ideas, simultaneously involve a treatment of materials and media in questioning, critical and often subversive ways.

Introduction 9

Part One – Reconfiguring Domestic Life In a text based on a speech she had read at a rally in San Francisco in 1970, Judy Syfers (1971) indicated that, rather than being a wife, she would much rather have one: I want a wife who will keep my house clean. A wife who will pick up after me. I want a wife who will keep my clothes clean, ironed, mended, replaced when need be, and who will see to it that my personal things are kept in their proper place so that I can find what I need the minute I need it. … Engaging with the gender politics of the home – whether through performing household chores or taking on parenting duties – has long been a topic of feminist engagement. For example, it was a focus of Betty Friedan’s well-known feminist volume, The Feminine Mystique, first published in 1963, which countered the notion that women were content to be wives, mothers and homemakers. Representing the home as a space of entrapment, Friedan in fact felt it could be likened to a Nazi concentration camp (Friedan 1963). This representation of the home as invariably stultifying for intelligent women was, however, challenged from within the feminist movement. In Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, first published in 1984, bell hooks (2000) mounted a scathing critique of Friedan’s seemingly exclusive focus on white women of the leisure classes. As hooks (2000) observed: She did not discuss who would be called in to take care of the children and maintain the home if more women like herself were freed from their house labor and given equal access with white men to the professions. She did not speak of the needs of women without men, without children, without homes. She ignored the existence of all non-white women and poor white women. She did not tell readers whether it was more fulfilling to be a maid, a babysitter, a factory worker, a clerk, or a prostitute than to be a leisure-class housewife. Drawing attention to the ways in which women whom Friedan had not considered simply did not share the experiences she outlined, hooks’ text highlighted the ways in which second-wave feminist writings in the West had a propensity to overlook how race and class dynamics complicated the experiences of females. If The Feminine Mystique offered a perspective that excluded many women who were not white and privileged, as hooks observed, it also represented views that were informed by a US context and history specifically. The perspective of home and domestic life may be shaped entirely differently by feminists (black or white, working class or middle class) in geographies outside the United States – as is clear in this section of the volume. This is not to say, however, that the works discussed in the four chapters here necessarily disagree with Friedan’s negative insights about home: in all, in fact, there is contestation about domestic arrangements as they are patriarchally configured. But in all four instances, domestic relationships – and the genderings that underpin them – are shaped by factors that are socially and culturally specific rather than neatly in tandem with the circumstances that Friedan outlined. Although Iconic Works by Feminists and Gender Activists: Mistress-Pieces is focused on unpacking examples by individual artists, it commences with one

10  Brenda Schmahmann example where a number of artists were in fact involved. In “The Aesthetic Labour of Protest, Now and Then: The Women’s Peace Camp at Greenham Common (UK, 1981-2000)”, Alexandra Kokoli explores visual strategies used by women protestors against nuclear proliferation during the Cold War. These interventions took the form of performances as well as craft works on the periphery fence of the Women’s Peace Camp at the site. While focusing on nuclear war, the protestors’ own living arrangements as well as their visual activism simultaneously troubled constructs about the domestic, as her exploration reveals. Kokoli views the Women’s Peace Camp activism as blurring boundaries between not only the realms of aesthetic and activist intervention but also private and public space. Giving maternity particular focus, Kokoli reveals how activists may have experienced disruptions to their work through the demands of motherhood but that their maternal role was also often used to motivate and shape their anti-nuclear protests. In “Middle fingers up, put them hands high: Rethinking Tracy Moffatt’s Scarred for Life (1994)” Jacqueline Millner and Catriona Moore engage with a work of Australian artist, Tracy Moffatt. Moffatt, they point out, has stringently rejected the expectation that she should produce “Aboriginal Art”, and has instead used contemporary art frameworks to explore identities and social experiences. Making reference to the family photograph album while also invoking the style conventions of Life magazine in the series Scarred for Life, Moffatt invokes incidents that occur during childhood within working-class multicultural Australian homes that, while apparently trivial, leave profound psychological scars. As the authors explain: Each image captures the banal humiliations, snipes and jibes of daily life, the trauma – from verbal to physical abuse and neglect – inflicted by parents, older siblings or friends, those very agents of the patriarchal psycho-symbolic orders against which feminism revolted. Exploring Scarred for Life in light of Bracha Ettinger’s concept of self-fragilisation as a strategy for resistance, Millner and Moore suggest that “Moffatt invites the viewer to connect to the power of their own fragility by figuring subjects whose selffragilisation becomes a form of defiance, but also by mobilising her own fragility as a subject”. If the social experiences invoked by Moffatt pertain to working-class families in Australia, the work discussed by Hilary Robinson in “Bodies, Borders, and Law: Tanja Ostojić’s Looking for a Husband with EU Passport (2000-05)” is focused on a marital alliance – and one that the artist herself undertook. As Robinson outlines, it began in 2000 with an advertisement that appeared initially in art world contexts but subsequently on other online sites. Invoking reference to, but also transgressing, the kinds of sexualised tropes used by women from the “former East” who were seeking husbands from the “former West”, the advert featured a photograph of the Yugoslavian-born Ostojić who appeared naked, and with her body and head shaved: the words “Looking for a husband with a EU passport” appear in pink text and vertical alignment against the right margin of the format. Subsequently entering into a marriage as part of the artwork, and moving to Düsseldorf, Ostojić concluded Looking for a Husband with EU Passport with her divorce. While invoking the complex politics of the so-called “Balkan States” and the attempts of Serbia to enter the European Union, the work also has feminist meanings in the sense that, as Robinson explains, it

Introduction 11 addresses the legal provision of the right to remain in a national jurisdiction through marriage: the right for a woman’s body to be in a particular legally defined place due to her legal relationship with a man who has particular rights of abode. In “Household Matters: Usha Seejarim’s Venus at Home (2012) and the Politics of Women’s Work”, I discuss a series of works by South African artist, Usha Seejarim, that, I suggest, are informed by intersectional feminist though and are underpinned by recognition of the ways in which South African women’s experiences of domestic work have been configured through the impact of colonial and apartheid histories. I consider the making of the Venus at Home in light of the spontaneity and delight in the unexpected that designer, Paula Scher, termed “serious play”. Constituted from donated domestic items such as brooms, mops and irons that retained their integrity as objects, the works comprising the exhibition invoked ironical reference to modernist engagements with the “readymade” by male modernist from the West. Through these references, I indicate in the chapter, Venus at Home offered a critique of not only gendered constructs about work in the home being of lesser value than that produced for money but also how race and geography inform principles of valuing creative work.

Part Two – Critiquing Gender Violence and Abuse Intricately connected to these engagements with the domestic milieu, but not limited to it, have been works responding to gendered violence. Phyllis Rosser (1994, 67) points out that: “The terror and madness of domestic violence were first brought to light by 1970s feminist speakouts, performances, and exhibitions where individual experiences of wife battering and rape, child abuse and incest were presented”. But feminist engagements with gender violence in art have not focused exclusively on those emanating from the domestic environment. For example, in preparation for a work called The Clothesline that was first exhibited in 1978, the Mexican artist, Mónica Mayer, distributed hundreds of pink paper postcards to women, asking them to complete the statement “As a woman, what I most hate about the city is …”. Many of the responses drew attention to sexual harassment in the street and public transport. These pink postcards were then exhibited suspended from rows of pink string, in the manner of a clothesline, in the Museum of Modern Art in Mexico City.5 Feminist concerns about gender violence would achieve widespread following through what began in 2006 as a “Me Too” movement founded by US activist Tarana Burke but achieved global impact and became #MeToo in 2017. These concerns directly inform feminist art practices as well. New versions of The Clothesline were developed by Meyer in 2016 (Mexico City), 2017 (Washington, DC), 2018 (Hermosillo, Mexico; Buenos Aires, Argentina; Portland, Oregon, USA) and 2019 (Nagoya, Japan). South African artist Gabrielle Goliath initiated a long-term performance project entitled Elegy in 2015, which commemorated female or LGBTQI individuals who had been raped and killed in South Africa, just before the global #MeToo phenomenon. The exhibition she produced as the recipient of the Standard Bank Young Artist Award in 2019 – one that included video and photography – followed this focus. In “Reading Hannah Wilke’s S.O.S. Starification Object Series (1974-82) in the Era of #MeToo”, Marissa Vigneault provides an exploration of what is probably the

12  Brenda Schmahmann most well-known work by American artist, Hannah Wilke, from a new perspective. Describing it “as eruption of internal traumatic wounds that aim to disrupt oppressive systems that force women’s silence and compliance under threat of destruction”, Vigneault sees the S.O.S. Starification Object Series as a work that reads powerfully in a current era where experiences of gender violence – long hidden – are being shared. As with Natalia LL, whose work is discussed in Part Four, Wilke’s work was frequently dismissed as perpetuating rather than critiquing women’s objectification. In her resistance to such narrow and simplistic readings, Vigneault invokes the critical role that mimicry offers. She also focuses especially on the work’s inclusion of marks on the body that become wounds and scars as well as mouches and ultimately, she suggests, operate in parallel to the contemporary hashtag. Palestinian artist, Hannan Abu-Hussein, is described by Tal Dekel, the author of “Private Trauma, Public Healing: Hannan Abu-Hussein’s The Vagina Series”, as “the very first artist in Israel to systematically refer to what ultimately came to be known as the #MeToo movement”. Using vaginal imagery in ways very different to that of Judy Chicago and other American feminists whose so-called “cunt art” was used to celebrate female power and women’s capacities for sexual pleasure, Abu-Hussein instead represents the vagina as a site of trauma. Commenting on practices such as virginity testing, female circumcision and rape, Abu-Hussein’s Vagina Series also alludes to – and speaks out against – the ways in which sexual violence goes unspoken in communities where women experience various layers of oppression. As Dekel reveals, Abu-Hussein’s works speak powerfully to and about women who are victims of not only gender prejudice but also unfair discrimination from the Israeli ethno-national state – a situation complicated still further through the lack of separation of the State and Religion in Israeli law, which in effect means they are subject to decisions and regulations on the part of Sharia courts. In “Transgressive Martyrs in Diane Victor’s Wise and Foolish Virgins (2008)”, Karen von Veh underlines “the horrific spectre of femicides and violence against women that, while a global problem, occurs in South Africa with considerably greater frequency than in most other countries”. Engaging with a triptych that South African artist, Diane Victor, made in 2008, she draws attention to the ways in which the images of St. Catherine, St. Agatha and the Virgin Mary comment on the horrors of gender-based violence. Von Veh supports interpretations that the violence against women pervasive in South Africa is the outcome of systemic factors – the pervasiveness of patriarchy in ways of understanding the world – rather than in light of what the society would regard as an aberration from norms and that might be explained to result from social turbulence and upheavals. Victor’s work, which conveys a sense of the patriarchal underpinnings of iconographies of martyrdom in Christianity, highlights this point. The #MeToo movement might be understood to provide an important backdrop for the work that Paula J. Birnbaum explores in her chapter, “Swoon’s Medea (2017) as a Feminist Intervention: Re-producing the Maternal”. An installation shown in the Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 2017, Medea by the American artist, Caledonia Curry (who goes by the name “Swoon”), focused on abuse within the context of the domestic milieu. If Von Veh’s essay examines a series that refers to figures from Christian iconography, Birnbaum’s engagement is with a work invoking Greek mythology via the character of Medea, the sorceress who killed her children as vengeance against her husband who had abandoned her, while also

Introduction 13 making reference to Buddhist and Hindi iconography. While Victor often uses her own features in renditions of figures but is nonetheless dealing with a social problem rather than personal history, Swoon’s installation had autobiographical significance. Offering a forum for the artist to confront the ways in which abuse shaped her family history and created intergenerational trauma, Birnbaum reveals, Medea also provided opportunities for visitors to confront their own histories and experiences of shame.

Part Three – Great Goddess Iconographies One of the discourses that became popular in 1970s feminism centred on the figure of what Gloria Feman Orenstein termed the “Great Goddess” archetype. Involving the idea that women could harness a primal energy sublimated and suppressed by patriarchy, the works that a number of artists working in feminist frameworks produced either represented the archetype directly or involved rituals in which her powers were summoned. In an article first published in 1978, Orenstein (1988, 71) summarised the feminist intentions of art of this type: If the artist is the avatar of a new age, the alchemist whose great Art is the transformation of consciousness and being, then contemporary women artists such as Mary Beth Edelson, Carolee Schneemann, Mimi Lobell, Buffie Johnson, Judy Chicago, Donna Byars, Donna Henes, Mariam Sharon, Ana Mendieta, Betsy Damon, Betye Saar, Monica Sjoo, and Hannah Kay, by summoning up the powers associated with the Goddess archetype, are energizing a new form of Goddess, consciousness, which in its most recent manifestation is exorcising the patriarchal creation myth through a repossession of the female visionary faculties. Exploring works of this type once again in 1994, Orenstein acknowledged that they were the result of the influence of books by writers such as Merlin Stone and Marija Gimbutas, coupled with Jung’s ideas of the archetype. Practitioners, who were often white, middle-class Americans, did not view their co-option of motifs and imagery from other cultures as a form of cultural imperialism, she notes, but rather as a unifying force between women that crossed barriers of class and race. As she explains: … I would argue that within the context of the notion of Jungian archetypes in the collective unconscious as it was understood in the early seventies (a period of pioneering and exploratory research in women’s studies done in the absence of feminist multicultural theory), many artists and scholars tended to believe that this collective unconscious was equally accessible to anyone, anywhere, and that the images thus inspired or created transcended all patriarchal cultural barriers. Indeed it was believed that via these images all oppressed women (whether oppressed by class, race, or ethnic origin, for example) could reconnect with an ancient primal female force emanating from these symbols, which would charge them with specifically female energy (known as “gynergy”). (Orenstein 1994, 177) The widespread impact of Great Goddess imagery is borne out by the three chapters in this section of the volume. While the essentialist views that underpin such initiatives may well be regarded as problematical from a 21st-century perspective,

14  Brenda Schmahmann it needs to be acknowledged that, as Orenstein observes, Great Goddess discourses had the benefit of appealing to women in very different contexts and circumstances. The first of the chapters in this section explores the works of Ana Mendieta, a Cubanborn artist who grew up and was educated in the United States, and whose work may come to mind when a focus on the Great Goddess archetype is invoked. But Mendieta’s relation to feminism is not an uncontested one. In “Mendieta’s Silueta Series: In and Out of Feminism”, Sherry Buckberrough explores how multifaceted interpretations of Mendieta’s well-known Silueta Series as well as the artist’s own shifting allegiances to feminist ideas have made not only their potential meanings allusive but also their fit into feminist art history a complicated one. Buckberrough suggests that, regardless of public statements Mendieta may have made about distancing herself from feminism, woman as a topic remained ever-present in her work. The Silueta Series, made between 1973 and 1980, when the artist was associated with feminist ideas, continued to have impact on the works she made between 1980 and her premature death in 1985 – notably, the Rupestrian Sculptures in Jaruco National Park in Cuba that were named after Taíno and Ciboney goddesses. Buckberrough’s conclusion is that “the Silueta Series is both essential to understanding Mendieta and to feminist art history”. The context in which works are not only produced but also received may have significant impact on the degree to which they exert influence. In “Clara Menéres’ Woman-Earth-Life (1977) and the Politics of Censorship, Concealment and Vandalism”, Laura Castro speaks about the response to a work representing a goddess figure by a Portuguese feminist artist – Clara Menéres. Woman-Earth-Life, constituted from earth and plant matter, was frequently vandalised during its initial exhibition in Lisbon and caused controversy when exhibited for a second time in Brazil. Opportunities were not taken up to retain the work when it was constructed for a third time in Porto. The chapter explores “overt as well as more surreptitious forms of censorship and prejudice within the contexts of museums and exhibition spaces”, revealing how these served as endeavours to suppress work deemed to be threatening and offensive to patriarchy. In “The Female Body and Spirituality in Ilse Fusková’s El Zapallo (1982) Series”, Maria Laura Rosa explores a series of photographs by Argentinian artist, Ilse Fusková, which represent a model in her fifties posing naked with a pumpkin in front of her genitals. Seeing the series as defying norms about female beauty and disrupting the workings of the gaze, the author also perceives it as intricately bound up with discourses about the Great Goddess. While Fusková’s actual reading on the Great Goddess happened only subsequent to the completion of the series, Rosa notes that there is congruity between the interests of artists who – in different ways and contexts – sought alternative images of women by linking the feminine to fertility, nature, thought and religious mythical creation., regardless of their knowledge of the [Great Goddess] movement.

Part Four – Body Politics Various explorations by feminist artists have involved the body to a greater or lesser degree. For example, the quest for an essential truth about womanhood and female power through Great Goddess imagery, discussed in Part Three of this volume, tended to involve a celebration of female biology. Indeed, Ilse Fusková’s El Zapallo series recalls

Introduction 15 the vaginal imagery used to celebrate not only women in history but also figures such as the Primordial Goddess, the Fertile Goddess and the Snake Goddess in The Dinner Party. But whereas an artist such as Judy Chicago deployed such imagery as a celebration of a supposedly innate female power, an artist such as Hannan Abu-Hussein – as indicated in Part Two of this volume – instead used it to allude to abuse and trauma. While some artists have used vaginal imagery specifically, others have depicted the female body more generally – articulating feminist critique by actively resisting and subverting traditionalist modes of representing the female form. In her important volume in which she developed her proposition largely from Mary Douglas’ ideas about the dangers of margins in Purity and Danger (Douglas 2002, first published in 1966) as well as Kristeva’s ideas about abjection (Kristeva 1982, first published in French in 1981), Lynda Nead (1992) has spoken about how art in the West has a history of using tropes and strategies for managing a female body understood to be potentially wayward. Such tropes and strategies have been linked to a definition of women as nature. Nead (1992, 18) notes that, since a woman is regarded as “both mater (mother) and materia (matter, biologically determined and potentially wayward, a conversion of her body into unyielding form signifies the ultimate triumph of (male) forces of culture over untampered (female) nature”. In contrast, artists working in feminist frameworks have sometimes sought ways of representing themselves as “uncontained” and “unbounded” – that is, in knowing violation of those conventions that have worked to assert control over their bodies. Some of the most powerful engagements with the body have involved performance. Women artists, working with their own bodies, have enabled a transgression of usual relations between the artist and model in the sense that, rather than being represented in such a way that she would be an object of a desiring gaze, females become speaking subjects. Such performances have, however, often been criticised for their flouting of taboos about nudity. This was true, for example, of performances by the Chinese artist, He Chengyao, who, in 2001, was photographed walking topless at the Great Wall and, in a subsequent work that year, had 99 needles inserted into pressure points by an acupuncturist.6 The artist observes that many “criticised the exposure of the female body” because customarily “women should not be nude, even partially, in public” (Merlin 2013). But underlying this criticism was in fact another discomfort. He Chengyao’s performances responded to struggles and ostracisation that her mother had undergone after the artist’s illegitimate birth in 1964, ones that led ultimately to her experiencing a mental breakdown. In invoking this struggle in her work – including acupuncture villagers had forced on her mother in the belief it would cure her of mental illness – Chinese society was being shown up as oppressive, backward and prejudiced. As this example indicates, the accusations of immorality directed at women artists who work with the body may be reactions linked to anxieties that are not expressed nor necessarily even recognised. But feminists themselves have also sometimes been sceptical about artists using their own bodies to articulate feminist commentaries. For example, in a widely read article published in 1976, Lucy Lippard remarked that A woman using her own face and body has a right to do what she will with them, but it is a subtle abyss that separates men’s use of women for sexual titillation from women’s use of women to expose that insult. (Lippard 1976, 75)

16  Brenda Schmahmann Lippard was sceptical of the value of an ironic mimicry of poses featuring in men’s magazines, for example: “Parody it may be (as in Dutch artist Marja Samsom’s ‘humorous glamour pictures’ featuring her alter ego ‘Miss Kerr’, or in Polish artist Natalia LL’s red-lipped, tongue-and-sucking ‘Consumption Art’), but the artist rarely seems to get the last laugh”. Indeed, some feminists have viewed any direct representation of the female body – their own or that of other women – as best avoided entirely. This was the stance taken by Mary Kelly in Post-Partum Document, as she indicated to Douglas Crimp: … because of my collaboration with Laura Mulvey, and the theoretical understanding that we began to develop through psychoanalysis and voyeurism and fetishism, it made a lot of sense to displace that element of iconicity, to take the woman’s body and estrange it somehow, in order to create an effect of critical distance. (Crimp 1997: 16) In her influential essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, first published in 1975, Mulvey argued that a voyeuristic gaze depended on the viewer being immersed in the plot and losing awareness of the image as a representation (Mulvey 1975). The estrangement and critical distance Kelly spoke about in her interview with Crimp involved avoiding illusionistic representations of the female body, which – in Mulvey’s theorisation – necessarily invites a possessive gaze, in favour of a focus only on its traces. Alertness to debates about the body and the various ways in which it may be configured in feminist art practice underpin the four chapters in Part Four of Iconic Works of Art by Feminists and Gender Activists. In “Who is Afraid of Natalia LL? Consumer Art (1972-75) and the Pleasures and Dangers of Feminist Art in Communist Poland”, Joanna Inglot presents a perspective about Natalia LL that is in diametric contrast to that of Lippard, cited above. She suggests that Natalia LL’s work had significance and import for feminism not only in the 1970s but also some four decades after their making. Mapping their emergence within experimental art in Poland, Inglot considers how Natalia LL’s works may have drawn on popular Pop Art consumerist imagery but how these motifs nevertheless resonated differently in Eastern Europe to how they did in the United States or in Western European countries. She considers also how Natalia LL produced works that have retained their capacity to provoke the ire of right-wing ideologues, citing the 2019 attempts of a new state-appointed director of the National Museum in Warsaw to remove her work (and those of three other Polish women artists working in feminist frameworks) from display and the protests in that regard. In “An Icon for the Aged: Alice Neel’s Self-Portrait (1980)”, Pamela Allara focuses on a self-representation by American artist, Alice Neel. Neel’s work can readily be understood in light of a defiance of boundaries and control that Nead outlines in her study of the nude that I invoke above. An aged naked body is, by definition, one that resists containment – a probable underlying reason why it has tended to be represented only rarely in Western art, and in those instances usually as a grotesque image intended to instil fear or as a memento mori. But Neel’s Self-Portrait does not operate in terms of such conventions and, Allara suggests, is instead simply a frank and unapologetic representation of herself in the armchair where she often posed sitters but wielding the brush and thus as artist as well as model. It is one, Allara suggests, that serves as “a challenge to the viewer to provide recognition, even admiration, for

Introduction 17 the aging female” and which, furthermore, “brings us into confrontation with our embodied selves”. While Nead’s conjecture was based on Western art, taboos on matter emanating from the body are not in fact geographically limited. This is clear in Yvonne Low’s chapter, “Phaptawan Suwannakudt’s Akojorn (1995): Connecting Women”. The first “contemporary” work by Phaptawan Suwannakudt (a Thai artist now living in Australia) – entitled Akojorn (in English No-Go Zone) – was an installation of, simply, a clothesline on which hung several examples of a tube-shaped cloth garment called a pahtung. But the work was to be profoundly transgressive because of its placement at the entrance of the gallery in Bangkok where it was displayed as part of an exhibition by women artists that was dedicated to women’s issues and entitled Tradisexion (which, Low notes, was a play on the words “tradition” and “dissection”). In Thai culture, Low points out, the pahtung is associated with menstrual blood. And it would never “be hung above a man’s head which is deemed the most sacred part of the body in Thai culture”: to force male visitors entering the space to walk underneath was thus a profound act of gender defiance. The work would be instrumental in facilitating the artist “coming out to become a feminist Thai artist on her own terms”, Low suggests, indicating that it also ultimately played a role in the founding of Womanifesto, a key transnational but Bangkok-based feminist art collective and network. In “Into the grave and back: Psychosomatic passage through grief in Lindi Arbi’s Unearthed (2009)”, Irene Bronner explores an instance where an articulation of ideas about abjection and the refusal of containment informed not only the way in which the body was represented, as such, but also how these representations were then deployed by the artist. In an enactment of experiences of grief and loss, Lindi Arbi, a South African (now living in France) who had been widowed when in her early forties, made casts of her own body which she interred in a graveyard for 18 months. Using a medium – casting – which is associated implicitly with death through the practice of making death masks, Arbi’s burial of these self-representations articulated her own experiences, in grief, of somehow being both “dead” and “living”. The burial and exhumation of the works also meant that these objects were materially altered, Bronner reveals, observing, for example, that “one of the collapsed, contorted clay Selves shattered, appropriately fulfilling its purpose as a vessel of psychosomatic grief”. Besides challenging conventional or stereotypical representations of middle-aged bodies, the resultant works thus spoke of the artist’s own ritual transformation and healing.

Concluding Thoughts The works or series in the 15 chapters comprising Mistress-Pieces have been selected for a variety of reasons. Some have had significant impact in feminist circles or might have done had they been better known, while others have achieved recognition but not necessarily though a feminist lens or the specific feminist lens cast on them here. As a totality, they make evident how some feminist ideas have been articulated and explored through visual art in a diversity of contexts and at various moments between the 1970s and the second decade of the 21st century. At the same time, they point to the range of concerns informing feminist art histories between 2018, when the conference that led to this volume was hosted,

18  Brenda Schmahmann and 2020, when this volume was finalised. This introduction was shaped during the COVID-19 pandemic – a factor that has some significance to the subject matter of the volume. A scenario that highlighted not only the interconnectedness of different geographies in a globalised world, the pandemic also underscored how gender inequities continue to shape the social experiences of women in numerous contexts. One shocking commonality between many countries has been escalating levels of gender-based violence during enforced lockdowns or periods of quarantine.7 The closure of schools in many countries has tended to increase domestic responsibilities placed on women, whether because they are single mothers or because children’s upbringing is designated as entirely their responsibility. Financial hardship and job losses from COVID-19 have also had notable impact on women who are frequently in more precarious forms of employment than are men or who participate in sectors of the economy that have been profoundly affected. 8 And shifts in resourcing have in some instances affected reproductive and sexual health services, rendering women in poorer communities especially vulnerable.9 Such scenarios are not simply the result of COVID-19 and thus ones that might be neatly remedied by the development and rollout of a vaccine, enabling life to return to “normal”. Rather, they are bound up with profound structural inequalities and gender biases that, notwithstanding shifts and changes in policies and norms in the last 50 years, continue to have efficacy and impact. The art initiatives discussed in this book are increasingly relevant in a world that, while seeing dramatic changes in how many of us conceptualise work spaces as well as how we may communicate and interact with one another, has yet to unsettle various structures and norms associated with gender prejudice.

Notes 1 Peirce (1955, 102) defined the index as a sign “which refers to the Object that it denotes by virtue of being really affected by that object”. Iconic signs, in contrast, operate in terms of resemblance. 2 My observation of a defiance of modernism is based on a reading of the work itself rather than on comments by Judy Chicago. Amelia Jones (2005, 411) observes that, while the work may have been dismissed by critics, such as Hilton Kramer, who were influenced by Clement Greenberg’s well-known ideas about policing the boundaries of high art and avoiding “kitsch”, Judy Chicago herself has tended to make comments which “made it clear that she wants The Dinner Party to be viewed as high-art”: rather “than attempting to break down the distinction between high and low, Chicago has openly acknowledged her continued investment in upholding such opposition”. 3 In Renoir, My Father, Jean Renoir (1962, 205–206) recounts an incident in which a journalist once asked his father, Pierre-August Renoir, how he managed to paint despite the arthritis in his hands. He evidently replied: “Je peins avec ma queue” (“I paint with my prick”). 4 Pollock (2010, 21) notes that the project of working on women artists from the past “emerged out of the Women’s Art History Collective, founded in 1973 as an informal grouping of artists and would-be art historians and journalists, attached to the women’s workshop of the Artists’ Union”. The concept of “Old Mistresses” was “taken on from the title of Broun’s and Gabhart’s founding exhibition in 1972 on women artists of the past” (Pollock 2010, 26). 5 A second iteration of the project took place in Los Angeles in 1979. 6 See Sung (2012) for discussion of these works and a contextualisation of them in relation to art practices in China as well as the artist’s background and feminist critique. 7 See, for example, Graham-Harrison et al. (2020).

Introduction 19 8 See, for example, Oppenheim (2020) who comments on the UK context. 9 See, for example, a press release by the United Nations Population Fund, 28 April 2020. www.unfpa.org/press/new-unfpa-projections-predict-calamitous-impact-womenshealth-covid-19-pandemic-continues

References Borzello, Frances. 2014. “An Art History Sit-In: The Dinner Party in its Artistic Context”. In The Dinner Party: Restoring Women to History, edited by Judy Chicago, 301–314. New York: Brooklyn Museum. Broude, Norma and Mary D. Garrard, eds. 1994. The Power of Feminist Art: The American Movement of the 1970s, History and Impact. New York: Harry N. Abrams. Crimp, Douglas. 1997. “Interview: Douglas Crimp in Conversation with Mary Kelly”. In Mary Kelly, edited by Margeret Iversen, Douglas Crimp and Homi K. Bhabha, 7–30. London: Phaidon Press. Douglas, Mary. 2002. Purity and Danger. London and New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul. First published in 1966. Friedan, Betty. 1963. The Feminine Mystique. London: Penguin Books. First published in 1963. Gerhard, Jane F. 2013. The Dinner Party: Judy Chicago and the Power of Popular Feminism, 1970-2007. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Graham-Harrison, Emma, et al. 2020. “Lockdowns around the World Bring Rise in Domestic Violence”.The Guardian, 28 March. www.theguardian.com/society/2020/mar/28/ lockdowns-world-rise-domestic-violence. hooks, bell. 2000. Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center. London: Pluto. Iversen, Margaret. 1997. “Visualising the Unconscious: Mary Kelly’s Installations”. In Mary Kelly, edited by Margeret Iversen, Douglas Crimp and Homi K. Bhabha, 32–85. London: Phaidon Press. Jones, Amelia. 2005. “The Sexual Politics of The Dinner Party: A Critical Context”. In Reclaiming Female Agency: Feminist Art History After Postmodernism, edited by Norma Broude and Mary Garrard, 409–428. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kristeva, Julia. 1982. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Translated by Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. First published in French in 1981. Lippard, Lucy. 1976. “The Pains and Pleasures of Rebirth: Women’s Body Art”. Art in America 64 (3): 73–81, May. Lippard, Lucy. 1978. From the Center: Feminist Essays on Women’s Art. New York: E.P. Dutton. Merlin, Monica. 2013. Interview with He Chengyao in the artist’s studio in Beijing on 20 November. www.tate.org.uk/research/research-centres/tate-research-centre-asia/ women-artists-contemporary-china/he-chengyao. Meskimmon, Marsha. 2007. “Chronology through Cartography: Mapping 1970s Feminist Art Globally”. In Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution, edited by Cornelia Butler and Lisa Gabrielle Mark, 322–335. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press. Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. 2003. “‘Under Western Eyes’: Feminist Solidarity through Anticapitalist Struggles”. Signs 28 (2): 499–535, Winter. Mulvey, Laura. 1975. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”. Screen 16 (3): 16–18. Nead, Lynda. 1992. The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity and Sexuality. London: Routledge. Oppenheim, Maya. 2020. “Coronavirus: Women Bearing Burden of Childcare and Homeschooling in Lockdown, Study Finds”. Independent, 14 May. independent.co.uk/ news/uk/home-news/coronavirus-childcare-homeschooling-women-lockdown-gendera9512866.html. Orenstein, Gloria Feman. 1988. “The Reemergence of the Archetype of the Great Goddess in Art by Contemporary Women”. In Feminist Art Criticism: An Anthology, edited by Arlene

20  Brenda Schmahmann Raven, Cassandra Langer and Joanna Frueh, 71–86. New York: HarperCollins Publishers. First published in Heresies in Spring 1978. Orenstein, Gloria Feman. 1994. “Recovering Her Story: Feminist Artists Reclaim the Great Goddess”. In The Power of Feminist Art: The American Movement of the 1970s, History and Impact, edited by Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard, 174–189. New York: Harry N. Abrams. Parker, Rozsika and Griselda Pollock. 1981. Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology. London: Pandora Press. Parker, Rozsika and Griselda Pollock, eds. 1987. Framing Feminism: Art and the Women’s Movement 1970-1985. London: Pandora Press. Peirce, Charles. 1955. “Logic as Semiotic: The Theory of Signs”, c. 1902. In Philosophical Writings of Charles Peirce, edited by Justus Buchler, 98–119. New York: Dover Publications. Pollock, Griselda, ed. 1996. Generations and Geographies in the Visual Arts: Feminist Readings. London: Routledge. Pollock, Griselda. 2010. “Opened, Closed and Opening: Reflections on Feminist Pedagogy in a UK University.” n.paradoxa 26: 20–28. Reilly, Maura. 2007. “Introduction: Toward Transnational Feminisms.” In Global Feminisms: New Directions in Contemporary Art, edited by Maura Reilly and Linda Nochlin, 15–45. London and New York: Merrell and the Brooklyn Museum. Renoir, Jean. 1962. Renoir, My Father. Translated by Randolph and Dorothy Weaver. London: Reprint Society. Rosser, Phyllis. 1994. “There’s No Place Like Home”. In New Feminist Criticism: ArtIdentity-Action, edited by Joanna Frueh, Cassandra L. Langer and Arlene Raven, 60–79. New York: HarperCollins Publications. Sung, Doris Ha-lin. 2012. “Reclaiming the Body: Gender Subjectivities in the Performance Art of He Chengyao”. In Negotiating Difference: Contemporary Chinese Art in the Global Context, edited by Birgit Hopfener, Franzika Koch, Jeong-hee Lee-Kalisch and Juliane Noth, 113–126. Weimar: Verlag und Datenbank fur Geisteswissenshaften. Syfers, Judy. 1971. “I Want a Wife”. New York, 20–27 December. Republished inwww.thecut. com/2017/11/i-want-a-wife-by-judy-brady-syfers-new-york-mag-1971.html (Accessed 28 June 2020). Waddell, Margot and Michelene Wandor. 1977. “Mystifying Theory”. Spare Rib 55: 4. Reprinted in 1987 in Framing Feminism: Art and the Women’s Movement, edited by Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock, 204. London: Pandora Press.

PART I

Reconfiguring Domestic Life

1

The Aesthetic Labour of Protest, Now and Then The Women’s Peace Camp at Greenham Common (1981–2000) Alexandra Kokoli

The women’s peace camp at Greenham Common, which lasted an unprecedented 19 years, from 1981 to 2000, was a women-only camp established in protest against nuclear proliferation and the Cold War ideology of deterrence that fuelled the arms race. It occupied the periphery of the US military base at Royal Air Force (RAF, i.e. the United Kingdom’s aerial warfare force) Greenham Common in Berkshire, England, which thus came to be known as United States Air Force (USAF) Greenham Common, where nuclear Cruise missiles were kept and from which they were deployed.1 Consisting of separate encampments across the different gates to the airbase, the peace camp also initiated a series of performative protest actions on and off site and maintained a network of occasional participants, visitors and allies regionally, nationally and internationally, through campaigns such as “Carry Greenham Home”. In lieu of any single feminist “Mistress-Piece” from Britain, this chapter proposes the performative activist strategies of women protestors at Greenham Common and their craft-based interventions on the periphery fence of the airbase. Taking stock of feminist art historical critiques of the monographic approach as well as the post-medium materialist emphasis on (art)work as labour rather than artefact, I suggest that a virtual archive of diverse documentation (visual, material, textual oral historical) is better suited to represent the aesthetic, political and ethical legacies of the feminist 1980s in Britain than any single artwork or project. Protesters at Greenham Common showed a precocious aptitude for visual activism, knowingly mobilising women’s crafts with all their ambiguous connotations as a form of intensely anti-militarist and anti-masculinist resistance. Greenham Common as Mistress-Piece both deserves and resists canonisation. It is hybrid, encompassing artistic and visual activist practices. It is difficult if not impossible to contain, spread across archives, both public and personal, some more accessible than others, and so rich in materials that no single study can cover. Finally, its status as a research object is in a state of flux, mutating in ways that both benefit and inhibit research. What started as the analysis of a historical object (the art and visual activism of feminist anti-nuclear activism) has gradually morphed into something more complex: the Greenham Common women’s peace camp and its Berkshire site are in the process of acquiring the ambiguous status of English and Welsh heritage with a transnational reach. Through my scholarly work, I aim to consolidate and further promote this recognition, while also troubling the notion of “heritage” with the tool kit of feminist art history.

24  Alexandra Kokoli

“Like it or not, We are History Now”2: The Peace Camp Lives on When I first started working on the range of visual activist and artistic practices at, in reference to and/or in support of the women’s peace camp at Greenham Common in 2015, the project fitted in my established research interests in the art and visual cultures of second-wave feminism, but did not seem particularly topical or pressing. In the beginning, I found myself on the familiar ground of a feminist “minor mode” (cf. Solomon-Godeau 2006), in which failure featured prominently if tacitly, before its queer reclamations (e.g. Halberstam2011).3 A sympathetic history of Greenham Common by journalist David Fairhall (2006) who covered the peace camp as The Guardian newspaper’s defence correspondent during the last years of the Cold War, included a straw poll with the question “What did the Greenham women’s protest achieve, and what difference, if any, did it make to the outcome of the Cold War?”, to which most responses were dismissive if not damning. Predictably, Andrew Brookes, last operational RAF commander at Greenham Common, 1989–1991, not only dismissed offhand any impact that the Greenham peace camp and anti-nuclear protests had on the end of the Cold War but also quantified the damage that the women inflicted through the protest tactic of cutting into the perimeter fence, for the repairs to which he claimed to have been given an annual budget of £750,000 (in Fairhall 2006, 193). Journalist and nuclear disarmament proponent Polly Toynbee was only slightly more generous in her appraisal: I never went to Greenham. My sister did, with her six-year-old son, but she was sent away because he was a boy. I think it had no effect at all on the Cold War, but had some galvanising effect on the women’s movement in the Thatcher years. (in Fairhall 2006, 202)4 Whether and to what degree Greenham helped end the Cold War is hardly measurable (at least not from an art historical perspective), whereas its more diffuse impact and its significance as a network of visual and other feminist activist practices cannot be doubted. In any case, the fortunes of Greenham changed fast, with the completion of a new oral history project Greenham Women Everywhere (Mordan and Kerrow 2020), 5 and a buoyant programme of exhibitions and events at the Control Tower at Greenham Common, re-opened in September 2018 as a cultural centre, including an exhibition of prints and drawings in reference to the peace camp by Pam Hardman in 2019 and a series of photographs from the Blue Gate of the camp by Wendy Carrig in 2018. In 2019, the arts festival Reading International chose the legacies of Greenham Common as its focus and, among other projects, commissioned a performance by Nina Wakeford, “an apprenticeship in queer I believe it was”. Wakeford’s performance, which was dedicated to sociologist and Greenham woman Sasha Roseneil, takes its title from Roseneil’s (2000) formative sociological writing on Greenham, exemplifying the close dialogue if not confluence between art and scholarship in this unfolding revival. Yet as Greenham appears to be shedding the charge of failure, it is important to remember that amateur aesthetics and, to some degree, an amateur approach to organising were defining features of this and other women’s peace camps. In the words of Ann Pettitt (2006, 309), Greenham pioneer: In my view, it is thanks to the millions of people in the western world for whom protest was a relatively easy option, and to a brave few in the East for whom it

The Women’s Peace Camp at Greenham Common (1981–2000) 25 wasn’t, that the arms race ended with a whimper […] and not with a bang (the end of the world as we know it). […] We did this […] not because we were good at campaigning, but because we were bad at it; not because we went about things in a professional way, but because we were amateurs; not because we were clever, but because we were naïve. Whether a failure or a success, by whatever criteria, the place of the Greenham Common peace camp in collective memory in Britain and globally has never been in question. At the time of writing (2020), Greenham is actively revisited from multiple quarters, including my own art historical research, often with activist intentions. Some hope of re-activation shadows commemorations and memorialisations of Greenham, while visual culture has emerged as a privileged signifier and crucial platform for the evaluation and dissemination of anti-nuclear, anti-war activism inspired and motivated by feminism. With its visual impact often identified as one of its most influential and defining features (e.g. Paul Rogers cited in Fairhall 2006, 201),6 Greenham’s re-activations often take place within contemporary art practices. Discussing her project The Fence and the Shadow, first shown at the Midlands Arts Centre, Birmingham, in 2017, painter Sally Payen (2020) notes: It’s not a legacy project or an archival project, even though I am interviewing some Greenham Women and researching archives. It is a project about how that contested landscape touched my life back then and the experience of what is still alive and vital today. (Fig. 1.1) Payen approaches the peace camp as both a physical site and an imaginary realm where individual, public and conflicting memories intersect, and the camp itself as both a studio and exhibition space, comparing the perimeter fence, host to so many visual activist interventions, to a loom (Payen and Fowler 2017, 22).7 The prevalence of the camp and its site in the collective imagination, particularly but not singularly in Britain, has made it unusually difficult for me to decide how and in how much detail to introduce the history of Greenham Common. This is complicated further by my own positionality as a first-generation immigrant to Britain, whose history or story this is not. While Payen captures the pervasiveness of Greenham into public consciousness as well as in her biography, my own experience of it remains retrospective and largely scholarly. My Mistress-Piece is not only diffuse, extending into contemporary art practices like Payen’s but also intricately woven into social, political and military histories, including notably the history of women’s movements, partly overlapping but not fully coinciding with anti-nuclear activism, anti-militarism and pacifism. An expanded or rather exploded artwork, or possibly a virtual feminist museum (Pollock 2007), Greenham Common remains dizzyingly interdisciplinary and presents a curatorial conundrum as well as an art historical provocation. Rarely have I presented my research on Greenham Common in Britain without at least a few of my listeners identifying as Greenham women (or male daytime visitors), and offering their own insights and information. Judging from the numbers of visitors, “campers” and “stayers”, the peace camp appears to have been a radically inclusive space in which committed activists freely mixed with inexperienced supporters.

26  Alexandra Kokoli

Figure 1.1  Sally Payen, Fence and Shadow, Invisible Woman and the Telephonic Tree. 2017, oil on canvas, 160 × 200 cm. Source:  Courtesy of the artist.

The camp encouraged contributions of all kinds and engagement in wildly varying degrees to suit different abilities, availability, social groups and situations. It would be apt to frame visits to Greenham as a kind of secular pilgrimage, if pilgrimages are to be understood as “movements of people that loosen the hold of institutional, structural descriptions in the creation of liminal spaces” (Lugones 2003, 8, drawing

The Women’s Peace Camp at Greenham Common (1981–2000) 27 on Victor Turner). By all accounts, spending any amount of time at the camp was personally and politically transformative (Roseneil 1995). The peace camp helped map the world anew, literally and metaphorically, by making the spatial dimension of military-patriarchal oppression both obvious and concrete, and fostering the development of protest methods that deliberately trespassed against it. In the work of decolonial feminist philosopher María Lugones (2003, 12), “trespassing […] violat[es] the spatiality and logic of oppression”. The camp created plentiful opportunities for both enacting and reflecting on border violations as a form of eloquent resistance, from the détournement of the perimeter fence into a gallery, a loom and a screen through which protesters and the military viewed and interacted with one other, to actual breaches of the fence by the Greenham women with wire cutters. Angela Dimitrakaki (2013, 7) coins the term “artWork” as a means of “tak[ing] further feminist art history’s partial displacement of the delivered artwork as the exclusive origin of meaning and rethink[ing] what ‘process-based work’ can possibly describe”. Greenham Common stretches this definition beyond artistic process to shed light on the labour of activism and particularly of the total commitment that staying at the peace camp involved, even for short periods of time. Furthermore, this work involves the “post-production” labour of documentation, its archiving and preservation, including crucially the maintenance and management of its accessibility of which I am a beneficiary, among many others. Such work is a labour of commitment and the hope of transmissibility, if not love. The persistence of the MistressPiece “Greenham Common” is a hybrid of Warburgian “afterlife” (Didi-Huberman 2003), a survival through transformation, of feminist commitment, and of the burden as well as promise of transmission (Pollock 2007; see also Chidgey 2018).

Artistic and Activist Strategies: From Pre-emptive Mourning to Sticky Time Art informed by 1970s feminism often casts domestic space as a site of ambivalence if not unhomeliness, inspired by anti-patriarchal dissent (Kokoli 2016). A focus on the art and activist practices of feminist anti-nuclear activism expands this repertoire to include the performativity of die-in demonstrations, the protest tactics and site-specific interventions of the Greenham women on the periphery fence of the airbase and the recreations of this fence by Margaret Harrison, among others, in which domesticity is thrown into crisis anew: here living space becomes untethered from the nuclear family home to retain its character as haven but is also transformed into the site of cruelly premature, violent death by total nuclear disaster. The present contribution seeks to blur the line between artistic and activist interventions just as it challenges the distinction between private and public space. In their spatial mappings, the public and the private are neither directly opposed nor completely separate: if the personal is indeed political, domesticity needs to be considered as a microcosm of widespread ideological operations, a lab for world-making and, in this case, a feminist reclamation of the militarised commons. Although in retrospect, Greenham Common is not only feminist but also an important chapter in the history of British feminism, it is crucial to acknowledge that despite Greenham’s challenge to patriarchal, bourgeois and heteronormative domestic ideals, it also sat awkwardly within some of the most dominant feminist discourses of their time. Women’s anti-nuclear activism often emphasised its rhetorical

28  Alexandra Kokoli and critical difference from the systems they opposed (militarism, nuclear deterrence, etc.) by embracing the archetypical affinity between femininity and nurturing, even while those same archetypes were challenged and deconstructed in emergent feminist analyses. The germinal work of Sasha Roseneil (1995, 4) grapples with some of these contradictions between a feminist dismissal of “maternalist peace activism” as “false consciousness” on one hand, and on the other hand, the recognition that “maternal thinking” stems from “maternal practice”, which is both materially and ideologically opposed to war. It is difficult to determine whether and to what degree the “three main discourses within which women have critiqued and protested against militarism: [namely] maternalism, materialism and feminism” (Roseneil 1995, 7) are distinct, and Roseneil’s later work on Greenham appears to highlight the subversive inclusivity of the camp, describing it as “the radical, anarchic edge of feminism” (Roseneil 2000, 320). The peace camp’s undeniable strength lay in pushing doctrinaire considerations aside (or, more accurately, allowing them to be organically negotiated) in favour of a shared commitment to protect all life on earth.8 Roseneil (1995, 7) also concedes that each of these three discourses “framed, at different times, both the public voice of Greenham and the motivations of individual women”. Teacher and press and publicity officer for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) Alison Whyte (1983, 85) notes that “some [women] see themselves as having a very distinctive role to play in the peace movement”, while also making note of the sexist deployment of gendered language by the conservative media. In the press, “the peace movement is stripped of masculinity – full of women, children, priests and long-haired youths – and embodies all the characteristics which hold no sway in our society” (Whyte 1983, 88). Women’s “distinctive role” was most succinctly articulated in their role as mothers, even if motherhood more often than not disrupted the contribution of those already involved in activism. This bind is addressed by Tamar Swade who describes the arrival of her baby as both an interruption to her involvement in anti-nuclear activism, since demand feeding interfered with the collaborative work of researching and writing an anti-nuclear booklet, and an opportunity for its revitalisation and reframing as a specifically maternal issue: “Those of us who had been involved before often feel an added urgency to our desire for peace after having a child” (Swade 1983, 65). Caring for an infant transformed Swade into “a different kind of social being” with new social needs as well as a newly gained consciousness, more alert to the vulnerability of non-combatants, particularly very young ones, across the world. Originally called “Mother and baby anti-nuclear group”, the name of her newly founded group was eventually shortened to the punchier “Babies against the Bomb”. This new consciousness, which she admits is not necessarily nor exclusively feminist, is shaped by the labour and joys of mothering as well as personal grief over global crises, however remote they may be. Swade’s statement is illustrated with a black and white photograph of three generations of protesters (Swade 1983, 64), the youngest of whom is nursing in his mother’s arms; the older two are shown engaged in passionate conversation behind a handwritten sign reading “Babies againts [sic] the BOMB” and piles of clothes with busy patterns in boxes and bags. This unattributed photograph of Chanie Gluckstein, Tamar Swade and Dario Swade, taken around 1981, is compositionally accomplished, an updated and repurposed variation of mother-and-child iconography: the nursing mother’s bare leg forms a V with the stick on which the sign is nailed; her patterned dress

The Women’s Peace Camp at Greenham Common (1981–2000) 29 drapes over and merges with the assembled donations. The three figures are shown in intimate and intense engagement with one another: nursing and being nursed, and absorbed in conversation.9 Although not generated at Greenham, this photograph of Babies Against the Bomb activists gradually emerged as a visual but also conceptual navigation tool in the knotted intersection of the maternal, pacifism and feminism.10 If one accepts Nancy Fraser’s (2013) invitation to untether the work of care from systems of social reproduction that have successfully exploited and co-opted it as a feminine capitalist supplement, simultaneously essential and marginalised, and to propose it instead as a genuinely feminist alternative to the explicit misogyny and barely veiled misanthropy of capitalism in its neoliberal inflections, then both representations of and practices of care will need to be rethought beyond the framework of prescribed gender roles.11 Following Kristeva (1980, 237–270), art and visual culture are approached as both source material and methodological tools for negotiating the psychosocial meanings of care in its maternal manifestations. Kristeva mobilised the work of two Renaissance masters, Giovanni Bellini and Leonardo Da Vinci, to interrogate descriptions and proscriptions of care work and maternal subjectivity through the idealised maternity of the Madonna. Despite its well-documented normative patriarchal limitations, Kristeva found in the maternal the potential for a woman-to-woman sociality: in becoming mother, one becomes reconnected with one’s own and joins a society of fellow mother-workers as well as maternal subjects. Considering such observations, it is surprising that Kristeva did not home in on Da Vinci’s The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne (c.1503–1519), which, alongside The Virgin and Child with St Anne and St John the Baptist, aka The Burlington House Cartoon (c.1499–1500) portrays three generations together: Mary with her own mother St. Anne and baby Jesus, with both grown-ups engaged in mothering work. Interestingly, the Louvre painting The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne was a key focus in Freud’s (1990 [1910]) speculative and widely disputed case study on the artist, Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood. While a comprehensive critical evaluation of this much debated body of work falls outside the remit of the present text (see notably Bersani 1986 and Kofman 1988), my intention is to introduce documentation of feminist antinuclear activism into the long-standing and wide-ranging art historical preoccupation with mother-and-child iconography, of which the Virgin and child is an idealised manifestation. The disparate scales of the private and the public, the sacred and the profane, kaleidoscopically shift and meld into one another: the maternal ethical and political orientation of anti-war, anti-nuclear women protesters, inspired by but not exhausted in mothering work, updates and remobilises (grandmother-and-)motherand-child iconographies in defence of life and in celebration of the work of care that makes it liveable. Da Vinci’s unusual experimentation with this three-figure composition on one hand breaks with the dualism of the mother-and-child iconography, but on the other hand, continues to be read in light of multiple dualities (Herding 2000): it is said to represent two immaculate conceptions; it shows two mothers, reflecting, according to Freud, Da Vinci’s own two mothers, his birth mother and the wife of his father who eventually adopted him. Mary and St. Anne are portrayed as being of similar age and very much alike, especially in the Burlington House cartoon, which also includes St. John the Baptist as a young child, engaging with his near-double, a slightly younger Jesus. In the Louvre painting, Jesus is shown in the process of being

30  Alexandra Kokoli gently checked by his mother: we see Mary performing mothering work, socialising the human side of her baby by encouraging him to be gentle to the lamb that he is innocently manhandling. The lamb is also her child’s double, and its small distress a mild foreshadowing of the child’s own future sacrifice on the cross. Beyond such established iconographies, networks of routinised intimacy and caregiving are evoked in many works of feminist anti-nuclear activism, even non-representational ones. Active between 1981 and 1984, the artists’ collective Sister Seven produced a series of consciousness-raising events, posters and performances, including notably the performance Premature Endings in Huddersfield in 1984. The collective originally consisted of seven women but eventually came down to six members (Evelyn Silver, Mary Michaels, Liz Hibbard, Shirley Cameron, Gillian Allnutt and Monica Ross). Their work is inflected by the paradox of much pacifist and particularly anti-nuclear activism, in which a pre-emptively mournful sense of impending doom by complete nuclear annihilation invites urgent action. John Timberlake (2014) describes visions of nuclear catastrophes as collective “false memories”: not only did a nuclear world war never take place but its multiple evocations and representations, including visual ones, are in themselves an effect of the traumatic fallout of the Cold War. Rather than false memories, however, which suggest a mass delusion sparked by real trauma, anti-nuclear art practice seems motivated by pre-emptive mourning for premature, abrupt and violent death on a mass scale, death which is perceived as likely and imminent and to which diverse visual and other forms are given, while politically campaigning against it. Shirley Cameron’s contribution to Sister Seven’s anti-nuclear exhibition is haunted by the spectre of her dead loved ones. She vividly describes her prematurely born children sleeping peacefully in their beds, whose premature deaths she cannot bear to imagine. A Sister Seven poster offers guidance for a simple do-it-yourself performance using a single prop in the shape of a nuclear missile, the “end-of-the-bookmark” (Sister Seven 1981): How to use end-of-the-bookmarks 1 2 3 4 5

Choose a book (a novel or story book) Place bookmark in any page near the centre of the book Read from beginning of book to the bookmark and STOP! THROW THE BOOK AWAY And think about premature endings – the nuclear weapons exploding at any time – just when we had done the shopping or maybe when we were in the middle of reading a good book …

The final instruction, which retroactively sets the scene of sudden and unjustified killing in treacherously familiar, ordinary and even relaxed circumstances, reveals a fundamental dimension of anti-nuclear feminist practice and forms an accented addition to feminist dystopian domesticities: the nuclear version of uncanny domesticity does not stem from a critique of a patriarchal division of labour but from the recognition that no place is safe from total war. Striking in their frequency and affective weight, such evocations of strategic uncanniness include the delivery of a child-sized coffin with the inscription “HUMAN RACE” to a guarded gate of the base and songs such as “Four minutes to midnight”, written by Rebecca Johnson and the women of Greenham, a countdown to nuclear Armageddon in four stanzas.12

The Women’s Peace Camp at Greenham Common (1981–2000) 31 The Mistress-Piece proposed in this chapter is composed of a sprawling network of returns and (re)activations, while the camp was in existence and since its closure. Originally created in 1989 during a one-month residency at New York’s New Museum, Margaret Harrison’s installation Common Land Greenham was “a reconstruction and reinterpretation” (a-n 2013) of the perimeter fence of the Greenham Common base bearing the protesters’ personal and largely domestic additions, including photographs, children’s clothing and toys, and kitchen implements. The installation included a mural, an empty pram and a quotation from Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas: “We can best help you prevent war not by repeating your words and following your methods but by finding new words and creating new methods.” Harrison’s installation was recreated for her solo exhibition Preoccupy at Silberkuppe, Berlin (2012), with the initiative of the gallery curators who saw in it and, by extension, in the original perimeter fence of the base itself, an influential precedent for contemporary artistic activisms. In 2013, the fence became Common Reflections with the inclusion of mirrors, which had multiple meanings and effects (Fig. 1.2). Harrison’s exhibition for the Northern Art Prize exploited reflection literally and metaphorically, reflecting on the politics and aesthetics of looking and being looked at as stock feminist concerns, while also exploiting the disorienting effect of differently angled mirrors on the viewer.13 Just as importantly, Harrison references one of the biggest demonstrations at Greenham, “Reflect the Base” in December 1983, which involved 50,000 women and resulted in a record number of arrests. In the words of Rebecca Johnson, “Surrounding the base, we faced thousands of armed soldiers and police as we held up our mirrors so that they could see their own faces, guarding these nuclear weapons of mass suffering” (Johnson cited in Graham 2003). The disorientation of the gallery viewer is not merely visual but extends to Harrison’s approach to the

Figure 1.2  Margaret Harrison, Common Reflections, 2013, installation view, Northern Art Prize 2013, Leeds Art Gallery. Source:  Courtesy of the artist and Leeds Art Gallery. Photograph by Simon Warner.

32  Alexandra Kokoli history of feminist activism. By recreating the fence anew, Harrison revisits earlier work on the same topic in 1989 and also invites the viewer to reflect on the meanings of repetition, return and history of and within feminism. When I started working on Greenham in June 2015, an American-owned factory on the outskirts of the city of Lyon became the target of what at the time was thought to be a terrorist attack (BBC 2015). Following multiple small-scale explosions (larger ones were planned as it transpired but did not pan out), reports emerged of a decapitated body found on the scene and a severed human head “stuck” on the fence of the Air Products facility. Before forensics investigators were able to identify the head as belonging to a manager at the factory, there was speculation that the head may have belonged to one of the attackers and may have been severed and caught on the fence from the force of an explosion. The exact meaning of the French verb s’accrocher was debated: it means to hang from, to hook on but also to catch (Larousse 2020). I made a concerted effort to avoid seeing visual documentation of the factory fence. While grappling with Harrison’s work on and with Greenham, I could not take the image of the severed head on the fence out of my mind, not seen but imagined; it stuck. Looking at Harrison’s fence again, I blanked out the pegs holding up the assorted objects. The object placement could be accidental, the result of extreme force; unlike what has been often repeated, they consist of both precious mementoes and, mostly, everyday objects, essential to the business of living such as pots and pans – the gear of everyday life more than memento boxes. Common Reflections joins a canon of works relating to Greenham Common but also offers the flickering suggestion of something that few other works do: a literally exploded view of the alternative domesticities of the peace camp. Like the subversively decorated perimeter fence of the Greenham Common USAF base, Margaret Harrison’s recreations demand an embodied approach from the viewer. The fence becomes “sticky”, a term repurposed by Mieke Bal to describe contemporary works of art that promote an enhanced experience of time in the act of viewing, without deploying time-based media, but by manipulating the experience of the viewer through an engagement of her senses and sensibilities. To be precise, sticky images do not so much engage as they transfix the viewer, thus conveying something of the trauma that informs their making. They slow down to the extreme; they make you dizzy from the back-and-forthness between microscopic and macroscopic looking where no eyeglasses or contact lenses will quite do the job. Looking itself becomes tortuous, almost tortuous. […] these surfaces, whose structure of microscopic detail conjures up such massive violence as to make it impossible for any historical or journalistic account to encompass it, so foreshorten time as to enter the viewer’s life-time, breaking its linearity and regularity. They stick to you, long after the intense experience of time has faded back into everyday life. (Bal 2000, 99) Stickiness inflects time for Greenham Common in at least two ways: then, on the Common, due to the stretches of apparent inactivity that staying at the encampment involved (Baraitser 2017, 95); and since then, now and then, thanks to its persistent resurfacings and returns, notably in visual art practice (Baraitser 2017, 113; Kokoli 2017; Roseneil 2000).

The Women’s Peace Camp at Greenham Common (1981–2000) 33

Coda: Baby-to-Baby Combat In The Psychoanalysis of War, originally published in 1966, Franco Fornari reviews psychoanalytic approaches to conflict to make a special case for nuclear war and its prevention with the help of psychoanalysis. Fornari’s (1974, 199–236) proposals, which involve the foundation of the Omega Institution, a global defensive and judicial organisation whose purpose would be to prevent all future wars, never came to fruition and are less important than his analysis of the problem of war in its nuclear mutation. Defending the role of psychoanalysis in the examination of war phenomena, he notes a series of “symbolic peculiarities” through which “the emergence of an all-destructive reality is associated with the symbols of procreation and preservation of the species, through a primary love relationship such as that between mother and child”. For instance, Colonel Paul Tibbets named the fighter plane that would drop the bomb on Hiroshima after his mother, Enola Gay; and the “father” of the atomic bomb General Leslie Groves, on completion of the first successful experiment, messaged President Truman that “Baby is born” (Fornari 1974, ix). From a psychoanalytic perspective, maternalism in anti-nuclear pacifism exceeds the assumption or imposition of the work of social reproduction on women, gendered divisions of labour, birth or childcare. For theorists like Julia Kristeva (1980) and Bracha Ettinger (2006), the maternal opens up a space for re-imagining subjectivity and inter-subjectivity beyond clear-cut divisions between self and other, and against the potential weaponisation of such divisions. These feminist theorisations inflect the reclamation of maternal practice in pacifism as a political and ethical philosophy of being in the world otherwise, for others and for each other. While Fornari (1974) unpicks the repressed aggression behind “pantoclastic” (all-destroying) war-mongering, the strategic deployment of maternal practice at Greenham Common, in performance and representation, constitutes a sorely needed counter-strike. In 2016, government documents from 1983 were released to the National Archives in Kew, London, revealing serious worries over the impact of anti-nuclear activism on public opinion and possible eruptions of mass civil disobedience. In addition to the chilling recommendation that, should it become necessary to shoot at protestors, the task must be performed by the British and not by the US forces, to avoid an international incident, Margaret Thatcher’s press secretary Bernard Ingham circulated a list of suggestions for distracting the public’s attention from the Easter Monday anti-nuclear march in London on 4 April 1983. His suggestions included the promotion of what he considered to be traditional British Bank holiday pastimes, such as “pigeon or whippet or tortoise racing”, and photographs of the then newly appointed Secretary of State for Defence Michael Heseltine’s visit to the Berlin Wall, the one material manifestation of the metaphorical iron curtain in Europe. Another suggestion, which is confirmed to have implemented, was originally redacted from the documents: pictures of baby Prince William, then aged ten months and on his first visit to Australia and New Zealand, were released to the press and widely published.14 The royal baby was extensively photographed with his parents and staff, including nannies and security detail. This really was babyto-baby combat.

34  Alexandra Kokoli

Acknowledgements This text has been developed through iterative elaborations of my article “Pre-emptive Mourning Against the Bomb” (Kokoli 2017), which itself stemmed from a paper presented at the conference “House, Work, Artwork: Feminism and Art History’s New Domesticities”, organised by Drs. Jo Applin and Francesca Berry at the Barber Institute of Fine Arts, University of Birmingham, 2015; and the chapter “‘Dying to live’: Bad endings & the afterlives of Greenham Common” (Kokoli 2020). I am grateful to the Paul Mellon Centre for supporting my research through the award of a mid-career fellowship (2019) and to all those whose invitations to present the material at different stages of development motivated me to push forward. Diverse audiences, including Greenham women and visitors, generously shared their feedback and insights. I would especially like to thank the Centre for Arts, Memory and Communities at Coventry University, the University of Warwick and the School of Arts and Humanities at Lisbon University for their invitations. The conference Mistress-Pieces, University of Johannesburg, organised by Professor Brenda Schmahmann (2018), played a pivotal role in the re-framing and evolution of this project.

Notes 1 Cruise missiles were deployed from Greenham in military exercises monitored and disrupted by Cruisewatch, an anti-nuclear initiative separate from but overlapping with the peace camp. In addition to Roseneil (1995 and 2000) and Pettitt (2006), a brief and comprehensive history of the peace camp can be found in the online database of the Women’s Library, London School of Economics Library Collections, https://archives.lse. ac.uk/Record.aspx?src=CalmView.Catalog&id=5GCC&pos=315 2 This is a quote from a short text by Jill Truman (2019), former Greenham woman and playwright, which reflects on the crucial moment of transformation from collective memory to shared heritage that the peace camp has been undergoing, consolidated by the designation of the formerly hostile Control Tower as a visitor centre, museum and community café. 3 I am here referring to Abigail Solomon-Godeau’s appropriation of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s idea of “a minor literature” exemplified by the work of Franz Kafka, “a Prague Jew writing in German” for the field of visual arts and specifically art informed by and committed to feminism (Solomon-Godeau 2006, 371). Solomon-Godeau argues that “minority or outsider” cultural producers such as LGBTQ+ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, Queer or Questioning, and others) women artists of colour are afforded some advantages despite and, paradoxically, thanks to their exclusion: outsider positionalities bring forth novel opportunities for experimentation in both aesthetic and political terms. 4 David Fairhall’s (2006, 191–202) straw poll is more balanced than my text indicates; I am simply pointing out that the fates of Greenham have changed radically even since the publication of Fairhall’s supportive book. 5 Many oral histories of Greenham Common came before Greenham Women Everywhere (such as the collection at the Imperial War Museum), but the distinctive feature of Kerrow and Mordan’s project is that interviewees responded to an open call rather than being selected by the interviewers on account of their perceived prominence in the camp. For this reason, Greenham Women Everywhere comes the closest to adhering to the leaderless commitment of the peace camp. 6 The centrality of visual activism at Greenham is noted in virtually all academic writing on the topic, as well as publications from the camp and its supporters, such as the richly illustrated pamphlet The Greenham Factor (Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp c.1984). 7 Photographs of the decorated perimeter fence can be found online, including those by Sigrid Møller, scanned by Holger Terp, June 2006. See: The Danish Peace Academy

The Women’s Peace Camp at Greenham Common (1981–2000) 35







Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp’s Songbook, www.fredsakademiet.dk/abase/ sange/greenham/sigrid/sigrid11.htm. 8 “Women for Life on Earth” was the name that the original group who marched from Cardiff to Greenham gave themselves (see esp. Pettitt 2006). 9 I would like to thank Tamar Swade for identifying the people in the photograph and for also giving me permission to reproduce it, although my scan was deemed of too poor resolution to print here. 10 It is not easy to summarise the richness and diversity of motherhood and feminism as a field, but Lisa D. Brush (1996) makes a good attempt, drawing on a variety of historical and sociological scholarship that encapsulates much of feminist thinking from the 1980s, principally from Britain and the United States. On maternalist pacifism, see Liddington (1989, esp. Chapter 5, 87–106). 11 The Covid-19 pandemic has seen a surge in activist thinking on care. The Care Collective (2020) proposes “promiscuous care” as an alternative to the labour of social reproduction often performed by women within the family. “Promiscuity” in this context alludes to HIV-AIDS (Human Immunodeficiency Virus-Acquired Immuno-Deficiency Syndrome) activism by ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) while also reflecting the Collective’s aspiration for “experimental and extensive” networks of care beyond kinship (Care Collective 2020, 41). 12 The lyrics of this song can be found here: www.fredsakademiet.dk/abase/sange/greenham/song22.htm 13 On Margaret Harrison’s practice in general and this work in particular (61–62), see also Munson (2015). 14 For a summary, see Higham (2016). The relevant documents can be found in PREM19/1846: DEFENCE. Policing of demonstrations at military bases: activities of anti-nuclear demonstrators; part 1 (1983–1986), National Archives, London.

References a-n The Artists Information Company. 2013. “Northern Art Prize: A Spring Opening Amidst Winter Snow”, 28 March, www.a-n.co.uk/news/northern-art-prize-spring-launch/. Bal, Mieke. 2000. “Sticky Images: The Foreshortening of Time in an Art of Duration”. In Time and the Image, edited by Carolyn Bailey Gill. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Baraitser, Lisa. 2017. Enduring Time. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Bersani, Leo. 1986. The Freudian Body. New York: Columbia University Press. BBC. 2015. “France Attack as It Happened”, 26 June, www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/world-europe33287095. Brush, Lisa. 1996. “Love, Toil, and Trouble: Motherhood and Feminist Politics”. Signs, Winter, 21 (2): 429–454. Care Collective. 2020. The Care Manifesto. London: Verso. Chidgey, Red. 2018. Feminist Afterlives: Assemblage Memory in Activist Times. London: Palgrave. Didi-Huberman, Georges. 2003. “Artistic Survival: Panofsky vs. Warburg and the Exorcism of Impure Time”. Translated byVivian Rehberg and Boris Belay. Common Knowledge, Spring, 9 (2): 273–285. Dimitrakaki, Angela. 2013. Gender, ArtWork and the Global Imperative: A Materialist Feminist Critique. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Ettinger, Bracha. 2006. The Matrixial Borderspace. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Fairhall, David. 2006. Common Ground: The Story of Greenham. London: IB Tauris. Fornari, Franco. 1974. The Psycho-Analysis of War. Translated by Alenka Pfeifer. New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday. Fraser, Nancy. 2013. Fortunes of Feminism: From State-Managed Capitalism to Neoliberal Crisis. London: Verso.

36  Alexandra Kokoli Freud, Sigmund. 1990 (1910). “Leonardo Da Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood”. In The Penguin Freud Library: 14. Art and Literature, translated under the general editorship of James Strachey, and edited by Albert Dickson, 145–231. London: Penguin. Graham, Sarah. 2003. “Reflections on Greenham, 11 December 1983”,Feminist Times. https://sarah-graham.co.uk/2013/12/11/reflections-on-greenham-11-december-1983/ Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp. c.1984. The Greenham Factor. London: Greenham Print Prop. http://bcrw.barnard.edu/archive/militarism/greenham_factor.pdf Halberstam, Jack. 2011. The Queer Art of Failure. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Herding, Klaus. 2000. “Freud’s Leonardo: A Discussion of Recent Psychoanalytic Theories”. American Imago, Winter, 57 (4): 339–368. Higham, Nick. 2016. “Margaret Thatcher Aides Used Prince William in Media War”. BBC News, 21 July, www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-36847895 Kofman, Sarah. 1988. The Childhood of Art. Translated by Winifred Woodhull. New York: Columbia University Press. Kokoli, Alexandra. 2016. The Feminist Uncanny in Theory and Art Practice. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Kokoli, Alexandra. 2017. “Pre-emptive Mourning Against the Bomb: Exploded Domesticities in Art Informed by Feminism and Anti-Nuclear Activism”. Oxford Art Journal 40 (1): 153–168. Kokoli, Alexandra. 2020. “‘Dying to Live’: Bad Endings & the Afterlives of Greenham Common”. In Feminist Art Activisms and Artivisms, edited by Katy Deepwell, 134–143. Amsterdam: Valiz. Kristeva, Julia. 1980. Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art. New York: Columbia University Press. Larousse Dictionnaires Bilingues: français-anglais. 2020. “Accrocher”. www.larousse.fr/ dictionnaires/francais-anglais/accrocher/551. Liddington, Jill. 1989. The Long Road to Greenham: Feminism & Anti-Militarism in Britain Since 1820. London: Virago. Lugones, María. 2003. Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition Against Multiple Oppressions. Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield. Mordan, Rebecca, and Kate Kerrow. 2020. Greenham Women Everywhere: The Project. http://greenhamwomeneverywhere.co.uk/ Munson, Kim. 2015. On Reflection: The Art of Margaret Harrison. Pacifica, CA: Neurotic Raven. Payen, Sally. 2020. The Fence and the Shadow. https://thefenceandtheshadow.wordpress.com/ about/ Payen, Sally, and Mandy Fowler. 2017. “The Act of Repetition, Paint, and Greenham”. In The Fence and the Shadow, 20–25. Birmingham: Midlands Arts Centre. https:// www.amazon.co.uk/Fence-Shadow-Sally-Payen/dp/1907796215/ref=sr_1_6?dchild= 1&keywords=the+fence+and+the+shadow&qid=1616760297&sr=8-6. Pettitt, Ann. 2006. Walking to Greenham: How the Peace-Camp Began and the Cold War Ended. South Glamorgan: Honno. Pollock, Griselda. 2007. Encounters in the Virtual Feminist Museum: Time, Space and the Archive. London: Routledge. Roseneil, Sasha. 1995. Disarming Patriarchy: Feminism and Political Action at Greenham. Buckingham: Open University Press. Roseneil, Sasha. 2000. Common Women, Uncommon Practices: The Queer Feminisms of Greenham. London: Continuum. Schmahmann, Brenda. 2018. CFP: Mistress-Pieces (Johannesburg, 8-10 Nov 18). In: ArtHist. net, Jan 13 (accessed Feb 5, 2020), https://arthist.net/archive/17082. Sister Seven. 1981. Sister Seven Poster. Monica Ross Archives. Brighton: Phoenix Studios. Solomon-Godeau, Abigail. 2006. “Taunting and Haunting: Critical Tactics in a ‘Minor’ Mode”. In Women Artists at the Millenium, edited by Carol Armstrong and Catherine de Zegher, 371–401. Cambridge MA: MIT Press.

The Women’s Peace Camp at Greenham Common (1981–2000) 37 Swade, Tamar. 1983. “Babies Against the Bomb”. In Keeping the Peace, edited by Lynne Jones, 64–67. London: Women’s Press. Timberlake, John. 2014. “Nuclear War as False Memory”. Open Arts Journal, Summer, 3: 157–163. https://openartsjournal.org/issues/. Truman, Jill. 2019. “Greenham Common: A Postscript”. London Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. www.londoncnd.org/latest/2019/3/18/greenham-common-a-postscript Whyte, Alison. 1983. “Thinking for Ourselves”. In The CND Story, edited by John Minnion and Philip Bolsover. London: Allison and Busby.

2

“Middle Fingers up, put them Hands High” Rethinking Tracey Moffatt’s Scarred for Life (1994) Jacqueline Millner and Catriona Moore

Toiling long and hard on Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party with 400 other volunteers at the Santa Monica workshop, Australian artists Frances (Budden) Phoenix and Marie McMahon soon became frustrated with what they regarded as the project’s exploitative working conditions and autocratic power structure. The anarchic and socialist values of Australian arts feminism in which they had forged their practice sat uneasily with what appeared to them as US careerism, monumentalism and irritating goddess worship. Phoenix slyly stitched the words “No Goddesses/no mistresses” around an anarcho-feminist symbol on a cotton d’oyley and sewed it onto the back of an exquisite runner that she was working on. When Chicago later discovered this dissenting Antipodean voice within Global Sisterhood, the work was removed and the Australians sent packing. We did not learn our lesson: in Australia, unreflective iconicity is often met with a healthy scepticism and rebuffed with humour for good measure: middle fingers up! The legacy of Phoenix’s sneaky anti-monumentalism still leavens certain Australian feminist and Indigenous art. We argue that this sensibility – one of surreptitious refusal, of stubbornly retaining a measure of autonomy despite all the indicators otherwise – when harnessed through humour – partly at the absurdity of the apparent smallness of the gesture, partly at the expense of the pretentions of the oppressor – opens up a fertile space for the trauma of colonial, postcolonial and patriarchal histories to be simultaneously felt and considered. This space is distinct from identity politics, satire and organised resistance; it rather evokes pleasure and shared experience in such a way that they remain unresolved, suspended, like that middle finger. It resonates with, but stops short of, the politics of vulnerability. We propose that an early photo-media series by Australian Indigenous artist Tracey Moffatt, Scarred for Life (1994, 1999: Figures 2.1–2.4), is a particularly important work in this regard, although its significance has yet to be fully recognised. Its loose colloquialism opened up “fresh articulations” for a transcultural and feminist theorisation of personalpolitical experience. The very notion of an Old Mistress – or a Mistress-Piece – as Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock so eloquently demonstrated (Parker and Pollock 1981), foregrounds the uneven playing field of art history and offers an opportunity not just to consciously “add to the canon” but to fundamentally question how value is ascribed in the discipline and beyond. While Moffatt is already “iconic” in Australian art, and Scarred for Life deemed locally to be one of her signature series, we argue that, at the same time, the work and the sensibility of the artist undermine the assumptions around iconicity and conventions of value (Pogliano 2015, 5).1 The works mobilise

Tracey Moffatt’s Scarred for Life (1994) 39

Figure 2.1  Tracey Moffatt, Job Hunt, 1976, from Scarred for Life, 1994, offset lithograph, 80 × 60 cm, Edition of 50 + AP 9. Source:  Courtesy of the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney.

what we might call an iconic iconoclasm, a “middle fingers up” gesture to hierarchical, art historical thinking that is fated to continually gauge and discriminate, compelled to distinguish what is best from the rest, rather than allow itself to be open to the integral qualities of a thing (Bell 2002). 2 The gesture also extends to those who would lionise the work primarily for any meaning that emerges from the (Aboriginal) identity of the artist. We propose that at times Moffatt’s work has suffered from being considered among the most significant examples of a particular kind of Indigenous identity politics that emerged in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and hence that her better known series are those selected for international exhibition and critical treatment within this analytical framework. Scarred for Life cannot be so easily co-opted. The series enacts a kind of refusal to engage with convention and expectation, analogous to the adolescent sullenness of many of its subjects and thereby keeps its libidinal energy in reserve. In this refusal or stubbornness, we argue, lies its power and continuing currency.

40  Jacqueline Millner and Catriona Moore

Figure 2.2  Tracey Moffatt, Useless, 1974, from Scarred for Life, 1994, offset lithograph, 80 × 60 cm, Edition of 50 + AP 9. Source:  Courtesy of the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney.

Hence, in this chapter, we undertake a feminist wrangle with iconicity in several ways: we take issue with the very practice of conferring icon status; we interrogate an “iconic” artwork which has yet to have its feminist resonances fully amplified and we open up an iconic Indigenous artist for new readings. We hope by proposing new interpretations of this work, and arguing for its “iconic iconoclastic” status, we can

Tracey Moffatt’s Scarred for Life (1994) 41

Figure 2.3  Tracey Moffatt, Doll Birth, 1972, from Scarred for Life, 1994, offset lithograph, 80 × 60 cm, Edition of 50 + AP 9. Source:  Courtesy of the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney.

contribute to what Griselda Pollock calls for in feminist art history: not only histories of women artists, but a “transformation” by the “force of feminism as intervention and effect” (Pollock 2018, 1). As Pollock proposes, to write the history of feminism “without understanding that feminism itself seeks to change how we understand history, memory, subjectivity, is to efface the effect of feminism from the writing of its own history” (Pollock 2016, 39).

The Series Moffatt is an artist of international renown: her recent body of work My Horizon, for example, was featured in the Australian pavilion at the 2017 Venice Biennale, and she has had solo exhibitions in the United States and participated in important group

42  Jacqueline Millner and Catriona Moore

Figure 2.4  Tracey Moffatt, Heart Attack, 1970, from Scarred for Life, 1994, offset lithograph. 80 × 60 cm, Edition of 50 + AP 9. Source:  Courtesy of the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney.

shows and contemporary art compilations since the 1990s. But our focus on Scarred for Life is spurred in part by the suspicion that the interpretation of her work is in need of broadening and updating to honour its complexity and to rescue it from the stock-in-trade terms of postcolonial identity politics applied to Moffatt’s breakout series Something More and her short film Night Cries, both from 1989. And, while some of her work has been contextualised and discussed in explicitly feminist ways – for example, her video mash ups Lip (1999) and Love (2003) were included in the legendary femobusters of 2007, and her video Heaven (1997) is an obvious candidate with its cheeky female voyeur – Scarred for Life’s feminist resonances have not been subject to dedicated analysis. The figure of Moffatt, and the position she occupies among a handful of Australian contemporary artists with world renown, render her work susceptible to the ossification that often accompanies iconicity.

Tracey Moffatt’s Scarred for Life (1994) 43 Scarred for Life is a series of captioned photolithographs featuring kids or teens, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, in staged suburban tableaux. The images are rendered in muted colours on cream paper to resemble scaled up pages from the golden years of Life magazine, the “iconic” documentary photography publication that has been a reference for Moffatt since childhood. The series’ 1994 iteration was comprised of nine photolithographs, to which Moffatt added a further ten in 1999. Each image captures the banal humiliations, snipes and jibes of daily life, the trauma – from verbal to physical abuse and neglect – inflicted by parents, older siblings or friends, those very agents of the patriarchal psycho-symbolic orders against which feminism revolted. Moffatt was inspired by the true stories confided in her by friends recalling those charged domestic moments growing up, that only reveal themselves as significant in retrospect: the put-downs, the mocking nicknames, the incomprehensible surge of shame when what had privately (and innocently) been enjoyed is suddenly yanked into public view and subjected to normative judgement. Moffatt aimed to render these moments as they had been first experienced without the deferred traumatic associations, in other words, as “something straight forward and snapshot-ish”: “it had to feel ordinary, everyday, because that’s how incidents happen in our lives” (Moffatt 2001). The deadpan “human-interest” photo-journalism jars with the deeply intimate and painful subject matter, but at the same time drives home that cruelty is particularly effective when normalised in seemingly inconsequential remarks and interactions. Moffatt made the series while artist in residence at the University of Wollongong, when that town, on the coast south of Sydney, was synonymous with recession-hit, working-class suburbia. While the hapless subjects of Scarred for Life hail from all walks of life, the series’ suburban idiom is distinctively working-class Australian and multicultural, offering a disarming regional perspective on personal experience that underscores Moffatt’s sophisticated understanding of media histories and the white popular culture with which she works. The series broaches subject(ivat)ion with a light but sure touch, with neither sentimentality nor anger. It also evokes the informality and remembered events (dated 1956–1977) of the family photo album – a field opened for aesthetic investigation within “second wave” feminist and later Indigenous art – and probes the ambiguity of our personal-political mini-narratives. Scarred for Life follows the fragmented nature of family memories and, as implied in the title, “the way in which injuries from our childhood years remain with us throughout our adult lives” (Mann n.d.).

Against Indigenous Iconicity Moffatt emerged as an artist at a febrile time for Australian Indigenous politics, in the wake of the hotly contested 1988 Bicentennial of European colonisation and amid the campaigns that would result in official acknowledgement of the violent dispossession of Aboriginal peoples. These included the High Court of Australia’s recognition of native title in the Mabo decision of 1992, 3 Labor Prime Minister Paul Keating’s famous “Redfern speech” of the same year (Keating, 1992) and the run up to the 1997 Stolen Generations report.4 Paradoxically, this period saw a crisis in the critical discourse around Indigenous art. Emerging Indigenous writers and curators proffered artistic biographies and descriptive texts referencing (self-evident) historical and political value rather than offering

44  Jacqueline Millner and Catriona Moore evaluative or aesthetic criticism, while both Indigenous and left-leaning non-Indigenous critics felt uneasy using Western aesthetic terms such as beauty, image and form to analyse Indigenous artwork. Meantime, the burgeoning Indigenous art market had no such qualms, using those very same Eurocentric formalist terms to enthusiastically promote Aboriginal art as a “newly discovered” Antipodean Impressionism or abstraction. Artists were bemused at this latest neo-colonial fantasy, and progressive critics were appalled. In 2002, Murri artist Richard Bell framed this crazy impasse with sledge-hammer satire in his Scientia E Metaphysica (Bell’s Theorem) which asserted that “Aboriginal Art” was a “white thing”, that a white industry controls all aspects of Aboriginal art, even shaping its production through demand for particular types of work: Aboriginal Art is bought, sold and promoted from within the system, that is, Western Art consigns it to “Pigeon-holing” within that system. Why can’t an Art movement arise and be separate from but equal to Western Art – within its own aesthetic, its own voices, its own infrastructure, etc? (Bell 2002) As the market still traded on lingering romantic discourses of cultural authenticity, there was initial resistance to works attesting a “hybrid” racial and cultural identity. Yet from her earliest work, Moffatt’s style owed nothing to the primitivist discourses of authenticity that still dominated the museum and the market. She has also repeatedly noted that she seeks to avoid expected “Aboriginal” conventions of expressive realism or documentary: for example, her work does not set out to cleave the cracks in mainstream visions of Australia by “representing” the repressed or granting particular “voice” to the other. Moffatt has consistently deflected any easy affirmation of identity politics and, while dealing with Indigenous issues and using Indigenous subjects, she avoids being categorised as an “Aboriginal artist”, preferring to claim a certain universality in her concerns (Rutherford 1989). Two quotes from an early interview permeate the more popular positioning of her work: “My work may feature brown faces but it could be anybody’s story” and “Yes, I am Aboriginal but I have the right to be avant-garde like any white artist” (Murray 1990). Moffatt might embody Bell’s assertion that “[m]any Urban artists have rejected the ethno-classification of Aboriginal Art to the extent they don’t participate in Aboriginal shows. They see themselves as artists – not as Aboriginal artists” (Bell 2002). Yet, like that of many other Indigenous artists, her work has been seen to express a hybrid subjectivity and an a priori decolonising politics, often within a circular and reductive identity politics. We would argue that Moffatt’s hybrid postcoloniality and critical non-essentialism is a starting point, rather than an end in itself (Butler and Thomas 2001, 23). Her work suggests a more nuanced aesthetics of reconciliation that pictures difference as a process of materialisation and allusion. She emphasises aesthetics as an embodied and affective ethics. And perhaps more so than in other series that are more clearly situated in specific genealogies of national identity – such as Something More, Up in the Sky, Laudanum and Plantation – Scarred for Life opened up fresh artistic options for cross-cultural reconciliation in Australia at a time when they were sorely needed – a need that remains all too evident today, and hence the enduring currency of the work.

Tracey Moffatt’s Scarred for Life (1994) 45

Aesthetics and Feminist Refusal In Scarred for Life, Moffatt locates and celebrates cultural specificity, but her inter-textual social creations also articulate ever-present social entanglement and relatedness: not consigned to the task of representing otherness or asserting identity, these creations are able to escape more predictable or reductive critical-postcolonial readings. Instead of being shuttled through, questions of self, identity and history are opened up to be felt. In that affective jolt where “injustice … is ‘felt’ before it is ‘known’” (Butler and Thomas 2001, 31), the images slip their identity constraints. Moffatt had begun developing this loose, affect-laden figures in her earlier series Beauties (in wine, in cream) from 1994, where Australian art critics Rex Butler and Morgan Thomas discerned “a type of looseness, nonchalance, ease, about the figure … that implies a loosening or suspension of the strictures of identity and identity politics” (Butler and Thomas 2001, 25). Scarred for Life’s brutal encounters with some agent of social authority resonate widely: this is the stuff that stays close. And this is the stuff that manifests the always tenuous, but nonetheless coercive, power of patriarchal authority. In Scarred for Life, feminist critique operates in a number of ways. In the traumatic narratives of each tableau, patriarchy and its toxic effects – including its inextricable link to racism – are acknowledged as near universal personal experience, and as the accepted status quo. Moffatt’s appropriation of the style conventions of Life (published weekly until 1972) hammers home the “normality” of such trauma. It also adds to what Butler and Thomas call “anachronistic temporality” and “visual anaesthesia”: “The photographs … appear to exhibit two different and conflicting effects: both the anaesthesia that is the initial effect of the shock or trauma and the frozen aesthetic imprint that is its ‘report’” (Butler and Thomas 2001, 31). However, Scarred for Life does not stop there, for each tableau also affirms the subject’s quiet, internal revolt against gendered and racial identities. In the artist, the afflicted subject – the girl nicknamed “useless” by her father (Fig. 2.2), the boy deemed unemployable by his mother (Fig. 2.1), the boys denied their playful explorations of gender (Fig. 2.3) – has a compassionate confidante and co-conspirator. Through humour and the solidarity of shared experience, Moffatt offers them, and by affective transmission, us the viewers, a safe space to reveal the shame of their abuse. That revelation is not a cry of outrage, nor a call for justice, but a historical marker that each subject retains the power of refusal, and that together that refusal constitutes a deep reserve of resilience and a collective keeping account of the abuse of power. This is not unlike the survival strategies of Frances Phoenix and Marie McMahon back in 1979: a surreptitious, collaborative refusal, middle fingers up behind the abuser’s back. It also recalls British-Australian cultural theorist Sarah Ahmed’s suggestion that unhappiness might sometimes work as “a form of political action: the act of saying no … affirms something, right from the beginning” (Ahmed 2010, 207). To actively embody the injustices of patriarchal neo-liberalism, rather than strive for the “rights” of the normative subject and the mythical happiness this promises, may indeed be a powerful form of resistance. In Moffatt’s series, the unhappy queer, the melancholy migrant or angry black woman of Ahmed’s writing find parallels in the survivors of everyday childhood traumas. To use Pollock’s frames of feminist art historical analysis (via Aby Warburg), what we see in Scarred for Life is precisely the deployment of affect – of shame and humour – to

46  Jacqueline Millner and Catriona Moore loosen the strictures of subjectivity and open out to different virtualities. These images “transmit a memory trace of once-experienced intensity” (Pollock 2018, 5), the pain of shame mingled with pleasure: the joy unleashed by insubordination and “the Rabelaisian inversion of the order of things” (Pollock 2018, 10), the assertion of a measure of autonomy and the shared undertaking to keep count, to not forget. The transmission of singular affective states creates certain collective political conditions and spaces for action: in particular, the stubborn refusal of “the hierarchies of both the historical-political-cultural and the psycho-symbolic orders” is the very definition of feminist activism (Pollock 2016, 35).5 As British feminist theorist Clare Hemmings argues, affect is what sustains feminism and gives it life: “politics can be characterised as that which moves us, rather than that which confirms us in what we already know” (Hemmings 2012, 151).

Vulnerability and Self-Fragilisation The sensibility of Scarred for Life also resonates with the politics of vulnerability as articulated, among others, by Judith Butler (2016); and with artist and philosopher Bracha Ettinger’s notion of self-fragilisation. Pollock draws on both of these in her analysis of certain artists who put their body on the line, including Sonya Khurana who asserts that failure and dereliction, that “divesting” onself of power can be “ultimately empowering” (Pollock 2018, 7).6 According to Pollock, vulnerability for Butler is “a deeply political gesture in its refusal of conformity” (Pollock 2018, 7). Butler urges us to rethink the conventional opposition between vulnerability and resistance, to consider how vulnerability can be “a potentially effective … force in political mobilisations” (Butler 2016, 14). One way this might occur is through the literal demonstration of what happens to bodies without support, which amounts to holding to account systems responsible for providing that “infrastructure” but also to a powerful manifestation of solidarity in sharing that precarity: There is plural and performative bodily resistance at work that shows how bodies are being acted on by social and economic policies that are decimating livelihoods. But these bodies, in showing this precarity, are also resisting these very powers; they enact a form of resistance that presupposes vulnerability of a specific kind, and opposes precarity. (Butler 2016, 15) There is power in acknowledging that bodies are not autonomous but exist in relation, and in recognising how in that interdependence and shared vulnerability (Butler 2016, 16) we can change how those relations are organised and mediated. Scarred for Life interpolates us in such a way that jolts us into this recognition: that identity is not self-forged but dependent on social relations, that we are all subject to the violence of (familiar) agents of normativity, but in that common susceptibility, we can also manoeuvre a swerve or divergence from that norm, a capacity we can keep in store. Butler specifically notes that “One clear dimension of our vulnerability has to do with our exposure to name-calling and discursive categories in infancy and childhood – indeed, throughout the course of life” (Butler 2016, 16). It is this very process that Scarred for Life explores. In several of the narratives

Tracey Moffatt’s Scarred for Life (1994) 47 Moffatt constructs in her combination of text and image, the focus is the authority-figure’s response to the subject’s expression of enjoyment in non-normative gender behaviour: a little boy is banned from playing with the boy next door “ever again” after “his mother caught him giving birth to a doll” (Fig. 2.3); the father of a boy “playing Dorothy in the school’s production of The Wizard of Oz” gets “angry at him for getting dressed too early”. In these images, the boys’ bodies capture that exquisite moment between the pleasure of gender play and the externally imposed shame for its enjoyment – being “caught”. In another tableau, an older teenager forces his brother to look in the mirror, denying him both a normative pathway to masculinity through rugged looks, and innocent enjoyment of his body, by declaring “you’ll have to survive on charm alone”. We are all affected by the agents of “the historical-political-cultural and the psycho-symbolic orders”, but Butler suggests that in “this very domain of susceptibility, this condition of being affected, is also where something queer can happen, where the norm is refused or revised, or where new formulations of gender begin” (Butler 2016, 18). That is, vulnerability can become resistance. By being called a name, we are “assigned a gender”, but swerves and divergences from expectation are possible: this is the process of queering (Butler 2016, 17). And this is the process Scarred for Life opens up for us, as these sullen and unhappy subjects gather their hurt in gestures of stubborn refusal, building up potential libidinal energy that may later be released in a swerve and switch. This swerve and switch, this refusal of normativity, in part operates through black humour, and the comic suspense created by the temporal lag between image and caption in Moffatt’s photolithographs. A particularly good example is Heart Attack. Here, the depiction of a naked man in a suburban bedroom assaulting a fully dressed child is initially shocking, but then we read that the narrator had glimpsed “her father belting the girl from down the street”, and that (this delivered with deadpan, grim relish), “That day he died of a heart attack” (Fig. 2.4). These temporal jolts work like the timing of the stand-up gag. It is this “wait …. Ha!” affective lurch that dislodges the unthinking or overdetermined project of representing difference, not unlike the suspension moment between the tease and the wink in feminist burlesque (Millner and Moore 2015),7 and common to the laconic, affective timing of Indigenous humour more generally. As Pearl Duncan elaborates, “Indigenous humour provides a realm of safety and release. The existence of humour enables participants to enter a domain in which features suppressed with difficulty under normal circumstances are allowed free rein” (Duncan 2014, 58). Along with Butler’s theorisation of vulnerability, we can also understand how Scarred for Life operates ethically and politically by reading it through Ettinger’s connection of fragilisation and resistance (Ettinger 2009), whereby fragility nurtures an ethical capacity for trans-subjectivity and hence political action. Ettinger proposes that fascinance – a term she coined to denote a transformational and creative gaze to counter Lacan’s dominating alternative (fascinum) – “is bound to primary compassion and awe” and “calls for re-spect and con-templation”. She continues, When fascinance reawakens by art, self-fragilization with-in the process sublimates com-passion itself into a special kind of ethical human contract. There is a contract of alliance between I(s) and non-I(s) that precedes the social and the political but participates in their fields to transform them. (Ettinger 2009, 6)

48  Jacqueline Millner and Catriona Moore Ettinger’s theories are of particular pertinence given her emphasis on the capacity of art and the aesthetic encounter to transform ethics, and the distinction she makes between this encounter and the “representation” of difference: image and form can “transgress” representation when they resonate with “remnants of subjectivity-asencounter” (Ettinger 2009, 6). As we have argued, Moffatt’s images do not “represent” difference, nor do they assert “identity”. Rather, they foreground intersubjectivity and the shared vulnerability of human subjects. In Scarred for Life, Moffatt invites the viewer to connect to the power of their own fragility by figuring subjects whose self-fragilisation becomes a form of defiance and also by mobilising her own fragility as a subject. The hapless powerlessness of childhood shadows many of Moffatt’s media interviews; she often recounts her long-standing passion for dress-ups, which began early while performing in plays at church camp on the Queensland Gold Coast and continued late into her teens. She would snap photos of neighbourhood kids or her own family in costume – as rock stars, in nativity scenes – in pursuit of her own “escape” from the dullness of suburban life. As a minor riff on Scarred for Life, for example, Backyard (2004) replayed Moffatt’s own backyard photo memories, a series she casually describes as some work that I made when I was 13 years old. I used to force my brothers and sisters and my neighbours to dress up for me, and I’d create these little tableaux scenes in the background, in the backyard. I recently reprinted them and presented them as contemporary art. Someone said that was early evidence of my bossiness. I forced my young cousin into pantyhose. I call it Planet of the Apes. It was 1974 and it was big. (Moffatt 2001) Moffatt recalls she was aware at the time that she was “too old” to still be dressing up: “That’s the shame, that’s why I got teased by family and neighbours and kids at school. Very nasty.…. (I’m still) that teenage boy drawing Jimi Hendrix in art class in high school” (Selinger-Morris 2005). Yet she continued, despite or perhaps because of this humiliation, a determination which ultimately signalled her “swerve”. Emblematic of this self-fragilisation as resistance, Moffatt’s Scarred for Life transforms shame into pride, echoing Ettinger’s insights about the ability of “fascinance” to assist “the passage to respect from each shaming”, which allows the creation of a new future from the past (Ettinger 2009, 3). Pollock sums up that for Ettinger, self-fragilization is a proto-ethical gesture. It starts at the level of the aesthetic, and is pre-ethical and pre-political. The aesthetic process, in Ettinger’s writing and practice, prepares us for an ethical relationship (intersubjectivity and response-ability) that will lead to political subjectivity and action. It is what sensitizes us for both an ethical and a political relation, not to the other but to one another; the phrasing itself is a crucial reconfiguration of the phallic model of self/other. (Pollock 2018, 10) In undertaking this move, Scarred for Life stands its ground as an iconoclastic icon of feminist art.

Tracey Moffatt’s Scarred for Life (1994) 49

Conclusion We have argued that Moffatt’s “micro-power politics” open up new and important possibilities for considering the ethical force of feminist aesthetics that move beyond straightforward representational politics or iconic affirmations of women’s culture – and that this iconic iconoclastic photographic work is in need of a current feminist re-reading that understands its power and complexity, in light of developments in feminist theories and politics since it was first made. We are not, however, proposing Moffatt’s agile aesthetics as a counterpoint or in opposition to the artistic and conceptual fixity of a work like The Dinner Party – like others, we acknowledge how that particularly iconic mistress-work has worked hard to earn its keep at the Brooklyn Museum, and its precarious niche in the Western matriculation art history syllabus. We would not be so churlish to doubt the political value of equal opportunity feminism gaining a seat at the metropolitan art dining table, especially given the current political climate. In proposing Tracey Moffatt’s Scarred for Life to be also considered a “MistressPiece”, we note that in our (failed neo-liberal, populist) political climate we also need to develop the sharper analytic purchase and “micro” ethical value of more basic, everyday impulses of stubborn resistance. We have argued that Scarred for Life evokes a nondoctrinaire, affective energy that we consider, following Pollock, Butler and Ettinger, to be “proto-ethical”. Moffatt does not represent so much as exercise what Australian feminist philosopher Elizabeth Grosz calls a “politics of imperceptibility, leaving its traces and effects everywhere but never being able to be identified with a person, group or organization” (Grosz 2005, 194). Such a framework, Grosz suggests, might allow feminists to develop a “politics of acts, not identities” (Grosz 2005, 189). We have investigated such small acts through Moffatt’s Scarred for Life series precisely for their refusal to cohere in a programmatic politics of representation or feminist aesthetic iconicity. Why do we propose this deliberate aesthetic and ethical informality as a MistressPiece (or “a piece of work”, as in “she’s a real piece of work”, to borrow the colloquial and suburban side-lining phrase for being a real bitch, a pain in the arse)? We propose this series precisely in order to think beyond feminist representational and identity politics, to speculate on what Grosz’s “politics of acts” might look like – in Moffatt’s case, as faux-muted moments of trauma, shame and mutinous co-conspiracy. We have noted how these moments or acts are relayed through a sullen and humorous recall that is born and bred in working-class or regional suburban Australia, shedding new light on more avant-garde or Kristevian visions of an abject, disruptive or semiotic femininity. Moffatt identifies acts of affective power and resilience that fall short of these figures of academic romanticism, and yet carry within them the potential for the more active recognition of ethical and political relation. From this perspective, we would propose the importance of Scarred for Life for suggesting that feminist theory might productively explore affects less for how they dominate, regulate or constrain individual subjects and more for the possibilities they offer for thinking (and feeling) beyond what is already known and assumed.

Acknowledgements We are very grateful to the artist Tracey Moffatt and her gallerist Roslyn Oxley9 in Sydney, Australia, who provided the images reproduced here: Tracey, your work is simply inspirational! We are also indebted to La Trobe University for support to

50  Jacqueline Millner and Catriona Moore travel to Johannesburg to participate in the Mistress-Pieces conference. Finally, we would like to thank Professor Brenda Schmahmann for her kind invitation, legendary hospitality and stimulating programme, and for her ongoing contribution to feminist scholarship and practice.

Notes 1 As Andrea Pogliano, citing Hariman and Lucaites (2007), summarises: “according to the existing literature, the meaning and power of the icon lies in its performative role, in its existence as co-agent in a variety of social performances”. In terms of one measure of iconicity, iconic significance can be assessed according to the following criteria: a) social-political placement (in terms of collective memory and image/event association), b) emotive impact, defined as identification and appropriation, c) initial use and re-cycling of the image (i.e. the history of its circulation). 2 The real problem arises out of the very nature of Western Art. Westerners need to sort and categorise everything in order to make sense of the world. That they do so in an ethnocentric manner is academic. The world of music is not dominated by Western Classical music – different styles stand alongside each other with extensive cross-fertilisation from different cultures. Not so in visual art. 3 The Mabo decision on native title rejected the doctrine of terra nullius which had asserted that no one owned the land of Australia when the first European settlers arrived. 4 Bringing them Home (1997) was the final report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families conducted by the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (the Australian Human Rights Commission), which documented the shocking historical policies of forced removal, as well as the traumatic ongoing impacts, based on the personal testimony of over five hundred Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people across Australia. 5 “It was against the hierarchies of both the historical-political-cultural and the psycho-symbolic orders that women have revolted. That revolt is called feminism”. 6 Unpublished manuscript Sonia Khurana shared with the author, cited in Pollock (2018). 7 For a fully argued case for the political purchase of feminist burlesque, see Millner and Moore (2015).

References Ahmed, Sara. 2010. The Promise of Happiness. London: Duke University Press. Bell, Richard. 2002. “Bell’s Theorem.” www.kooriweb.org/foley/great/art/bell.html Butler, Judith. 2016. “Rethinking Vulnerability and Resistance”. In Vulnerability in Resistance, edited by Judith Butler, Zeynep Gambetti and Leticia Sabsay, 165–175. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Butler, Rex and Thomas, Morgan. 2001. “Tracey Moffatt: From Something More… To Something Singular”. Eyeline, no. 45 (Autumn/Winter): 23–31. Duncan, Pearl. 2014. “The Role of Aboriginal Humour in Cultural Survival and Resistance”. PhD diss., University of Queensland. Ettinger, Bracha. 2009. “Fragilization and Resistance”. Studies in the Maternal 1, no. 2: 1–31. Grosz, Elizabeth. 2005. Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Hemmings, Claire. 2012. “Affective Solidarity: Feminist Reflexivity and Political Transformation”. Feminist Theory 13, no. 2: 147–161. Keating, Paul. 1992. “Paul Keating’s Redfern Speech. December 10, 1992.” ANTaR.https:// antar.org.au/sites/default/files/paul_keating_speech_transcript.pdf Mann, Ted. n.d. “Tracey Moffatt, Birth Certificate, 1962.” Accessed February 28, 2020. Guggenheim Collection Online. www.guggenheim.org/artwork/13131.

Tracey Moffatt’s Scarred for Life (1994) 51 Millner, Jacqueline and Moore, Catriona. 2015. “Performing Yourself Badly: Neo-burlesque and Contemporary Feminist Performance Art”. The Australia and New Zealand Journal of Art 15, no. 1: 20–36. Moffatt, Tracey. 2001. “Australian Artist Tracey Moffatt”. Interview by Bruce James. Arts Today, ABC, January 9, 2001. Transcript of July 31, 2000 broadcast. www.abc.net.au/rn/ legacy/programs/atoday/stories/s229128.htm. Murray, Scott. 1990. “Tracey Moffatt”. Cinema Papers, no. 79: 19–22. Parker, Rozsika and Pollock, Griselda. 1981. Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Pogliano, Andrea. 2015. “Iconic Photographs in the Newsroom”. Sociologica, no. 1: 1–49. Pollock, Griselda. 2016. “Is Feminism a Trauma, a Bad Memory or a Virtual Future?” Differences 27, no. 2: 27–61. Pollock, Griselda. 2018. “Action, Activism, and Art and/as Thought: A Dialogue with the Artworking of Sonia Khurana and Sutapa Biswas and the Political Theory of Hannah Arendt”. e-flux Journal, no. 2 (June). Hariman, Robert and Lucaites, John Louis. 2007. No Caption Needed: Iconic photographs, public culture and liberal democracy, University of Chicago Press. Rutherford, Ann. 1989. “Tracey Moffatt: Changing the Images: Interview with Ann Rutherford”. In Aboriginal Culture Today, edited by Ann Rutherford, 146–157. NSW: Dangaroo Press. Selinger-Morris, Samantha. 2005. “The Secret Lives of Tracey Moffatt.” Sydney Morning Herald, July 30, 2005. www.smh.com.au/entertainment/art-and-design/the-secret-lives-oftracey-moffatt-20050730-gdls0e.html.

3

Bodies, Borders and Law Tanja Ostojić’s Looking for a Husband with EU Passport (2000–2005) Hilary Robinson

Two of the artworks that would be on many lists of major feminist works of art share nothing in common (materials, subject matter, theoretical context and the experience of viewing them) apart from the fact that they took many years to complete and were first exhibited as complete and finished works in 1979. Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party (1974–1979) and Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document (1973–1979) address, respectively, key women in (predominantly Western) history, and the psychoanalytic structure of the relationship between mother and infant. In this chapter, I will address a third work, also distinct in every way from these two, other than that it took five years to complete, same as The Dinner Party and a year less than PostPartum Document. It is a work I regard as being of equal significance in its engagement with a fundamental issue for feminist politics. Tanja Ostojić’s Looking for a Husband with EU Passport (2000–2005) addresses the legal provision of the right to remain in a national jurisdiction through marriage, with focus on the right for a woman’s body to be in a particular legally defined place due to her legal relationship with a man who has particular rights of abode there. Specifically, Looking for a Husband with EU Passport addresses the European Union (EU) Schengen laws which allow free movement across most borders in the EU and certain non-EU countries like Iceland and Switzerland, but forbids free movement across the borders of Schengen countries with some non-Schengen EU countries such as Romania, Bulgaria, pre-Brexit UK and other non-EU countries, including all other Eastern European countries and post-Brexit UK. Two conditions allow for movement across the EU border. Most EU countries grant a one-year visa for people travelling for employment; for women in particular, such dependency upon a named employer creates vulnerability to various forms of abuse. Marriage is the other condition (Lutz, 1997). How can feminist thinking begin to position such artworks within the canon? Griselda Pollock argues that the canon is presented by Art History as a “a discursive formation” (Pollock, 1999, 9) informed by sexual politics.1 Pollock identifies three feminist positions in relation to the canon. One understands the canon “as a structure of exclusion” that may admit a few “magnificent exceptions” at a tokenistic, sub-genre level (Pollock, 1999, 23). Feminists holding this position aim to fill gaps in historical knowledge and evaluations: works by, and lives of, women artists are retrieved and written about. The second position understands the canon as “a structure of subordination and domination” emerging from “contradictory structures of power – race, gender, class and sexuality” (Pollock, 1999, 24). Thus, practices undertaken mainly by women (e.g. textiles, ceramics) are devalued by Art History and require strategies of re-valorisation. The third position – with which Pollock identifies – understands

Tanja Ostojić’s Looking for a Husband with EU Passport (2000–05) 53 the canon “as a discursive strategy in the production and reproduction of sexual difference and its complex configurations with gender and related modes of power”. Thus, the discipline of Art History is understood as a practice of discourses, informed by and informing wider discourses, allowing us to see the canon as “an enunciation of western masculinity” (Pollock, 1999, 26). Following from Pollock’s identification of three feminist methodologies of engaging with historical art objects, we can also identify three feminist practices of making art that follow similar structures. There are artists who knowingly engage with dominant art forms, like painting; artists who engage with art forms designated as feminine, like textiles and those who question the established discourses of art production, as in much photo-text and other contemporary anti-modernist work. This third position is more complex to define however: regarding the production of art as entry into a set of discourses which can all be potentially dismantled or re-directed can be a strategy across all media. Artists such as Sonia Boyce, Lubaina Himid, Faith Ringgold, Jenny Saville, Kara Walker and, I argue in this chapter, Tanja Ostojić have effectively taken the discussion into the core of the hegemonic modes of production of painting, drawing and sculpture; marginalised practices such as quilting and paper-cutting and non-traditional or new media such as video and digital technology. To demonstrate how Ostojić disrupts the discourses of “the canon” while producing a major work of art, I will first outline and analyse the phases, events and contexts of Looking for a Husband with EU Passport and then move on to contrast that with two other durational artworks. Finally, I will make the case for why this allows Looking for a Husband with EU Passport to be termed a Mistress-Piece.

The Context and Processes of Looking for a Husband with EU Passport In August 2000, Ostojić began Looking for a Husband with EU Passport. 2 Ostojić was born in 1972 in the part of the territory then called the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, which is presently called Serbia (Ostojić now questions “national identity” having been first identified by others as Serbian in 1998–1999 [McLaughlin, 2016, 31–32]). Some background information about the situation in this territory in the years leading up to her making Looking for a Husband with EU Passport is necessary for the work’s fuller implications to be understood. The former Yugoslavia comprises a geographic area that is a little larger than the United Kingdom and a little smaller than Italy. The so-called Yugoslav wars were a series of vicious wars, religious and ethnic conflicts and uprisings between 1991 and 2000. These led to the break-up of the former Yugoslavia first into Croatia, Slovenia, The Republic of Macedonia (which since 2019 has been called The Republic of Northern Macedonia), Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia and Montenegro, Serbia (from 2006), Montenegro (from 2006) and Kosovo (from 2008). In 2000, the territory now known as Serbia but which was then part of Serbia and Montenegro began informal negotiations to enter the EU. In 2003, the EU officially declared that these states in South Eastern Europe (the “Balkan states”) could potentially become members of the EU. Formal negotiations, begun in 2005, were suspended in 2006 due to Serbia’s lack of plans to arrest the Bosnian Serb General Ratko Mladić for war crimes, and its non-co-operation with the International Criminal Tribunal. Negotiations began again in 2007, though Mladić was not arrested until 2011 (he was sentenced to life imprisonment in 2017).

54  Hilary Robinson Radovan Karadžić (Mladić’s political master) was arrested in 2008, and in 2016 found guilty of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide; a 40-year sentence was in 2019 increased to life imprisonment. Kosovo became independent from Serbia in 2008. The EU gave permission for Serbia to attain candidate status in 2009, which it did in 2012. It has still not (at the time of writing, 2020) joined the EU. Looking for a Husband with EU Passport started in the year of Serbia’s first informal negotiations to enter the EU, and after nine years of war and about 140,000 deaths. In the months before starting Looking for a Husband with EU Passport, Ostojić had made two works which pre-figure and add legibility to some of the issues raised in the major work. These formed the first two of a series she titled the Crossing Borders Series, which engaged with the issues of diverse border crossing strategies that migrants have used for decades in order to get to the territory where they believe they can find prosperity for themselves and their loved ones; among them: Schengen border, methods of control, praxis of checking “the warmth of bedsheets” if marriage is between EU and non-EU partners, marriage blanche, etc. (Ostojić in Gržinić and Ostojić, 2009, 33) In June 2000, Illegal Border Crossing comprised two crossings of the Slovenian/ Austrian border – i.e. into the EU, and out again – over a three-day period, documented with a few video stills. Ostojić, based at the time in Slovenia, had been denied a visa to attend an artists’ workshop in Austria; this action was her response in order to attend the workshop: I directly familiarized myself with border-crossing strategies that migrants have been using for decades. I trespassed across the Slovenian-Austrian border, which at that time was the border of the European Union, and where eight or nine “illegalized beings” were captured per day. (in Mignolo and Ostojić, 2013) She described it as risky for the person who drove her, and exciting for her but “still less stressful” than the legal process of applying and being granted a visa a few weeks previously for an exhibition also in Austria: a statement which indicates the apparent arbitrariness of being granted or refused a visa to enter the EU (Gržinić and Ostojić, 2009, 34; Ostojić, 2012, 352). The second Crossing Borders project was Waiting for a Visa, August 2000. This was a six-hour performance in front of the Austrian Embassy in Belgrade (the capital of Serbia) where she queued, required papers in hand, in line with the other petitioners, to no effect. I lined up from 6.00 am to noon, in the regular queue with hundreds of other people, with more than twenty pages of documents and guarantee letters, in order to apply for a visa. At noon, the embassy closed, so I shared the fate of failure with more than a hundred others who were “too late”. (Gržinić and Ostojić, 2009, 38) The work was documented in photographs: an illegal act, as photographing the people queueing outside the Austrian embassies in Serbia in the hope of leaving the

Tanja Ostojić’s Looking for a Husband with EU Passport (2000–05) 55 country (family, tourist, student visas, etc.) had been forbidden by Austria – presumably to deter anti-immigration discourses. Both of these works by Ostojić deliberately broke laws concerning the rights of bodies to move, and in particular, laws addressing the relationship between the “former East” on one hand, and the “former West” in its manifestation as the EU on the other. Two further pieces in the Crossing Borders Series were made while Looking for a Husband with EU Passport was underway. Wait Behind the Line (2004) was set up at the “border” for a gallery space in the exhibition Privatizations: Contemporary Art from Eastern Europe (16 May–26 June 2004, KW Contemporary Art, Berlin). People who wanted to enter the space were asked to identify themselves with fingerprints and to elect an identity from a restricted set which then determined a colour code to the fingerprints. The final work in the Border Crossings series was Untitled: After Courbet (L’Origine du Monde, 46 × 55 cm) (2004). Ostojić produced a photograph of herself in the position of the painting by Courbet named in the work’s (non)title. Rather than being naked (as is the model in the original painting), she is wearing a pair of blue underpants with the circle of 12 gold five-pointed stars – the colours and symbol of the EU flag. Even for those who knew nothing of Courbet and his support for the Paris Commune, or nothing of the painting that is clearly referenced in the work, 3 the critique of the sexual politics at the heart of EU identity is clear. It was published first as an artist’s double-page in the Canadian art journal Esse n.52, 2004; then as an artwork in Double Check: Reframing Space in Photography (Gallery for Contemporary Art in Celje, Slovenia, 2005). It is best known in its iteration as a billboard project in Vienna, Austria, 27 December 2005–30 January 2006, as part of the exhibition euroPART; this in turn was part of a celebration of the 60th anniversary of the Austrian Republic, the 10th anniversary of its EU membership and its assumption of the EU presidency on 1 January 2006. Following an outcry from politicians and a furore whipped up in the press, the rotating billboard with Ostojić’s artworks was removed (so too was another billboard by Carlos Aires showing three people, wearing masks of George Bush, Jacques Chirac and Queen Elizabeth, having sex). It was then displayed as a large poster on the façade of Forum Stadtpark, Graz. By placing her own nationless, stateless and faceless body in the pose of Courbet’s Origin of the World, Ostojić places sexual politics at the origin of EU determinations around nationality. Ostojić began Looking for a Husband with EU Passport in August 2000, after Illegal Border Crossing and Waiting for a Visa. The rest of this section of the chapter will survey its five years. Ostojić first produced an advertisement, a photograph of herself, taken with a harsh light. In it, she stands naked, viewed from the thighs upwards, with a neutral expression, and all of her body and head hair shaved. Up the right-hand side of the photograph, in pink, she placed the text “Looking for a husband with a EU passport” (Fig. 3.1). The image was posted online on the website of the independent Belgrade-based art organisation Remont with the text: “Please send your applications to . Do not hesitate to contact me with any further questions or details”. Leaflets were distributed by Ostojić at the exhibition пол и капитал/Capital and Gender, Open Graphic Art Studio and the city shopping mall, Skopje, Macedonia 2001. It subsequently appeared on the website of The Contemporary Arts Centre, Skopje, and then in magazines in Slovenia, Denmark and Germany, as a result of them finding and reproducing the image. While Ostojić did not instigate the reproduction of the image beyond the appearances in Remont

56  Hilary Robinson

Figure 3.1  Tanja Ostojić, The “Ad” from Looking for a Husband with EU Passport, 2000–2005, Participatory web project/combined media installation. Source:  Photo – Borut Krajnc Copyright/courtesy Tanja Ostojić.

Tanja Ostojić’s Looking for a Husband with EU Passport (2000–05) 57 and Capital and Gender, she accepted this “escape” or “appropriation” of the image as part of the work (Gade, 2005, 204). Many responses arrived; Ostojić exchanged emails with over 500 people, mainly men, mainly from Europe but also from the United States and Australia.4 As the level of correspondence grew, Ostojić became increasingly aware that she was engaging with people who were creating online personae and representations of themselves. She was aware of websites where women from the war-torn Balkan states, unable to gain asylum in the EU or visas to enter the EU, would advertise their willingness to marry and commit to sexual and domestic relationships with strangers in return for a life in the EU (related sites like RussianBride and AsianBride were also important references for her). Women who did this were often highly vulnerable, not only in the situations from which they were trying to flee, but also because such sites were often used as a means of conning the women, and importing them instead like goods into prostitution and pornography rings, or into virtually slave-labour conditions. Once in the EU, the women could be denied the marriage or work permits and papers that would have legalised their situation. Thus, facing potential prosecution both in the EU (their new place of residence) and in their home countries, the women are trapped by the men who have conned them. This is still an ongoing situation. On such sites, the women would create representations of themselves that were attractive, sexualised and living up to popular stereotypes of appropriate femininity. While Looking for a Husband with EU Passport was not posted on such sites, its modes of representation were both antithetical to and exposing of such modes of representation. While most respondents took the request at face value as if it were indeed part of that discourse, many commented on Ostojić’s stark appearance – for example: To make more convincing “looking”, perhaps you should put on an inviting smile, and some “womanish” hair – otherwise, it looks more like evidence from woman’s prison files … However, maybe since Liliana Cavali’s film The Night Porter (1974), the sexual preferences of man with American and EU passport moved toward the image of concentration camp inmates … so perhaps you had in mind the possible shift … Otherwise, nice looking body ….5 Others responded as if they would be taking care of her, or ignoring the image altogether: “dear tanja, here a first answer, want to put a garment upon you, would marry you, when you really would be mine for ever”; “Hello Dear Lady, I know this is a bit late but I just now found your add and site. Are you still in the market for a husband? I don’t want to go into any great details if I am wasting my time” (Gržinić and Ostojić, 2009, 44, 50). Dizdar (2020, 53) argues that “Nothing about the photograph suggests artistry or performance”; I would argue differently. Everything distinguishes it from the norm of self-representation in such advertisements; what Dizdar reads as lack of artifice exposes the forms of artifice of the more usual representations of femininity and thus is indexical of its own artifice. Ostojić’s preparation of her body by shaving all her hair rather than by plucking, dying and styling is perhaps the most pointed; but the choice of pose and background can only be understood as determined as any that enter into such a high-stakes site of discourse and exchange. The respondent quoted above, who contextualised the image with The Night Porter, seems to want to let “[email protected]” know that he is familiar with cultural references,

58  Hilary Robinson naming not just the film but its (woman) director and giving its date – and in doing so, acknowledges the performativity of the self-representation. It is notable too that when Ostojić entered into a six-month correspondence with a respondent, it was with an artist, Klemens Golf, who is German. She was able to make it clear (and he understood) that this was part of an art project, that no romance would be involved: as Milevska notes, Golf “deliberately delved into the ‘art-marriage’ adventure” (Milevska, 2005, 117) and Hock notes that “Ostojić [kept] the affair within the confines of an art project” (Hock, 2014, 47). They met at noon, 28 November 2001 as a 60-minute web-streamed performance, Crossing Over, which took place in front of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade, and was also made into a seven-minute video by Ostojić and Golf, Crossover (2002) (Fig. 3.2). In the video, we see them separately walking to the park, identifying each other, talking and drinking tea together. It is not always clear to whom the subtitles should be assigned: “I cannot come closer”; “I cannot escape”; but it is clear that the words do not dub words the two are saying. This too, like the photograph, is a representation. Some statements talk of attraction: “She has such an irresistible smile for me”; “His beautiful hands”. In a prefiguration of a later work by another artist from what is now Serbia (Marina Abramović, The Artist is Present, 2010), a square table and two chairs occupy an open space; Ostojić and Golf move to sit opposite each other. The only shot not of the performance in the park is three seconds of penetrative sex, where neither participant is identifiable beyond their sex, adult age and white skin (notably, in the composition of the shot, the image of the woman echoes that of the

Figure 3.2  Tanja Ostojić and Klemens Golf, Crossing Over, 2001, seven-minute DV video. Video-still.

Tanja Ostojić’s Looking for a Husband with EU Passport (2000–05) 59 Courbet’s Origin of the World, which Ostojić was to quote two years later). The final shot shows Ostojić and Golf sitting talking, with the subtitle “Marry me!” “Yes!” “Yes!” The camera pans back to show the performance’s audience between the artists and the museum building, some clearly cold and distracted, some with umbrellas; and then fades to black. On 8 January 2002, Ostojić and Golf signed an agreement that their lives and possessions would remain separate and distinct, and that either would be free to divorce the other whenever they wished (Ostojić, 2009, 163). The following day, 9 January 2002, Ostojić and Golf married in the Serbian capital Belgrade in a private ceremony witnessed by the officials, an interpreter, a photographer and the two legally required witnesses: an artwork in the medium of law (McLaughlin, 2016, 33) (Fig. 3.3). The officials were not aware that this was an artwork. The legal nature of the exchange was the only thing that the bride and groom were interested in: photos of the event show them in clothing suitable for a January day in Belgrade (Ostojić in a long black wool dress, the others in woolly jumpers, all wearing winter boots); the witnesses at the wedding reported that when Golf was asked if he would “obey [his] lawfully wedded wife Tanja Ostojić without contradiction?” he said “no” and the question had to be re-worded; further, when invited to kiss after the legal transaction, they declined. This was a “precise execution of the act of marriage, which lacked all indispensable embellishments” (Radovanović and Andjelković, 2002, u.p.).

Figure 3.3  Tanja Ostojić, From Looking for a Husband with EU Passport, Wedding photo: Srđan Veljović 2002. Source:  Courtesy Tanja Ostojić

60  Hilary Robinson

Figure 3.4  Tanja Ostojić, Looking for a Husband with EU Passport, 2000–2005, Installation view, Kustpavillion Innsbruck, 2008. Source:  Photo – Rupert Larl. Copyright/courtesy Tanja Ostojić

With her marriage certificate, Ostojić applied for a visa. After eight weeks, she was granted a single-entry, three-month visa, and moved to Düsseldorf. On 25 April, she had a meeting at the Ausländerbehörde (immigration authority office) where she unsuccessfully applied for a three-year visa although she did eventually gain a threeyear German residence permit. After this residence permit expired, spring 2005, Ostojić was still not granted a permanent residence visa, but only another temporary one, this time for just two years “since I did not have a family tax declaration” (Gržinić and Ostojić, 2009, 42). Ostojić and Golf legally divorced, and Ostojić made a further event, Divorce Party, at the opening of another durational art project of hers, Integration Project Office (Project Room Gallery 35, Berlin, 1 July 2005) (Ostojić, n.d.). Divorce Party completed the work Looking for a Husband with EU Passport. It has been exhibited with documentation selected and presented by Ostojić: copies of legal documents, photographs of events, copies of correspondences with people who responded to the original photograph, and so forth (Fig. 3.4).

Contrasting Looking for a Husband with EU Passport with Other Works If the canon is a formation informed by wider structures of power, including sexual politics, within and beyond Art History, then a work such as Looking for a Husband with EU Passport enters the canon in a dialectical relationship with those structures and other artworks. In this section, I want to place it in relation with

Tanja Ostojić’s Looking for a Husband with EU Passport (2000–05) 61 two other durational artworks, their production and reception and the sexual and cultural politics that informed them and were produced by them. Made about 20 years earlier, one has entered the canon of contemporary and feminist art; the other has been little commented-upon, possibly in part due to global politics, or to the artist’s withdrawal from the art market, rather than to aesthetics. Feminist politics may have a collective aim – the destruction of the patriarchy, its works and effects – but how that plays out at particular times and in particular places will vary, as will strategies for achieving that. Recognising this is crucial when we talk about art from what we might now call the “former East”. The experience of feminism was very different from the Anglophone histories that have evolved, and in particular from the American campus-based white women’s movement – the movement that is dominant in publishing and hegemonic in determining terminologies. The terms, contexts and issues, pertaining to work from the “former East” that feminist critics from the “former West” might now want to include as “feminist” were very different too. However, they came from a different environment where sex equality, abortion, education and child-care – key rights for which Western feminists campaigned – fully existed; but formations of femininity, particularly in relation to mythic mother figures, were hugely problematic. It is not a question of an originary myth of “feminist art”, with influence travelling from the then-West then to the then-East; but rather of different aesthetic and political contexts coming together with technical ability, informed by the avant-gardes of the 1960s and 1970s, to produce work that needs to be understood as emerging from a distinct set of discourses. A brief discussion of two other works can help clarify this. Moving across the border between the EU and the former Eastern Bloc (pre-1989) had always been problematic, no matter which way people were trying to travel. This had been the focus of at least one artwork before the break-up of the USSR (the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, or colloquially, the Soviet Union) and the Eastern Bloc. In 1979, Hungarian artist Judit Kele began a durational work called I am a Work of Art (1979–1984). In 1980, she was invited to take part in the Paris Biennale, which enabled her to leave Hungary legally. For the Biennale, she proposed a work Self Auction, and ran an advertisement in the French national newspaper Libération: Young and successful Eastern European female artist seeks gentleman to marry. This marriage would enable her to move freely around and accompany her exhibitions in the West. In exchange, accommodation in her home country and local art contact are offered. (Hock, 2014, 37) The period of ownership of the artwork (the marriage, and Kele as the work of art) was stipulated. She selected the applicants who then placed their bids, married the “buyer” (a gay male Parisian dancer) and continued living in France. This could break a number of laws (not least the buying and selling of a human being) and customs, such as the fact that Kele was already married to a Hungarian, whom she divorced in order for the new marriage to happen. The artwork remained the property of the “owner”/husband until 1983. In 1985, Kele withdrew from the art world to work in television, and still lives in Paris. While it has resonances (East/West migration; an advertisement; legal marriage; a duration of five years), this work differs from Ostojić’s project in a number of

62  Hilary Robinson significant ways. Produced 20 years earlier, it dates from before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Hungary was then part of the Eastern Bloc, aligned to the USSR; the former Yugoslavia was not formally aligned to the USSR and travel of people, books, ideas and art was much more accessible.6 Kele’s work emerged from a Soviet-aligned economy and was understood (in the late Cold War politics of the capitalist West) as unsurprising – indeed, her advertisement was in Libération, a left-leaning newspaper, and attracted a number of responses where writers declared their left politics and sympathised with Kele’s situation in Hungary which had departed from socialist ideals (Hock, 2011). Ostojić’s work emerged from a post-socialist, formerly state-based economy that had shifted to a market economy and was now experiencing “the firing and unemployment of women, the elimination of maternal work-leave, trafficking in women, the booming sex-business, the commercialisation of images of women, and the subsequent sexist media imagery” (Minićová, 2004, u.p.); and the circulation of her advertisement, discussed above, formed part of a highly sexualised online lexicon of women from the “former East” looking for husbands from the “former West”. Kele’s work virtually disappeared in part due to her own withdrawal from the art world until recent exhibitions on the Eastern European avant-garde re-presented it,7 while Ostojić’s has garnered significant attention in the context of her growing body of work. Kele’s work was directed at the USSR’s field of influence and Ostojić’s project began following nine years of brutal civil war and was directed firmly at the EU’s attitudes to people trying to escape war situations. Perhaps the most crucial distinction is that Kele relinquished control of “an increasingly self-propelling process that today she describes as an instance of self-victimisation” (Hock, 2011, u.p.), while Ostojić retained control of what was first and foremost an artwork: The frame of this project was emancipatory for me regarding the segregation of my passport, that didn’t allow me to move without a visa. Instead, I chose the husband, I chose the method, I chose the rules, and I financed the project. Initially, my intention was not to marry, I just posted an “ad” as a political statement, but after a while my correspondence went in another direction. At a certain point, I had an offer to marry a German man, […] and I thought it would be good to continue my research from another perspective, on another stage. (Ostojić in McLaughlin, 2016, 34) All of these distinctions make the works differ in context, aesthetics and politics. We could locate both Self Auction and Looking for a Husband with EU Passport within a certain strand of avant-garde performative practices, but would need to be more granular about their differing approaches to what Allan Kaprow called “the blurring of art and life” (Kaprow, 1993). For Kaprow, the happenings that he developed in 1950s–1960s New York and California were to a significant extent experiences to be co-created by the “audience” (a concept that he developed into “the un-artist”) and moments of art-making that might be so personal as to be unacknowledged by others. In Poland, in a theatrical context, for Tadeusz Kantor, it was important that the performers did not feel they were performing the actions, but that they believed they were doing them. In Northern Ireland, Alastair MacLennan developed durational performances that would last up to 144 hours non-stop, without food or sleep. Carefully predetermined in their aesthetics, they were nonetheless open to chance in the execution, whether from people entering performance spaces

Tanja Ostojić’s Looking for a Husband with EU Passport (2000–05) 63 or from passers-by in street works. Kele’s approach could be read as not dissimilar from Kaprow’s: a total immersion in a process that was controlled by others. Ostojić’s approach is closer to MacLennan’s: careful planning, and absorption of, through thoughtful reaction to, chance encounters. Gade (2005, 188–189) draws parallels between Looking for a Husband with EU Passport and Lynn Hershman Leeson’s The Roberta Breitmore Series (1975–1978); he argues that in both the blurring of art and life, the indistinguishability of art and artist, is key. I would argue the opposite: that the similarity between the two works is first, the absolute control of the boundary between the artist and the artwork; and second the focus upon structures of femininity in socio-legal frameworks. For Hershman Leeson, the point of constructing the figure of Roberta Breitmore was to analyse the life of a then-typical middle-class American white woman in her 20s: “Hershman conveys a sense of the alienation and loneliness that plague many women in contemporary society and illustrates their efforts to combat those feelings” (Roth, 1983, 102). Breitmore, not Hershman Leeson, obtained a drivers’ licence, Social Security number and a home, and joined typical activities and groups. People could visit her apartment during stipulated hours to examine the traces of her life themselves. Likewise, in Looking for a Husband with EU Passport, Ostojić’s focus was upon analysing the sexual politics of the legal structures of marriage and national identity, not upon exploring the interface between her own life and the artwork. While the legal medium did mean that the artist was legally tied with the co-participant, Golf, they did not engage with the conventional social elements of a wedding, thus exposing marriage as primarily the legal contract that it is. Ostojić further emphasised this boundary between herself and the artwork when she mentions: I was grateful that the parents of my boyfriend at the time understood this project, as they escaped from Czechoslovakia to Austria in ‘69 and had their own interesting migration story. And so, when they figured out about my work, they told me their story. (Ostojić in McLaughlin, 2016, 34)

Looking for a Husband with EU Passport as a Feminist Activist Mistress-Piece I want now to return to my opening discussion of Art History’s masculinist canon, and how a feminist critique and analysis can place Looking for a Husband with EU Passport at the centre of a differently structured discourse of arts’ practices. I have written elsewhere about how visual activism and activist art in the 20th century is frequently made by women, and yet the analysis of such work has been written mostly by men, who are mostly white, mostly based in America, and tend not to write about work by women (Robinson, 2019, 2021). I will not repeat that fuller analysis, but the observation of this phenomenon is crucial to my purpose here. I deliberately mention it after having earlier outlined Pollock’s insistence that we (feminists and others) need to understand the discipline of Art History as a series of discourses with ideological frameworks. This writing out of women and of feminist analysis is both symptomatic and productive of masculinist ideology: patriarchy. It is clear that the first feminist strategy that Pollock identified of simply adding women to Art History for the last 50 years has failed – the textbooks and exhibitions have barely shifted in

64  Hilary Robinson their inclusion of women, their definitions of the canon and of “masterpieces”; prices at auction, overwhelmingly dominated by white men, are but the most obvious symptom of how the sector values different demographics of artists (Adams et al., 2020). It is also clear (referencing the second feminist strategy identified by Pollock) that assuming a separate sphere of “women’s work” leaves masculinist critical and curatorial structures intact; it also does a disservice to women working in traditionally “masculine” fields, or indeed in the male-dominated avant-gardes of the last century, including those who disrupted the hegemony of painting and sculpture. Therefore, it is urgent to develop practices that help make legible the activist and interventionist works that women are undertaking, and that contribute towards shifting the discourses that constitute “Art History”. Ostojić explicitly approached making Looking for a Husband with EU Passport as working with series of discourses, all of which have produced ideologies of sexual politics. She stated: Law is actually very arbitrary; therefore we need to look at who has written it and whom it serves. We cannot take law for granted. Obeying the law is very important, however, it is equally important to question it, and with this project, I especially questioned the ethical aspects of EU immigration laws. I looked into the ways it, in effect, intersects with my non-EU origin and with my gender. In particular, […] I delved into the fragility of the female condition in the context of migration. The issue of whether the marriage has been implemented or not, in the case of EU and non-EU partners, is what the authorities are most curious about … The work is critical of Schengen Agreement bio-politics, which have, for decades, left me feeling extremely exposed, vulnerable and discriminated against, because of the discomfort that arose at having my private life exposed against my will. (Ostojić, 2019, 138) In this sense, the work is activist. My definition of feminist activist art is, firstly, work that is informed by feminist thinking; and, secondly, work which is intended to make interventions directly in people’s lives and in social structures to effect change for the better. While there is no clear line between such intent and the intent to make changes primarily within a representational or aesthetic sphere, Looking for a Husband with EU Passport did actively reach beyond aesthetic concerns in its dynamic interactions with people and legal structures during her process of making it and in the work’s reception; therefore, I regard the work as being intentionally interventionist and Ostojić as being activist in her practice. She intersects a set of politics – a feminist analysis – with the practices of art and the art world. Looking for a Husband with EU Passport enters directly into politics – the structures that keep the political ordered: definitions of nationality and of identity, the rights of a body to be in a particular place, the meanings of marriage, the law in relation to all of this and more. Not obviously visible as a single and singular object, it nonetheless intervenes in regulatory structures, and in so doing exposes the lines between freedom and its opposite in the realm of politics. The personal (marriage, living choices, identity), the private (sexual and emotional realms), and the coercion of the state in relation to these, is exposed. Ostojić is an artist who insists on intervening in what Hannah Arendt identifies as the polis: a discourse-based community and “space of appearances”, which is productive of

Tanja Ostojić’s Looking for a Husband with EU Passport (2000–05) 65 the realms of the political (relationships though discourse between the people that constitute the polis) and of politics (regulatory and legal structures that keep the polis in order). As she said, “Truly political activities, […] acting and speaking, cannot be performed at all without the presence of others, without the public, without a space constituted by the many” (Arendt, 1960, 217). Uttered in this instance before the officials and two witnesses, the ceremony a legal space constituted by the polis, the “I do” of the marriage ceremony determines all else: complicity with the coercive politics of the state(s), the aesthetic actions of the artist, national identity, visas, passports, the right of the body to be in a place, or not. In the other works from the Crossing Borders Series, Ostojić broke the law, indicated its workings and practices and/or embarrassed its state structures. In Looking for a Husband with EU Passport, she built an aesthetic practice in the medium of law in order to use the law against itself: in order to expose the fundamental gendered nature of legal structures, at national and international levels, and to expose the restricted access to the polis, the space of appearances, the community created by the discourses of the many and democracy. For these reasons, I consider this work to be a Mistress-Piece of feminist politics.

Acknowledgements I would like to thank primarily Tanja Ostojić not only for her work but also for her responsiveness to my questions. I also thank Loughborough University for funding my travel to Johannesburg, and the University of Johannesburg for funding my stay there, which allowed me to rehearse an early version of this paper in public at the Mistress-Pieces conference organised by Brenda Schmahmann.

Notes 1 I am capitalising Art History to indicate the academic and museological discipline with its practices, values and exclusions as distinct from histories of all art. 2 Key sources on this work are included in the bibliography. In particular, I draw attention to: Gade (2005); Gržinić and Ostojić (2009); Hock (2011, 2014); Mignolo and Ostojić (2013); McLaughlin (2016); Minićová (2004); Radovanovic and Andjelkovic (2002). Dizdar (2020) was published just as this paper was going to press. Further important contextual material can be found in: Altmann et al. (2019); Hlavajova and Dheikh (2016), particularly Walter Mignolo (2016); Pejić (2009); Pejić et al. (2010). Finally, n.paradoxa: international feminist art journal in its 20-year run in both print and online versions was one of the few “former West” journals that routinely included any artwork from the “former East”. 3 It was privately commissioned in 1866 by an Ottoman diplomat, Khalil Bey, and remained in private hands until 1981 when its then-owner, the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, died; it was given to the French State as part of his death duties and can now be seen in the Musée d’Orsay. 4 Some are published in Gržinić and Ostojić (2009, 44–57); others have been available on Ostojić’s website from time to time but are not online at the time of writing. 5 This example is one that is no longer online, but was found in 2015 at www.scca.org. mk/capital/projects/tanja/l_dusan.asp 6 Cuba also was not aligned to the USSR: the distinct issues about travel there mainly arose from the US economic blockade, forbidding any US dollars to be spent there. 7 I am a Work of Art was purchased by the Ludwig Museum, Budapest (2011) and exhibited there (Ludwig Museum, n.d.); and was exhibited in (for example) The Medea Insurrection: Radical Women Artists Behind the Iron Curtain Lipsiusbau-Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, German 8 December 2018–31 March 2019; The Wende Museum, Los Angeles, 9 November 2019–5 April 2020.

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References Adams, Renee B, Roman Kräussl, Marco A. Navarone, and Patrick Verwijmeren. 2020. “Is Gender in the Eye of the Beholder? Identifying Cultural Attitudes with Art Auction Prices”. Report. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3083500 (Accessed 8 March 2020). Altmann, Suzanne et al., eds. 2019. The Medea Insurrection: Radical Women Artists behind the Iron Curtain. Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walter König. Arendt, Hannah. 1960. Between Past and Future: Six Exercises in Political Thought. London: Faber and Faber. Dizdar, Ivana. 2020. “He Loves Me Not: Marriage and Migration in the Work of Tanja Ostojić”. Thresholds, 48, pp. 52–61. Gade, Rune. 2005. “Making Real: Strategies of Performing performativity in Tanja Ostojic’s Looking for a Husband with an EU Passport”. In Performative Realism: Interdisciplinary Studies in Art and Media, edited by Rune Gade and Anne Jerslev, 181–207. Copenhagen: Museum of Tusculanum Press. Also in Marina Gržinić and Tanja Ostojić, eds., 2009. Integration Impossible? The Politics of Migration in the Artwork of Tanja Ostojić, 201–222. Berlin: Argobooks. Gržinić, Marina, and Tanja Ostojić, eds. 2009. Integration Impossible? The Politics of Migration in the Artwork of Tanja Ostojić, 201–222. Berlin: Argobooks. Hlavajova, Maria, and Simon Sheikh, eds. 2016. Former West: Art and the Contemporary after 1989. Utrecht and Cambridge, MA: BAK and MIT Press. Hock, Beata. 2011. “Agency Gendered: Deconstructed Marriages and Migration Narratives in Contemporary Art”. ArtMargins Online, 7 August 2011. https://artmargins.com/ marriages-and-migration-in-art/ (Accessed 29 February 2020). Hock, Beata. 2014. “Moving Across Europe: Three Case Studies on Sex-Appeal”. In Sexing the Border: Gender, Art and New Media in Central and Eastern Europe, edited by Katarzyna Kosmala, 33–54. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Kaprow, Allan. 1993. Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life, edited by Jeff Kelley. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Ludwig Museum. n.d. “Kele, Judit: I am a Work of Art (1979-1984)”.www.ludwigmuseum. hu/en/work/i-am-work-art (Accessed 29 February 2020). Lutz, Helma. 1997. “The Limits of European-ness: Immigrant Women in Fortress Europe”. Feminist Review, 57, pp. 93–111. McLaughlin, Laurel. 2016. “Marriage and Other Migrations”. In SEE: Art Gates: States of Reality, edited by Nemanja Bogdanov, 29–41. Pancevo: Gallery of Contemporary Art. Mignolo, Walter. 2016. “Looking for the Meaning of ‘Decolonial Gesture’”. In Former West: Art and the Contemporary After 1989, edited by Maria Hlavajova and Simon Sheikh, 85–95. Utrecht and Cambridge, MA: BAK and MIT Press. Mignolo, Walter, and Tanja Ostojić. 2013. “Crossing Borders/Development of Diverse Artistic Strategies”. Social Text Online: Periscope, 15 July 2013. https://socialtextjournal.org/ periscope_article/crossing-borders-development-of-diverse-artistic-strategies/ (Accessed 26 February 2020). Milevska, Suzanna. 2005. “Objects and Bodies: Objectification and Over-Identification in Tanja Ostojic ’́ s Art Projects”. Feminist Review, no. 81, pp. 112–118. Minićová, Danica. 2004. “Gender Related Art from Serbia”.Umēlec, February 2004. http:// divus.cc/london/en/article/gender-related-art-from-serbia (Accessed 5 March 2020). Ostojić, Tanja. 2009. “Crossing Borders: Development of Different Artistic Strategies.” In Integration Impossible? The Politics of Migration in the Artwork of Tanja Ostojić, edited by Marina Gržinić and Tanja Ostojić, 161–170. Berlin: Argobooks. Ostojić, Tanja. 2012. “Assuming a Migrant Woman’s Identity.” In Perform, Repeat, Record: Live Art in History, edited by Amelia Jones and Adrian Heathfield, 351–355. London: Intellect.

Tanja Ostojić’s Looking for a Husband with EU Passport (2000–05) 67 Ostojić, Tanja. 2019. “Glossary Law”. In The Nineties: A Glossary of Migration, exhibition catalogue edited by Neda Knežević, Ana Panić and Simona Ognjanović, 137–142. Belgrade: Museum of Yugoslavia. Ostojić, Tanja. n.d. “Mission Statement.”www.van.at/see/tanja/. Pejić, Bojana, ed. 2009. Gender Check: Femininity and Masculinity in the Art of Eastern Europe. Exhibition catalogue. Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walter König. Pejić, Bojana et al., eds. 2010. Gender Check: A Reader. Art and Theory in Eastern Europe. Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walter König. Pollock, Griselda. 1999. Differencing the Canon: Feminist Desire and the Writing of Arts’ Histories. Abingdon and New York: Routledge. Radovanovic, Jelica, and Dejan Andjelkovic. 2002. “The Marriage of Tanja Ostojic and Klemens Golf”. In Uncertain Signs – True Stories, edited by Angelika Stepken, Unpaginated. Karlsruhe: Badishcher Kunsverein. Robinson, Hilary. 2019. “Witness It: Activism, Art, and the Feminist Performative Subject”. In A Companion to Feminist Art, edited by Hilary Robinson and Maria Elena Buszek, 245–260. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. Robinson, Hilary. 2021 “But Does it Work in Theory? Androcentric Blind Spots and Omissions”. In Aesthetic Resilience: Art and Activism in the Age of Systemic Crisis, edited by Eliza Steinbock, Marijke de Valck and Bram Leven, 24–38. New York and Abingdon: Routledge. Roth, Moira, ed. 1983. The Amazing Decade: Women and Performance Art in America, 1970-1980. Los Angeles: Astro Artz.

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Household Matters Usha Seejarim’s Venus at Home (2012) and the Politics of Women’s Work Brenda Schmahmann

On 28 June 2012, an exhibition by South African artist, Usha Seejarim (b. 1974), opened in the Atherstone Gallery in Grahamstown1 during the National Arts Festival, an annual event involving various creative arts initiatives that takes place in that city over a ten-day period. Comprised of constructions constituted from used household objects such as brooms, mops, irons and ironing boards, Venus at Home engaged with the theme of domestic labour and its impact on women’s lives. Curated and organised by Les Cohn of Art Source South Africa, a body that manages art initiatives, Venus at Home was initially conceptualised as travelling to various other museums around the country immediately after its inauguration at the festival, which ran until 8 July 2012. Unfortunately, the funding raised was considerably lower than expected, and this meant that a less ambitious schedule was devised. Shown at the Johannesburg Art Gallery and in the city where Seejarim lives between 10 February and 12 May 2013, there would be only two further iterations of the exhibition, each more than a year apart. The exhibition was hosted from 8 May until 20 June 2014 at the NWU Gallery at the University of the North West in Potchefstroom, a town some 120 km south-west of Johannesburg, and made its final appearance at the Durban Art Gallery between 13 August and 18 October 2015. While ultimately shown at less venues than initially envisaged, Venus at Home is nonetheless an iconic show. As I indicate in this chapter, the works Seejarim produced for Venus at Home are on one level commentaries about challenges faced by women such as herself who are artists as well as mothers: as she explained, they allude to how she seemed “to straddle between daily chores like washing the dishes or changing diapers to the seemingly glamorous act of making art”. 2 But while deploying a theme that has been widespread in feminist art practice, Seejarim’s interpretation is pertinent to South Africa specifically. The objects Seejarim used for her works in the show were imbued with allusions to the class and race as well as experiences of those who donated them to her. Informed by intersectional feminist thought, the works she made are underpinned by recognition of the ways in which South African women’s experiences of domestic work have been configured through the impact of colonial and apartheid histories. Also, the works make ironical reference to those of celebrated white male modernists from the West. But, through these allusions, Venus at Home referred not only to gendered understandings that creative work stemming from the realms of the domestic (and done for “love”) is necessarily of a lower order than that associated with the public domain (and done for money) but also about how constructs about race and geography inform whether or not creative work is valued.

Usha Seejarim’s Venus at Home (2012) 69 While warranting the designation of a “Mistress-Piece” for its insightful engagement with the ways in which identity politics inform and shape contemporary feminist art in South Africa, the importance of Venus at Home is yet to be recognised. The exhibition was discussed only in short exhibition reviews3 and within an unpublished PhD dissertation focused on South African works incorporating “found” objects (Kearney 2016). In this chapter, the first expansive publication on this series of works, I aim to address this gap.

The Home as a Topic in Feminist Art Practice The home was one of the earliest areas of interest for feminist art practitioners in the West. Two initiatives from the 1970s – one in the United States and the other in the United Kingdom – are particularly well known. Womanhouse, a project that Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro organised with students enrolled for a Feminist Art Program at CalArts, took place in a derelict house in Los Angeles and was open to the public from 30 January to 28 February 1972. Within this context, the students produced various installations which commented critically on the domestic site as a space which often constrained women by defining their roles narrowly as wives and mothers. For example, Sandra Orgel’s Linen Closet, showed a female mannequin, quite literally trapped between the shelves and sheets, who is seeking unsuccessfully to step out of that domain. The works also invoked tensions and conflict within the home. Susan Frazier, Vicki Hodgens and Robin Welsch produced Nurturant Kitchen, a wholly pink environment in which forms suggestive of eggs on its ceiling mutate into breasts on its walls. Suggestive of a state in which the requirement to nurture becomes overwhelming, its imagery was also informed by a perception among participants in Womanhouse that kitchens are often sites of conflict between mothers and daughters (see Racz 2015, 71). Performances emphasised the repetitive drudgery of domestic work. In Ironing, Sandra Orgel “silently and laboriously ironed a large plasticised sheet with a cold iron, and then tightly folded it for storage” (Racz 2015, 72), while in Scrubbing, Chris Rush undertook the tedious task of cleaning floors. Relatedly, Feministo, a project in the United Kingdom that began in 1975, involved women mailing small-scale artworks they had created (with accompanying notes) to each other. In a commentary on results of the initiative that were being shown at the Institute for Contemporary Arts in London between 10 June and 20 July 1977, Rozsika Parker indicated that the act of communication through mailed artworks “could be described as a lifeline for trapped women”. As with Womanhouse, the works created through the Feministo project explored what Parker described as “the complexity of our relationship to our sexuality, domesticity, motherhood and romanticism” (Parker 1987, 207). At the same time, it recognised women’s labour: “Exhibiting homemade works begins to challenge the split between the public and domestic spheres, between ‘home and work’, validating women’s work in the home as ‘work’” (Parker 1987, 209). In some sense, Venus at Home could be likened to both initiatives. Involving sculpture and installation, Seejarim’s exhibition had commonality with Womanhouse in that she too created works which at times invoke tensions within the domestic space, and, like the performances by Orgel and Rush, refer to the activities of ironing and floor-cleaning specifically. And, like the Feministo, project, Venus at Home

70  Brenda Schmahmann commented on ways in which women’s aspirations to be artists are in tension with the demands of domestic life. Also, while not involving an exchange of artworks between different women, as in Feministo, nor collaboration in the actual act of making, as in Womanhouse, the work involved others: household items were donated to the project, primarily by women, and in that sense it included traces of a variety of people’s experiences. But Venus at Home is distinct from Womanhouse and Feministo in mood. Unlike Womanhouse and Feministo, many of its works are imbued with a sardonic humour. It is a sensibility that tends to be less of a feature of 1970s feminism than that of the 1990s and 21st century. Highlighted in the “Bad Girls” exhibition that Marcia Tucker and Marcia Tanner curated at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York in 1994, and that continues to be pervasive today, feminist work of this type involves the hilarious or absurd being used for critical effect: “The work that particularly fascinated me and pushed me to rethink a lot of old issues had two characteristics in common. It was funny, really funny, and it went ‘too far’” (Tucker 1994, 4). Some works in Venus at Home – notably the Hairstyles discussed here – have this quality of humour and, likewise, also go “too far” or are “over the top”. Crucially, also, Venus at Home is related to its South African context and thus to circumstances different to the United States and the United Kingdom. Middleclass women in South Africa have almost invariably enjoyed assistance with domestic work.4 Embroiled in a politics of not only class, but also race, the practice of hiring domestic help during the apartheid years meant that, almost without exception, the employer was white and the employed woman was black.5 Indeed, domestic servitude in white homes was the almost exclusive circumstance for black women to be allowed in so-called “white areas”.6 The post-apartheid years has not seen the disappearance of hired domestic labour by black women in white homes being a norm but rather the extension of hiring practices to include black middle-class employers. Given these circumstances, it is unsurprising that engagements with domestic labour in art practices in South Africa underpinned by a feminist consciousness have not tended to focus on makers whose entrance into marriage and motherhood has had impact on their independence and agency – issues at play in Womanhouse and Feministo. Rather, prior feminist works that are well known have focused on the figure of the domestic worker and her position within the South African home. As with Betye Saar’s well-known Liberation of Aunt Jemima, where the racist construction of the “mammy” is reconfigured into an image of black resistance, South African feminist representations of domestic workers have engaged with how a politics of race inflects women’s agency and roles. For example, well-known feminist artist, Penny Siopis, included a photocopy of a negative of a photograph from her youth – that of her younger brother on the lap of his “nanny” – in her Tula Tula (1994), one of her works from the early 1990s in which, as Irene Bronner (2019, 32) observes, she “explored the subjectivities of black and white South Africans who meet in this relationship between employers, their families, women employed as domestic workers, and their (usually absent) families”. There have been post-apartheid examples also. The most well-known of these is Mary Sibande’s “Sophie”, a figure or character introduced at the artist’s first solo exhibition in 2009, and who would subsequently undergo various iterations. Inspired by the artist’s grandmother, a domestic worker, Sophie is made from a fibreglass cast of the artist’s own body and clothed in a garment that synthesises the fabric of a South African domestic worker’s uniform with

Usha Seejarim’s Venus at Home (2012) 71 a design that draws on an elegant Victorian gown. Exaggerating the sweep of bustles and the overall dimensions of costume, Sophie’s extravagant dress that nevertheless keeps reference to domestic overalls speak of a fantasy to escape the constraints of a life of drudgery and instead enter a world of opportunity and privilege. While Venus at Home differs from these prior incarnations in that it does not foreground the figure of the domestic worker, it does in some ways involve fantasy as well as an engagement with class and race. When Seejarim began Venus at Home, she had been working with “found” objects. In her Cash Ticket, Ash Ticket (1999), for example, she produced a collage out of bus tickets that she and other commuters used when, as an undergraduate student at the Technikon Witwatersrand (now the University of Johannesburg), she travelled about 30 km from her former home in the suburb of Lenasia, south-west of Johannesburg, to the centre of the city. There, as in Venus at Home, the signs of use within these objects inflected her works with meaning. Prior works have also involved her using objects with gendered associations. For example, when, in 2006, she was commissioned to produce a public work of art commemorating Gandhi for outside the Hamidia Mosque in Fordsburg where he had led the first burning of registration certificates by those classified as “non-white” by the Transvaal government, she did so in terms of a metal cauldron. While imitating that which the protestors had used to burn their documents, it was also a cooking pot generally associated with domestic realms and with women. Consequently, the work did not simply record events but also complicated and unsettled gendered dichotomies between public and private spaces. This interest in the gendered associations of domestic objects becomes a focus in Venus at Home.

Serious Play In commencing with the making of works for Venus at Home, Seejarim had the idea of making constructions from objects associated with domestic labour: I had always worked with found objects. At that time, I had two kids already, and the domestic side of who I am was so prevalent that I thought this is what I want to focus on, so I wanted to use domestic objects, household objects. (Interview with author at SMAC Gallery in Johannesburg, 2 January 2020) Sending out text messages, e-mails and Facebook posts to request used irons, brooms, mops and ironing boards, she received an overwhelmingly enthusiastic response from her neighbours, her mother’s friends and people in the arts with whom she was friendly: “People just gave me all their stuff. My aunt asked her neighbour and I think somebody at work, and people would come with ten brooms and fifteen irons” (Interview with author, 2 January 2020). But when asking for these donations, Seejarim had no clear idea what she intended to make from the items she received nor how they might ultimately be configured. Rather, she chose to work intuitively with them. Adopting what she described as a “completely playful” approach, and where experimentation was foregrounded, she examined the various objects individually as well as in relationship to each other to see what they suggested: “I played with donated items until something clicked. I played with different configurations. So I would think: ‘that is not working, but what

72  Brenda Schmahmann if I did that?’ So that is ultimately how the works developed” (Interview with author, 2 January 2020). Her approach in fact tallied with what the New York designer, Paula Scher, describes as “serious play”. As Scher explained in a TED talk, “serious play” is distinguished from “solemn” endeavours, which are socially correct, cautious, careful, draw on existent knowledge and fulfil expectations. “Serious play”, in contrast, “often happens spontaneously, intuitively, accidentally or incidentally” and tends to be achieved “through all those kind of crazy parts of human behaviour that don’t really make any sense”. It is “about invention, change, rebellion – not perfection” (Scher 2008). Working without letting any preconceptions about what might be appropriate from an aesthetic or ideological point of view constrain possibilities, Seejarim instead allowed unexpected ideas and associations to guide her. The extensive number of household items that she received may have had something to do with the initiative being an excellent way for people to get rid of broken items. But, Seejarim indicates, people were also clearly motivated by excitement to be part of the project. In the Johannesburg Art Gallery incarnation of the show, she indicates, people were keen to find the objects they had donated: At JAG I had invited many of my mother’s friends and my neighbours who had never been to a gallery, never been to a museum, but who had contributed stuff. And their access to the work was their personal stuff, which for me was so exciting. They were walking around: “There is my iron!” “There is my mop!” (Interview with author, 2 January 2020) For Seejarim, the fact that the works were used rather than new was important to their meaning: “I wanted it to be used stuff because I wanted the histories to come together in some collective idea or concept. And I think that came through because people felt that everywhere” (Interview with author, 2 January 2020).

Mops, Hair and the Politics of Abjection In addition to being constituted from used items, the anthropomorphism of items – the sense that these worn and torn objects were somehow also suggestive of worn and torn bodies – was important to the meaning of works. Nowhere was this clearer than in the six installations of mops constituting Hairstyles (Fig. 4.1). Named after the styles deployed to wax or shave pubic hair, the works almost invariably generated amusement and delight. But this was perhaps less to do with the sauciness of creating an analogy between mops and public hair than the outcome of an incongruity between an impetus towards fastidiousness and sexual enticement signified by such grooming and connotations of weathered decrepitude conveyed by these well-used items. Bodily abjection has a long history of deployment in feminist art practice, including in South Africa, as an act of resistance. A key influence in this regard was Mary Douglas’s Purity and Danger, first published in 1966. In her exploration of the body within ritual systems, Douglas indicates that “all margins are dangerous”, pointing to matter issuing from the margins of the body such as skin, nail clippings, faeces and sweat, and indicating that such defiance of boundaries was intricately linked to challenges to social structures: “The mistake is to treat bodily margins in isolation

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Figure 4.1  Usha Seejarim, three of the components of Hairstyles, 2012. Hairstyles: Heart (left); Hairstyles: Landing Strip (middle); Hairstyles: Triangle (right). Installation constituted from mops. Source:  Photographs courtesy of the artist and Les Cohn.

from all other margins. There is no reason to assume any primacy for the individual’s attitude to his own body and emotional experience, any more than for his cultural experience” (Douglas 2002, 150). As is well known, this idea was developed by Julia Kristeva in her Power of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, first published in French in 1980 and translated into English in 1982. Arguing that marginal matter is disturbing not because it is “dirty” but rather because it poses a threat to social structures, Kristeva defined abjection as that which “disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite” (Kristeva 1982, 4).7 As noted in the Introduction to this volume, Douglas’ and Kristeva’s ideas have had a bearing on Lynda Nead’s interpretation of the female nude. Speaking about an impetus in art from the West to necessarily control and contain the female body, Nead (1992, 6) suggests: The forms, conventions and poses of art have worked metaphorically to shore up the female body – to seal orifices and to prevent marginal matter from transgressing the boundary dividing the inside of the body and the outside, the self from the space of the other. In a context where women’s bodies tend to be seen as wayward and undisciplined product of nature, Nead (1992, 18) argues, such discipling has in a sense been conceptualised as a process of submitting them to management by forces of (male) culture. Seejarim’s mops offer a defiance against such stress on containment and management of the female form. In being weathered and used rather than pristine and new, the mops speak not only of bodies that are themselves permeable and susceptible to aging but also of unboundedness and the refusal of categorisation in a general sense.

74  Brenda Schmahmann They are in fact ironical objects in the sense that, while mops are associated with endeavours to keep the home free of detritus and germs, the particular examples Seejarim has included are arranged in such a way that they are suggestive of bodies susceptible to the effects of dirt, disease and decay. In their defiance of boundaries, the mops also highlight the irony of the title of the exhibition. As Alison Kearney (2016, 172) explains: If we were to read the objects as standing in for the woman’s body, because of their allusion to the feminine body via their reminiscence of pubic shapes and allusion to pubic hair waxing styles, then in Seejarim’s works Venus is not a beautiful lover, but, tired, dirty, and used. These dystopic images counter discourses of “the ideal woman” suggested by the title of the exhibition and also call up images of domestic drudgery that is the everyday lot of many women. This association of these objects with women worn down through domestic drudgery is in fact reinforced if one has knowledge of the demographic who had used them. When gathering donations of household items, Seejarim discovered that all the sponge mops she received came from white middle-class friends who do not themselves do domestic work,8 whereas string mops – those used in Hairstyles – were deployed by working-class black women who were not in a position to employ others to do their domestic work for them (Interview with author, 2 January 2020).

Ironic Irons While the series of mops refer to people, Cow’s Head (Fig. 4.2) was the outcome of a juxtaposed iron and a clothes hanger creating a bovine allusion. This reference is resonant on a number of levels. While perhaps referring to the sacredness of cows in Hindu culture, given Seejarim’s own cultural background, cattle also have connotations to do with domesticity and the home – and ones that are highly gendered – among Nguni groups of people in South Africa. Along with providing milk and meat as well as being sacrificed in sacred practices, cattle have historically been central to the payment of brideprice (lobola) – that is, payment for wives who would bear children and look after the homestead. Besides being used to purchase wives, cattle ownership and management was historically the exclusive province of men. Writing about the use of cattle among isiXhosa-speaking peoples, Jeff Peires (2003, 47) observes that women were excluded from the privileged sphere of cattle. A woman could not slaughter or milk cattle, or even wash the milkpails. She could not even walk through a herd of cattle in the company of other women. More important, she had no formal voice in the disposition of cattle as inheritance or brideprice or in its political and legal arenas where the role of cattle was crucial. Such issues are highlighted but also undermined through the rendition of a cow in Seejarim’s work. Normally associated with masculine ownership, the cow is instead represented via items associated with a female domestic domain. The work also appears to comment on masculinist identities, albeit lightly and with humour. Seeming on one level like a bizarre hunting trophy, that reference, coupled with the

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Figure 4.2  Usha Seejarim, Cow’s Head, 2012, iron and hanger. Source:  Photograph courtesy of the artist and Les Cohn.

allusion to brideprice in the choice of a cow’s head, may perhaps be interpreted as a critical comment on women being constructed as “trophy wives”. Importantly, Cow’s Head is a parody. Seejarim’s juxtaposition of an iron and a hanger refers unmistakably to Picasso’s well-known Bull’s Head (1942) which was constituted from the seat and handlebars of a bicycle. Seejarim explains how this parody came about: There were irons lying on the floor and there were hangers lying on the floor. In my mind I put them together and it looked like a cow’s head. I had a flash of Picasso’s Bull’s Head. I then put them together to see what it looked like and put the object up on the wall. Then I went to read up on Picasso’s Bull’s Head. I found this little text where he talks about how the Bull’s Head came together. He saw these two objects on the floor, put them together in his mind and saw a bull’s head. It is very interesting to me that the process was exactly the same as my cow. (Interview with author, 2 January 2020)

76  Brenda Schmahmann In a well-known discussion of parody, Linda Hutcheon (1985, 6) makes the important point that it is a genre that involves “repetition with critical distance, which marks difference rather than similarity”. In other words, points of likeness between a representation and its source do not highlight their commonalities but rather draw attention to their differences – and this is clear here.9 While assuming the general form of Picasso’s Bull’s Head, Seejarim’s Cow’s Head is constituted from objects associated with a dreary act of labour – ironing – that takes place within the home, whereas a bicycle is associated with movement in the public domain and in some situations with recreation. Most crucially, the maker of Cow’s Head is a black female and a young mother living in Africa rather than a renowned mature white male from Europe whose own children were the responsibility of his wives and girlfriends and who had no need to bother with general domestic duties such as ironing. And here, in fact, is the crux of the matter. Cow’s Head invites consideration of who gets to enjoy the description “artist” and what conditions enable their creativity. While Picasso had followed exactly the same process in making his work as Seejarim had when making her own, only the former has been described as a “genius” and brilliant visionary. Picasso tended in fact to be highly competitive, as Eric Gibson (2011) points out: He was notorious for keeping tabs on other artists, dropping by their studios, visiting their exhibitions to check up on what they were doing – all to ensure that his position as leader of the avant-garde remained unchallenged. In the same spirit, he would borrow and adapt their ideas and attempt to one-up them in other ways. Gibson suggests that Picasso’s Bull’s Head was likely motivated in part by an idea of upstaging Duchamp: by showing he too could make brilliant “Readymades”, Picasso would ensure his own leadership within an avant-garde. This machismo competitiveness is utterly alien to Seejarim who is more interested in how works speak of – and to – communities of women who do not necessarily have any familiarity with museums and art galleries. Social distinctions between male and female forms of labour are also the topic of critical engagement in The Builder’s Wife (Fig. 4.3), a work that combines a plastering trowel and an ironing board. Seejarim indicated to me that she had found a wooden plastering trowel at the back of her studio when she began using the property in 2008: It was lying in the back yard. When I saw it, I immediately saw an iron and then I kept it for the right moment. When I had found this ironing board, I knew they were a match and I knew the work wanted to be “The Builder’s Wife”. So all I did was add an ironing cord and then put it together. (Interview with the author, 2 January 2020) A wonderfully ironic work in its transmuting of an object associated with the usually masculine activity of plastering into the usually feminine activity of ironing, it prompts the viewer to reflect on the gendering of labour and professions. The work might be considered a counterpart to Cow’s Head in the sense that, rather than being an iron that has become something else, it is something else (a plastering

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Figure 4.3  Usha Seejarim, The Builder’s Wife, 2012, ironing board, wooden builder’s trowel, plug. Source:  Photograph courtesy of the artist and Les Cohn.

78  Brenda Schmahmann tool) that has become an iron. The Builder’s Wife is also parodic. Referring generically to the “Readymades” that Duchamp produced, it would seem also to refer to strategies of using found items on the part of the avant-garde more generally. It is noteworthy that a “found” iron (of the type that was heated on the stove) was famously transformed into an artwork by Man Ray and titled The Gift (1921). But Seejarim’s works are at odds with the machismo that sometimes underpins works of this type. The only modification that Man Ray made to the iron, which he purchased from a hardware store, was to attach a row of sharp nails to its base. The work’s subsequent sadistic potential was acknowledged by the artist in a comment in which he also revealed an “othering” and objectification along gendered and racial lines which is such a disturbing current within western modernism: You can tear a dress to ribbons with it. I did it once, and asked a beautiful eighteen-year-old coloured girl to wear it as she danced. Her body showed through as she moved around, it was like a bronze in movement. It was really beautiful.10 Seejarim’s “iron” does not link two items that counter each other (an iron that smooths and nails that tear) but rather reveals an analogy between the shape of an object used to smooth cloth and one used to smooth plaster. More crucially, it differs from Man Ray’s work in that it highlights and offers a critique of gendered assumptions rather than operating within those biases.

Domestic Difficulties As with many feminist artworks, such as Womanhouse, Venus at Home alludes to the domestic milieu being a potential site for oppression and conflict. One instance where this is invoked is Three Sisters in Law (Fig. 4.4), where the sticks of three conjoined brooms are surrounded by some bangles the artist had begun collecting prior to the Venus at Home initiative and which she thought would be evocative in this context. She points out that a Hindu woman receives a set of red glass bangles when she marries, and these items are considered symbolic of the marriage. But rather than being allowed to wear them, the idea is that the recipient will break them when she is widowed. In addition to this, the artist observes that “married Hindu women – I don’t know if all Hindu women but Gujarati women – wear a set of red bangles that are not glass, that are plastic or metal” and in that way bangles are suggestive of marriage in a general sense (Interview with the author, 2 January 2020). In Three Sisters in Law, the bangles do not simply link the three women whom each of the brooms is implied to represent but also constrain them. The artist explains that the context she had in mind was not her own family – she herself never lived with her mother-in-law and gets on with her sisters-in-law – but rather a conservative family structure where parents, their sons and daughters-in-law all live together and where “there is often family politics”: This relationship is one in which three women, three sisters in laws, are sisters by marriage, not by blood. They are in this relationship and it is a constricting one and it is a domestic one. It is [centred] around this domesticity of keeping house, of keeping family, of keeping your husband happy, of keeping your father-in-law and your mother-in-law happy. (Interview with author, 2 January 2020)

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Figure 4.4  Usha Seejarim, Three Sisters In Law, 2012, brooms and bangles. Source:  Photograph courtesy of the artist and Les Cohn.

80  Brenda Schmahmann The very shiny bangles, with their glossy and colourful exterior, mask what is in fact often a fraught and conflicted relationship. The placement of the work may also be understood as a comment. As Kearney (2016, 176) observes, by being shown on the floor and positioned leaning against the wall, Three Sisters in Law is in keeping with how “one might encounter a broom in a home” and thus perhaps also comments on the sisters-in-laws’ lowly place within their domestic hierarchy.11 Seejarim noticed that sometimes viewers interpreted her works as being about abuse when this was not her conscious intention. She observes that this occurred particularly with a work comprised of a broken ironing board and the container of a toilet brush: “I thought it is quite sexualised. And I think people read that into it. But because all the materials are stained, used or broken, a few people read sexual and physical abuse out of that work” (Interview with the author, 2 January 2020). In one instance, however, an actual history of abuse formed the backstory to one of its components. In Affairs of the Home (Fig. 4.5), Seejarim has included two discarded signs from the Department of Home Affairs that she had purchased at a scrapyard, welding them to a steel ironing board. It is an ironic conjunction, one that perhaps talks about attempting to “iron out” enormous difficulties when establishing a home in a new country. Arranged with the two boards propped against one another so that their outer edges are triangles, the structure also repeats a shape that features elsewhere in Venus at Home (e.g. in Cow’s Head) and that Seejarim used deliberately to symbolise female empowerment (Interview with author, 2 January 2020). When the artist originally attached the signs to the ironing board, she felt that the work was still missing something and that she needed to “warm it up” (Interview with author, 2 January 2020). Her thought was to add a blanket – not a new one but rather one that carried visual traces and aromas of use. Given the references to immigrants and the difficulties they might encounter that was implicit in the Department of Home Affairs signs, she sought a participant at the Methodist Church in Plein Street, next to the Johannesburg court, which had often served as a place of sanctuary for refugees: her idea was to arrive with a new blanket and find somebody taking shelter at the church who would like to exchange it for an old one, and who was willing to have their blanket included in an artwork. But whereas she had previously gone to the church when it was “full of people, and people were sleeping on the floor” (Interview with author, 2 January 2020), she found that there was only one person there – a woman in a wheelchair. While Seejarim could not follow her account clearly, she ascertained that the woman was not an immigrant but rather a refugee from a terrible domestic situation in her home in the Limpopo province: It sounded like she had been ostracised in her community because she was in a wheelchair. There had been sexual abuse. She had been raped. She wasn’t saying it directly. But that is what I was understanding from what she was saying. (Interview with author, 2 January 2020) The woman was very happy to exchange her own worn blanket for a new one, and Seejarim used the donated blanket to cover the legs and the base of the ironing board, making its aroma a part of the work: “The blanket had a strong smell of sweat and urine. I didn’t wash it. It was quite difficult to work with. But that smell is what I wanted the work to have” (Interview with author, 2 January 2020). Thus here, as in Hairstyles, the focus is on what Douglas termed marginal matter and Kristeva

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Figure 4.5  Usha Seejarim, Affairs of the Home, 2012, ironing board and signage boards. Source:  Photograph courtesy of the artist and Les Cohn.

82  Brenda Schmahmann termed abjection. Matter traversing the margins of the body, the sweat and urine that had infused the blanket unsettles the viewer because it defies boundaries. Along with alluding to matter out of place, the work may be interpreted as suggesting actual physical injury and bodily trauma through a small detail on the blanket: Seejarim found on the item “a little tag that said it was from the Red Cross” (Interview with author, 2 January 2020). This emphasis on the defying of borders of the body assumes ironic form in a work that features a sign from the Department of Home Affairs – that is, a government department intended to prevent a defiance of the regulations surrounding borders, but in this instance geographical ones.

Conclusion Venus at Home was a landmark in the artist’s own practice. The show marked the beginning of a more concertedly feminist direction to her work as well as suggesting how concepts of the domestic might be explored compellingly through the deployment of ordinary household items. In her Transgressing Power show at the SMAC Gallery in Johannesburg in 2019, Seejarim once again worked with objects such as brooms and irons. But rather than focusing on used items that carry personal histories, she purchased items as she needed them. And rather than sustaining the integrity of these objects, she began to take them apart or carve them into component pieces. Introducing some additional categories of found objects, most notably pegs of the type used on washing lines which she worked into objects that allude to the body, Transgressing Power also included some new motifs, such as nests – a signifier of the complexities surrounding home. But besides providing direction for Seejarim’s own practice, Venus at Home is significant as a landmark feminist exhibition. Engaging with the complexities surrounding the domestic milieu and home in a South African context, it simultaneously questioned gendered notions of creativity and masculinist privilege. Produced in a spirit that tallies with what Scher defined as “serious play”, its engagement with domestic labour and the politics of the home was fresh, new, experimental and rebellious.

Notes 1 Grahamstown has subsequently been renamed Makhanda. 2 This comment appears, for example, in the version of the press statement produced for the North West University Gallery. 3 Makeng (2012) wrote a short article on Seejarim just before the National Arts Festival in 2012. A text by Makhanya (2012) also preceded the show, but focused on Venus at Home rather than Seejarim’s work in general. Mdluli (2012) wrote a review of it at the festival. Premdev (2013) and Monnakgotla (2013) comment on its showing in Johannesburg. 4 Entrance into marriage kept white women at home and unable to participate in the working world not because they were obliged to undertake domestic labour but rather because factors such as joint taxation for married couples as well as unequal pay would make their labour unprofitable. 5 An excellent sociological study of domestic work under apartheid is Cock (1980). 6 The Group Areas Act of 1950 implemented into law the idea that only one supposed “race” could live in any particular neighbourhood. 7 In Chapter 6, Tal Dekel – who quotes the same passage by Kristeva – discusses Hannan Abu-Hussein’s work in the light of this idea. It is also invoked in Chapter 7, where Karen von Veh discusses Diane Victor’s work. 8 These sponge mops were incorporated into a work called Squeeze.

Usha Seejarim’s Venus at Home (2012) 83 9 For Hutcheon, “repetition with critical distance” is effected through irony – a trope that does not simply mean “saying one thing and meaning another”, but is rather “a process of communication that entails two or more meanings being played off, one against the other” (Hutcheon 1994, 105). 10 Quoted in the Tate Museum’s entry on an editioned replica (1972) of Man Ray’s The Gift (1921), www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/man-ray-cadeau-t07883 (Accessed 18 February 2020) 11 A related work that spoke of the domestic site as a locale of conflict was actually called Dysfunctional Relationship, and was comprised of a bucket, broom and vinyl flooring. As the artist explained in e-mailed communication with me on 19 February 2020: “Essentially, the mop is threaded through the bucket in a manner where neither can now function. It is placed on a base that is covered in ‘tapyt’, a cheap vinyl flooring typical of many working-class homes in Lenasia”.

References Bronner, Irene. 2019. “Tula Tula by Penny Siopis: Re-membering the nanny-child relationship”. Woman’s Art Journal. 40 (1): 31–39. Cock, Jacklyn. 1980. Maids and Madams: A Study in the Politics of Exploitation. Johannesburg: Ravan Press. Douglas, Mary. 2002. Purity and Danger. London and New York: Routledge. First published in 1966. Gibson, Eric. 2011. “A magical metamorphosis of the ordinary”. The Wall Street Journal, April 16. www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748703551304576261042931202326 Hutcheon, Linda. 1985. A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-century Art Forms. New York and London: Methuen. Hutcheon, Linda. 1994. Irony’s Edge: The Theory and Politics of Irony. London: Routledge. Kearney, Alison. 2016. Beyond the Readymade: Found Objects in Contemporary South African Art. Johannesburg: University of the Witwatersrand. Kristeva, Julia. 1982. Power of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. New York: Columbia Press. First published in French in 1980. Makeng, Zintle. 2012. “The domestic goddess artist”. New Age, May 31. Makhanya, Siphiliselwe. 2012. “She’s making art a household word”. Sunday Times (Extra section), June 10, p. 18. Mdluli, Same. 2012. “Domestic bliss”. Sunday Independent (Lifeart section), July 1, p. 3. Monnakgotla, Mamodima. 2013. “Venus at Home puts a twist on womanhood”. Sowetan, February 15. www.pressreader.com/south-africa/sowetan/20130214/281887295706054 Nead. Lynda. 1992. The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity and Sexuality. London: Routledge. Parker, Rozsika. 1987. “Portrait of the Artist as a Housewife”. In Framing Feminism: Art and the Women’s Movement, edited by Rozsika Parker and Grisela Pollock, 207–210. London and New York: Pandora. First published in Spare Rib 1977 60: 5–8. Peires, Jeff. 2003. The House of Phalo: A History of the Xhosa People in the Days of their Independence. Johannesburg and Cape Town: Jonathan Ball Publishers. Originally published by Ravan Press (Pty) Ltd., 1981. Premdev, Doreen. 2013. “Mops, brooms and irons get tongues wagging”. Sunday Times (extra section), February 17, p. 11. Racz, Imogen. 2015. Art and the Home: Comfort, Alienation and the Everyday. London: I.B. Tauris. Scher, Paula. 2008. “Great design is serious, not solemn”, TED recording, May 2008. www. ted.com/talks/paula_scher_great_design_is_serious_not_solemn?language=en Tucker, Marcia. 1994. “Introduction and Acknowledgments”. In Bad Girls, edited by Marcia Tucker and Marcia Tanner, 4–9. New York: The New Museum of Contemporary Art.

PART II

Critiquing Gender Violence and Abuse

5

Reading Hannah Wilke’s S.O.S. Starification Object Series (1974–1982) in the Era of #MeToo Marissa Vigneault

In an essay she wrote for Indelible in the Hippocampus: Writings from the Me Too Movement, Hafizah Geter observed: Our stories are rising. Like any marginalized group attempting to break its chains, it is our stories that make us so utterly dangerous to white patriarchal institutions. Our safety is a fiction. The danger we live in, the secret we will no longer keep. (Geter 2019, 256) The stories are always there. We hear them whispered among our mothers and grandmothers, shared as anecdotes and bits of warning among friends, spread as rumours that always feel more true than false. These stories by and of girls and women subjected to every form of sexual harassment and abuse live in an underground warren of sorts, accessible to those who need to know, but not always. When exposed, more often than not, they are offhandedly dismissed for exactly what they are categorised as: stories, a term the English language holds in duality as both a recounting of true events and a fictitious lie. And women, under patriarchal protocol, are positioned as deceit personified, whispering Eves who aim to take power from men via their lying tongues. A millennium and more of silencing women, brandishing them as witches and whores, is our hysterical history. And yet, as Geter writes, “our stories are rising” and with them “secret[s] we will no longer keep”. Our and we. A collective of story tellers and believers. Reading and listening and absorbing such traumatic stories is hard, at times insurmountably so, as they are filled with horrifying accounts of girls and women alone and terrified, silenced under the weight of powerful men, of men with power, which is to say all men operating within and protected by patriarchal structures. But it is work we must do, an act of feminist homework, to use Sarah Ahmed’s words; a task of emotional labour that equally affects mind and body, because these stories remind us of how close we all are to one of them being our own, if they are not already.1 And in this moment of sympathetic and sometimes, although probably often, empathetic connection we can share the heaviness of our sisters’ traumas. And sharing is precisely what helps heal, both personally and collectively: “I wait to see if this is how we begin to heal our bodies, by airing out what we have forced them to reckon with silently, protectively, alone” (Chen 2019, 205). “Airing out” is a particularly fascinating way to think through where we are right now as a society, one in the midst of a collective reckoning with the social wounds left by perpetual (even if unintentional) permissioning of sexual harassment and assault. Airing out is something we do to stale and musty old spaces, ones in need of fresh air

88  Marissa Vigneault and new life. We air out our grievances as a way to correlate our past with our present and our future. And we air out our stories over airwaves both literal and symbolic as a way to share them through acts of community building. What particularly marks our contemporary moment as distinct from preceding ones is the way in which the airing out is occurring via social media, where stories are shared instantaneously on a global level with multiple communities, who then share those stories with other communities, creating an ever-expanding web of connection points that strengthen with each share or retweet. Geter (2019, 252–253) observes: Because of the size and unstoppable growth of the internet, people of color, women, and others long marginalized are finding platforms to amplify their voices and their stories. Stories that matter. Stories so damming in their truth that to simply utter them destabilizes institutions of oppression and power. The sheer amount of muscle true stories can hold is why we ban books. And, I add, why we ban art. Because we recognise its ability to touch these other spaces and pull the abstract of the internal into the physicality of the external, in activist acts of eruption and disruption. This is precisely how I read Hannah Wilke’s S.O.S. Starification Object Series, 1974–1982 (Fig. 5.1): as eruption of internal traumatic wounds that aim to disrupt oppressive systems that force women’s silence and compliance under threat of

Figure 5.1  Hannah Wilke, S.O.S. Scarification Object Series, 1974–1982, MOMA, New York. Source:  © 2020 Marsie, Emanuelle, Damon and Andrew Scharlatt, Hannah Wilke Collection & Archive, Los Angeles/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Right Society (ARS), NY.

Hannah Wilke’s S.O.S. Starification Object Series (1974–82) 89 destruction. S.O.S. continues to hold deep relevance in terms of gender politics, for ultimately, it is a work about objectification and commodification of women, and the mental and physical scarring that results from constant patriarchal surveillance and control. The body Wilke presented in S.O.S. – always her own, but never fully owned – is a constructed body that simultaneously conforms and subverts expectations of compliant femininity. It is in Wilke’s assertion of the body as a constructed space oriented towards the desires of others that I find her critical intervention into the dynamics of feminine objectification, as she dually aimed to re-inscribe female subjectivity and sexuality at the level of the individual through art that “destabilizes institutions of oppression and power”. How, then, does reading S.O.S. through the lens of our current moment of social reckoning with pervasive sexual harassment and assault, made public as the Me Too movement, lead to reassessment of Wilke’s own awareness and critique of the same occurrences in the 1970s? And in what ways does our re-reading of S.O.S. converge and diverge with present political and social concerns? By considering S.O.S. as part of a larger body of stories shared by those who have experienced sexual harassment and/or assault in all its variations, I aim, as Paisley Rekdal (2019, 53) writes, “to bring pain out of the body and into language” just as Wilke brought psychological scars out of the body into visual art. The tiny S.O.S. scars – pieces of chewed gum folded and refolded – function as a type of text arranged like messages across her skin leading us to read Wilke’s story via her body, a body given voice to air out its pain. In her words: 2

In one of my pieces I used chewing gum to make sculpture symbolizing the scarification of society. I placed small pieces of gum shaped like vaginas or phallic symbols in designs all over my body. They were like African scarification wounds and represented the numerical systems that marked Jews in concentration camps. As a Jew I would have been destroyed had I been born in Europe. It’s incredible to think this happened during my lifetime and I am still alive. The piece was called S.O.S. Starification Object Series. I’ve been scarred as we all have been by this inhumane history. Being a star also is a form of scarification. All people are scarred by their religion, their culture, their particular caste system. (Wilke et al. 1985, 9) Clearly Wilke would have tweeted #SOS and #MeToo if she were still alive.

A Hashtag Ignites a Movement: #MeToo and Me Too #MeToo went viral on October 15, 2017, sparked by a tweet sent by actress and activist Alyssa Milano reading: “If you’ve been sexually harassed or assaulted write ‘me too’ as a reply to this tweet”. Over one million uses of the hashtag appeared on Twitter within 48 hours of Milano’s tweet; Facebook reported 12 million posts, comments and reactions to #MeToo by 4.7 million worldwide users within 12 hours of Milano’s tweet, presenting an unsettling record of the pervasiveness of sexual harassment and assault at a global scale (Modrek and Chakalov 2019). The vast community of voices that now comprises #MeToo has its origins in the work of social activist Tarana Burke, who started using the hashtag #MeToo in 2007, although she conceived the driving ideas behind the larger Me Too movement a decade earlier, in

90  Marissa Vigneault 1997, after listening to a particularly horrifying account from a 13-year-old girl subjected to sexual abuse. In Burke’s words: Me Too is a movement to, among other things, radicalize the notion of mass healing. As a community we create a lot of space for fighting and pushing back but not enough for connecting and healing. It’s a long and varied process for everyone and each and every one of us has a different entry point on to the journey to heal from our experiences. But the one thing that we have in common is the ability at some point in our journey to reach back and create an entry point for another woman. Some of us start by telling our stories. For those who are ready and able, standing up and saying “Me Too” can be a deeply cathartic experience. (Fessler 2018) The movement is thus rooted in recognition and awareness of another’s pain, an empathetic connection with someone outside ourselves who bears the scars, not always visible, of emotional and physical suffering. It is on this point that I connect S.O.S. to the collective aim of Me Too: a desire to make visible what has been tamped down to the point of invisibility; that is, the systemic erasure of girls and women as individual subjects, and the resultant overt objectification of their bodies. Because it is exactly such objectification that allows for the free reign of sexual assault and sexual harassment, 3 which operates through systems of power that maintain girls and women as powerless.4 In recognising systems of unequal power distribution, we must also keep attention on the ways race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, class position and other social identity markers intersect with occurrences of sexual harassment and assault. Wilke recognised the way her Jewishness impacted her being a woman in the world, just as Burke recognises how her identity as a Black woman engenders multiple overlapping points of discrimination. The Me Too movement is not a homogenous conglomerate of women who experience sexual harassment and assault only as women. Rather, drawing from Kimberlé Crenshaw’s writing on intersectionality (Crenshaw 1989), it behoves us both individually and collectively to acknowledge and validate the multiple intersecting points at which discrimination occurs. So how do we resist exclusionary systems of unequal power distribution? Where do we locate other spaces and voices that shift us towards the equitable, the inclusionary and the overlapping, and once we locate them, how do we sustain them? Here we may consider Homi Bhabha’s writing in which he considers the effects of “unequal and uneven forces of cultural representation” on sociocultural development of communities (Bhabha 1994, 55). Building on the idea of First Space as the local (individual) and Second Space as the remote (community), Bhabha’s “third space” emerges as a zone where other positions may materialise in strategic resistance to dominant cultural narratives that aim to homogenise and nationalise culture. The “third space” is a hybridisation that collapses the first and the second and, as Bhabha (1994, 211) states, “gives rise to something different, something new and unrecognizable, a new area of negotiation of meaning and representation”. Me Too is a movement taking place in the “third space”. It is, above all else, an act of resistance in the face of forceful assertions of power, a cry against the neutrality of space, both real and virtual. It is through such resistance that generative community building takes place, and telling stories is one such way to catalyse “a new area of negotiation of meaning and

Hannah Wilke’s S.O.S. Starification Object Series (1974–82) 91 representation”. Art, too, operates in the “third space”, a matrix which not only allows for but encourages a constant state of becoming – that is, a space for eruption and disruption, a space for S.O.S. And while I propose in this essay that Wilke’s S.O.S. series is an iconic feminist artwork made by a very iconic American feminist artist, I do not assume widespread familiarity with the specifics of S.O.S.’s creation and its variations. So first, I will briefly describe the piece, which exists in multiple media, before delving into the specific aspects of the work that, I believe, connect Wilke’s social commentary from the 1970s to a 21st-century global awareness via a social media hashtag.

Performative Variation: Wilke’s S.O.S. S.O.S. is above all performance based; it started as a photographed performance in 1974 in her SoHo loft, and continues to performatively engage with viewers decades after its creation. In 1974, Wilke asked photographer Les Wollam to take a series of photographs of her striking assorted poses – ones viewers would immediately associate with fashion models, Hollywood starlets and pin-up girls, and to a lesser extent art historical subjects – and variously outfitted with accessories ranging from a men’s tie to a crocheted apron to hair curlers. Wilke retroactively referred to such photographs as “performalist self-portraits”, meaning works created in collaboration with another person, but with retention of her own authorship. 5 Out of the approximately 50 photographs Wollam took, Wilke chose 28 as the core of the S.O.S. series. The photographs were first used for S.O.S. (Starification Object Series): An Adult Game of Mastication, a boxed game created for the 1975 exhibition “Artists Make Toys” at the alternative art space The Clocktower in New York City.6 Also included in the box – Wilke’s playful response to Marcel Duchamp’s Box in a Valise (From or by Marcel Duchamp or Rrose Sélavy), 1935–1941 – are 50 playing cards, 28 numbered S.O.S. photographs, 1 enlarged S.O.S. image of Wilke in a boldly patterned men’s tie, 6 boxes of Chiclets, 16 packs of stick gum and instructions for how to play the game (Wilke 1978). Most notable on the rule list is the requirement that Wilke be “rented” for $1500 as the “starification object” (the S.O.): over the course of the game, players would pick one of the gum flavours, chew the gum and hand it to Wilke (the S.O.), who would then form the material into a tiny vulva-shaped sculpture and hand it back to the player to stick onto the S.O.’s body (Fitzpatrick 2009, 49; Princenthal 2010, 52–53). Wilke’s S.O.S. performance at the Galerie Gerald Piltzer in Paris in February 1975 (Fig. 5.2) is the closest physical realisation we have of the game. Wilke spent three hours at the exhibition opening of “Five American Women in Paris” moulding sculptures from gum chewed by the guests and either pinning them to the wall or attaching them to herself. A note on the back of a never-sent photograph in Wilke’s archives offers insight into her awareness of the double standards of the art world. As she wrote, “I found out people will pay for me, not the art”.7 Such a statement exemplifies how women artists are put into the position where they must market not only their work but also themselves, resulting in the perpetuation of self-objectification in response to market demands. What is the woman artist to do in the face of such erasure of being, where the forces of capitalism value the commodification of the body at the expense of the individual subject? This is where we may locate Wilke’s critical, performance-based resistance to such systems of objectification. She does not labour

92  Marissa Vigneault

Figure 5.2  Hannah Wilke at S.O.S. performance in the exhibition “Five American Women in Paris”, Galerie Gerald Piltzer, Paris, 1975. Source:  © 2020 Marsie, Emanuelle, Damon and Andrew Scharlatt, Hannah Wilke Collection & Archive, Los Angeles/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Right Society (ARS), NY

Hannah Wilke’s S.O.S. Starification Object Series (1974–82) 93 her body through poses and pulling (of gum, erasers, clay, etc., her artistic materials) for the other to use. Rather, she labours as a means to reinforce her body as being, herself as subject, in denial of a Cartesian split: “…I think one can have a body and a mind”, she said (Wilke 1978). Because she inhabited and used a beautiful body in order to critique the social expectations of femininity, Wilke was further accused of being a flirt and a tart. Her response to such reproaches was notably acerbic: “People would like intellectuals to be ugly” (Wilke 1978). Critic Ann-Sargent Wooster (1975, 74–75), covering Wilke’s 1975 solo exhibition at the Ronald Feldman Gallery in New York City, wrote: “Causing more commotion than was warranted or necessary, HANNAH WILKE unfortunately felt she had to get on the bandwagon of artists’ ‘nudie’ pin-ups with a vulgarly accessorized (i.e. unzipped blue jeans, hair curlers, etc.) rendering of her semi-nude flesh in 28 photographs from the S.O.S. Mastication Box”. Here we can add another modern term of disdain directed against women: hysteria. Wilke, or rather images of Wilke, supposedly caused “more commotion than was warranted or necessary” through her “vulgarly accessorized…semi-nude flesh”, according to Wooster, who does not even offer Wilke the benefit of her own mental labour. She can only jump onto the art world bandwagon of ideas. Of course, such reduction of Wilke to mere body without mind aligns with the essentialism versus poststructuralism schema of art historical writing that has resulted in the side-lining of one camp of artists – those accused of using the female body in reductivist ways – Wilke, Judy Chicago, Carolee Schneemann, for example – in favour of those who employed theory as critique – such as Martha Rosler and Mary Kelly. This divisionism carried into the 1980s, with Wilke’s radical practice of what I call “femininity as posturing masquerade” masked over by the subsequent Pictures Generation, in particular Cindy Sherman, who, like Wilke, used her own body, but, unlike Wilke, denied any reference to a “self” in her untitled film stills. Wilke steadily fought against these feminist splits; she in fact had no qualms about claiming to use vaginal imagery before Chicago and masquerade before Sherman, that is to say, being both essentialist and poststructuralist. But what irked Wilke the most was what she termed “fascist feminism”, a dogmatic acceptance and support of only one kind of feminism that upheld the work of one group of women at the expense of others, Wilke included. She made the print Marxism and Art: Beware of Fascist Feminism in response, stating: About two years after I had done [the S.O.S.] series, there was a group of women who had asked me to create an 8 ½ × 11 inch statement…related to the question, “What is Feminism and what can it become?” – So, I made “Marxism and Art: Beware of Fascist Feminism”, because I felt feminism could easily become fascistic if people believe that feminism is only their kind of feminism, and, not my kind of feminism, or, her kind of feminism, or his kind of feminism. (Wilke 1978) The poster features a photo from the S.O.S. series of Wilke with hands on hips, white shirt unbuttoned and sliding off her shoulders, necktie between her exposed breasts and staring directly back at the viewer. It is the same image enlarged for the S.O.S. game box and the Galerie Piltzer performance. Each of these formats is about public engagement: the game necessitates outside players, the performance asked

94  Marissa Vigneault gallery visitors to chew gum and the Marxism and Art poster was hung around SoHo and handed out to passers-by. The viewer of Wilke’s body thus becomes a participant in the creation of its meaning, and by extension responsible for their objectification of her body. But this has the potential to be converted into something redemptive, notably awareness of the person as subject. Wilke’s full-frontal posture is matched by her full-frontal stare: she is aware of us looking at her just as we are aware of her looking at us looking. We engage in an exchange, not in the Marxist sense of economic valuation of another’s bodily labour, but an exchange of awareness and recognition. And as our eyes begin to adjust to the image we notice the small forms that cover her skin, running parallel to the edges of the tie and kissing the borders of her face. These marks on the body, a type of feminist “Marks-ism” rooted in feminist ideology, are internal wounds that Wilke made externally visible.8 The marks on Wilke’s flesh in the S.O.S. photos are miniature gum sculptures, small sugary forms alternately pressed against her face, torso, fingers and back in slightly different arrangements. The little twisted gum ribbons are suggestively androgynous – she referred to them as “totally a male female form” – but primarily vulva-like with their soft openings suggestive of interior depths and double loops evoking clitoris and labia (Wilke 1978). Wilke began folding such forms in the early 1970s, using malleable kneaded erasers as her first material; for example, New York Public Library, New York (1975) features a small army of decorative grey folds pressed along the sharp architectural edges of the building. A desire to add colour to the minisculptures without having to paint them led to her switch to chewing gum a few years later. The gum sculptures reflect Wilke’s visual solution to merging the two-dimensional (a painted ground) and three-dimensional (a folded form). We can look to her chromatic gestural drawings and ceramic folds from the 1960s, which are ripe with sexual and erotic referents, as precedence for her gum folds and coloured latex sculptures of the 1970s.

Stars, Scars and Stigmata Beyond the formal, Wilke viewed the gum as a symbolic referent, with specific gender and sociocultural meanings. She stated: “I chose gum because it’s the perfect metaphor for the American woman – chew her up, get what you want out of her, throw her out and pop in a new piece” (Berman 1980, 77). Wilke affiliated the disposability and empty attachment of the consumer product – chew, swallow, spit out, repeat – with women, and specifically with the way they are used as temporary objects of pleasure with no regard to their individual being. Within a consumer framework, women are structured as image-ideals to be bought and sold, as models and as model shoppers, regarded as starified objects. Wilke named herself such in both the title of the S.O.S. series and in the S.O.S. game instructions. Starification suggests a process of conversion, making someone into something. Perhaps our best example is from Hollywood, Norma Jeane Mortenson starified into Marilyn Monroe, whose tragic end mirrors Wilke’s citation of the consumption of women by a society that uses them purely for their own pleasure. As Joanna Frueh (1996, 143) has written: “To be ‘starified’ is, in some measure, to be ill-starred, and the ‘ornaments’ decorating Wilke in S.O.S. are not only scars but also stigmata. They make the model woman into a martyr”. Monroe, infamously martyred by the press and converted into sainthood by Andy Warhol, existed in life and now in death as an image-object exchanged between men

Hannah Wilke’s S.O.S. Starification Object Series (1974–82) 95 (patriarchal culture) and valued only for her sugary exterior. Laura Mulvey (1996, 216) duly notes: Marilyn Monroe, with her all-American attributes and streamlined sexuality, came to epitomise in a single image this complex interface of the economic, the political, and the erotic. By the mid 1950s, she stood for a brand of classless glamour, available to anyone using American cosmetics, nylons and peroxide. Monroe’s interior wounds from continual surveillance and objectification were thus masked under the feminine façade of platinum blonde hair and kohl-lined eyes. And that one little “scar” above her red-stained lips – a so-named “beauty mark” – recorded as a pleasing interruption. Monroe’s beauty mark connects back with historical fashioning of the body, in particular the 18th-century French courtly trend of applying small mouches (Fig. 5.3) made of black taffeta or velvet to the face to

Figure 5.3   Gilles Edme Petit, after François Boucher, Le Matin, La Dame a sa Toilete, 1745–1760, etching and engraving, 31.5 × 21.5 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1953 (53.600.1042).

96  Marissa Vigneault highlight otherwise flawless skin, and their reappearance in the early decades of the 20th century as “beauty spots”, manufactured by Johnson & Johnson (the company’s first cosmetic product).9 But what of the mark that multiplies, that exceeds the boundaries of “beauty” to become something else, as we see with Wilke, whose stars are also scars and stigmata? The gum sculptures are in effect scars that make visible the interior invisibility of wounds, what Wilke (1978) called the “emotional wounds…the internal wounds that we carry within us, that really hurt us. You know, having to be ‘pretty’, or, being pretty, and being thought of as stupid”. What we see in S.O.S. is the woundedness of the female body under patriarchal conditioning, which is evidenced as “lack” in a Western society that upholds “penis envy” over “Venus envy”.10 To make up for such perceived lack, women are instructed in the art of artifice, that is to say femininity, which necessitates a type of masquerading via makeup, accessories and clothing. Yet it is precisely this “making up” that is used to declaim women of authenticity or essence, to see her as “pretty stupid”, capable only of “telling stories”. She is forever artificial in the eyes of patriarchy, a conglomeration of sugary chemicals carelessly folded for men’s pleasure. It is care that Wilke invested in the body, an attentiveness that resists the patriarchal insistence on carelessness. She carefully folded the chewed gum into tiny colourful ribbons, dotting her flesh with little symbolic wounds unavoidable to the viewer’s eye. In exposing the wound, that is making visible what has historically been forced as invisible, Wilke resisted concealment and shunned the conventional requirements that women remain silent. She employed the artificial as artistic strategy by starifying and scarifying herself. But because Wilke used her body as material, highlighting the real effects of flesh and hair in her performances, critics, including other feminists, accused her of narcissism, the derisive label put onto women who spend more time on self-reflection than patriarchal society allows. When women turn the camera on themselves (in acts of self-reflection), they are automatically accused of narcissism, but such categorisation is to be understood as attempts to neutralise the perceived threat of a woman who reflects on her own image as a way to consider how she is imaged. Because women are positioned within consumer culture as object-images (who both buy and are bought; this is why we look at images of other women wearing clothes in fashion magazines and feminised mannequins in department store windows), the threat to patriarchal/consumer culture comes when women aim to take control of that image in resistance to their objectification as commodity for economic (pleasurable) exchange. This is resistance in the “third space”, where “a new area of negotiation of meaning and representation” is constructed through the strategic uses of hybridity and mimicry, in extension of Homi Bhabha’s terms, where the colonised is here understood as the woman’s body and the coloniser as patriarchy.11 Hybridity and mimicry are powerful tools for the artist, and Wilke used them both in the creation of S.O.S., where hybrid forms of chewing gum scars mar the exposed flesh of a body mimicking the feminine posturing favoured by the culture industry. Following Luce Irigaray, Wilke’s mimicry of the feminine pose is only strategically useful if she is “highly conversant in the required behavior”, and it is only successful as strategy if it fails (Irigaray 1985, 76). Wilke’s mimicry meets Irigaray’s qualification, as it is successful as strategic intervention into the commodification of women’s bodies; she exposed the wounds of objectification via the rituals of beautification in order to reveal femininity as constructed artifice, hence its “failure”. And her pop culture

Hannah Wilke’s S.O.S. Starification Object Series (1974–82) 97

Figure 5.4   “American Beauties” playing cards, illustrations by Gil Elvgren, Stancraft Products, 1960.

styled personas in S.O.S. exemplify an artistic tactic of mimicry aimed towards the creation of an alternative space not permissible – or perhaps not recognisable – in what Irigaray calls a “between-men culture” (Johnson 2013, 105). In a “betweenmen culture”, women’s bodies function as “exchange values”; a fabulous example of this are decks of playing cards featuring American beauties, pin-ups and artist models (Fig. 5.4). These are cards specifically manufactured for men to use while playing games, oftentimes exchanging money, so that economic value and card image value are intertwined. Looking again at the S.O.S. game box and the 28 numbered cards, we see precisely Wilke’s knowledge of feminine performativity and her failure of such feminine performance; it is a successful mimicry of the “between-men culture” and a subversive use of their language of women’s desire in order to create a new language of women’s sexuality at the level of the individual. Wilke’s language of desire is one of visibility. By marking her body with small gum scars, she drew attention to herself as a medium of exchange, not as object but of knowledge. Her language, like a rearranged Morse Code spelled out across the flesh, speaks of other spaces of desire that reject the discourse “between-men”. The gum marks are seductive, in the same way that beauty spots are. But they are also riotous eruptions that create their own language of the body, like mouches, which were themselves a form of coded language – both flirtatious and political – that conveyed meaning via placement. This is symbolic communication intended to construct a relationship and a common ground of understanding. It is how a hashtag functions today

98  Marissa Vigneault on social media and why the creation of #MeToo has been such a powerful tool; it is the formation of a new language shared between women that not only forecloses patriarchal predators, but also calls them out for their destructive behaviour.

S.O.S. in the Midst of Me Too Wilke’s S.O.S. series is a product of its moment, but it is equally conversant in our present moment, demonstrating a fluidity of movement between sociocultural and political concerns of the 1970s and today. Our world is still virulently misogynistic, a fact I witnessed in my own country of the United States in September 2018, when Dr. Christine Blasey Ford testified at the confirmation hearing of now Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, sharing her traumatic story of being sexually assaulted by him as a teenager. Blasey Ford stood before the Senate Judiciary Committee almost exactly 27 years after Anita Hill stood to offer her own testimony of sexual harassment by then nominee to the Supreme Court Clarence Thomas. And while the voices of neither women mattered in the machinery of politics – the Republicans were going to force their men through – both spurred the rallying call: Believe Women. And another hashtag emerged: #DrFordLoveLetter, to send words of support to Blasey Ford. Poignantly, one on Me Too letterhead reads: We witnessed you show up for duty not as a superhero, but as a fully human woman. You showed us that the new hero – the kind of heroism called for in this moment – is a woman facing the patriarchy with no weapons other than her voice, her body, and the truth. This is precisely what Wilke did in S.O.S.: faced the patriarchy with no weapons other than her voice, her body and the truth. Our moment of collective social reckoning is simultaneously one of institutional awareness, specifically of the way that the institutional has allowed, often via silent protection, perpetually destructive behaviour by particularly monstrous men. So what we must register – not newly, but again – is that institutions are not neutral, which includes the space of the museum (#museumsarenotneutral). The museum is to be understood as a space of constructed history, and the objects chosen for display and the ways in which they are put on display must be recognised as reflections of cultural biases and expectations. Institutional choices (often more compliant than resistant) have tended to maintain a particular narrative of gender, class and racial privilege meant to reflect back and reinforce the viewer’s own position of power, which has preserved a certain type of viewership in the space of the museum. Yet, there are potent examples of contemporary curatorial intervention into perceived neutrality that aim to activate the spaces of the museum and offer other possibilities: for engagement, discourse and community building. One such intervention is taking place at the Birmingham Museum of Art in Alabama, where temporarily taped to the wall next to a small Joan Mitchell painting was a sheet of paper with an “Extra! Extra! Read All About It” masthead and the headline “#METOO”. The text is part of a series of additional labels placed around the museum with the intention of creating a dialogue between objects in the collection and current events. The labels are temporary – the #METOO one was only up for six weeks in fall 2018 – as implied

Hannah Wilke’s S.O.S. Starification Object Series (1974–82) 99 by the ephemera of the material: paper and blue masking tape. What is particularly revolutionary, however, are these typed lines: the #metoo movement gained national attention last year [2017] when it became a social media hashtag to draw attention to the rampant sexual discrimination, harassment, and assault women have faced. This sexism and violence also shaped the history of art and the collections of institutions like the Birmingham Museum of Art … The Birmingham Museum of Art actively seeks to correct systematic exclusion by collecting work by people of all genders and colors across all periods. The Birmingham Museum of Art is doing the work to activate the museum in full recognition that the museum is not neutral, nor are the discourses of art history and the institutions that have shaped the discipline. This is precisely the level of institutional reckoning that must occur in redress of a history of exclusion, censorship, misogyny and racism, in the museum and in art history, as the Guerrilla Girls have been arguing since the 1980s. Their 2018 print 3 Ways to Write a Museum Wall Label When the Artist is a Sexual Predator is a stellar case-in-point: “Museums are deliberating how to respond to the #MeToo movement. We decided to help them figure it out”. That this is still an absolutely necessary endeavour is verified by the October 2018 circulation of an Evening Standard article announcing a major Lee Krasner exhibition at the Barbican Art Gallery that starts with the qualifier “Jackson Pollock’s artist wife”. Media work such as this erases the individuality of the subject in favour of a non-descript legal status. Wilke fought against precisely such erasure, and this is why S.O.S. remains so vital today. She knowingly used the title of the series – S.O.S., a warning and a cry for help – for others to take heed of what happens when, as a collective culture, we continue to star and to scar female bodies. There are repercussions to actions, and continual de-subjectification at the hands of patriarchal society will only hold so long. What S.O.S. continues to remind us, decades after its making, is that we have the power to perform together, in recognition of the clout of collective action. Language can scar, but it can also build a community of voices in opposition to the pure objectification of women’s bodies. #MeToo.

Acknowledgements I extend my deep appreciation and gratitude to Marsie and Andrew Scharlatt, who have both granted me access to Wilke’s archives and spent an immeasurable amount of time sharing personal stories about Wilke, her art and her life. Thank you, as well, to Brenda Schmahmann, for her tireless work on this anthology. This essay is in recognition of and in solidarity with all who have said “me too” and who continue to share their stories.

Notes 1 ... feminism is homework because we have much to work out from not being at home in a world. In other words, homework is work on as well as at our homes. We do housework. Feminist housework does not simply clean and maintain a house. Feminist housework aims to transform the house, to rebuild the master’s residence (Ahmed 2017, 7).

100  Marissa Vigneault 2 Scholarship on S.O.S. has rightly focused on Wilke’s feminist critique of consumer production, which perpetually objectifies and commodities women’s bodies. Notable publications on S.O.S. include Fitzpatrick (2009), Frueh (1989), Johnson (2013), Jones (1998) and Princenthal (2010). My interpretation of S.O.S. and Wilke’s overall artistic objectives builds on this previous scholarship, while also positioning Wilke’s performance-­based practice in our contemporary moment as a way to understand continuing narratives of oppression specifically against women. A work like S.O.S. reminds us that the political and social concerns of women in the 1970s hold strong two decades into the 21st century. 3 Recent scholarship by Fryd (2019) and Princenthal (2019) have highlighted the ways in which women artists, many driven by feminist politics, have addressed acts of sexual violence against women. 4 Naomi Alderman’s 2016 novel The Power speculates a world in which women, through newly developed powers of electric shock, have the ability to assert physical and psychological control over men in often horrifying ways. Alderman remarks: “People say to me, ‘Ah, your novel is a dystopia’. And I say ... ‘It’s only a dystopia for the men’. And in my world, nothing happens to a man that is not happening to a woman in the world we live in today. So if we find my world to be a dystopia, then we are already living in a dystopia” (quoted in Neary 2017). See also: La Ferla (2018). 5 For example, the S.O.S. images were taken by Wollam; Hannah Wilke Super-t-Art (1974) by Christopher Gierke and I Object: Memoirs of a Sugargiver (1977–1978) by Richard Hamilton. 6 The exhibition ran from January 1–25, 1975. 7 Hannah Wilke Collection & Archive, Los Angeles, CA. 8 In Wilke’s words: Starification-scarification/Jew, black, Christian, Moslem.. . . Labeling people instead of listening to them.. . . Judging according to primitive prejudices. “Marks-ism” and art. Fascistic feelings, internal wounds, made from external situation.  (quoted in Frueh 1996, 143) 9 Codes of beauty dictated how many and where mouches (plaisters in British culture) should be placed on the face and the body. Placement was significant, as location of the patches indicated flirtatious, romantic and/or sexual intention to those in the know of this language. Additionally, mouches covered up the deep, round scars left by smallpox, functioning as a type of proto-Band-Aid (another Johnson & Johnson product). 10 Wilke made a series of Polaroids with Richard Hamilton in 1980 titled Venus Envy, in which Hamilton’s head (strategically positioned between Wilke’s tufted pubis) visually transforms from birthed face to erect penis. 11 Bhabha also includes the strategies of “difference” and “ambivalence”.

References Ahmed, Sarah. 2017. Living a Feminist Life. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Berman, Avis. 1980. “A Decade of Progress, But Could a Female Chardin Make a Living Today”. ARTnews 79, no. 8 (October): 73–9. Bhabha, Homi K. 1994. The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge. Chen, Karissa. 2019. “My Body, My Story.” In Indelible in the Hippocampus: Writings from the Me Too Movement, edited by Shelly Oria, 199–206. San Francisco: McSweeney’s. Crenshaw, Kimberlé. 1989. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics”. University of Chicago Legal Forum 1989, no. 1: 139–68. Fessler, Leah. 2018. “Tarana Burke, Creator of Me Too, Believes You Don’t Have to Sacrifice Everything for a Cause.” Quartz (February 6). Fitzpatrick, Tracy. 2009. “Hannah Wilke: Making Myself into a Monument.” In Hannah Wilke: Gestures. SUNY-Purchase: Neuberger Museum of Art.

Hannah Wilke’s S.O.S. Starification Object Series (1974–82) 101 Frueh, Joanna. 1989. “Hannah Wilke.” In Hannah Wilke: A Retrospective, edited by Thomas H. Kochheiser, 10–103. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press. Frueh, Joanna. 1996. Erotic Faculties. Berkeley: University of California Press. Fryd, Vivien Green. 2019. Against Our Will: Sexual Trauma in American Art Since 1970. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press. Geter, Hafizah. 2019. “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” In Indelible in the Hippocampus: Writings from the Me Too Movement, edited by Shelly Oria, 251–58. San Francisco: McSweeney’s. Irigaray, Luce. 1985. This Sex Which Is Not One. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Johnson, Clare. 2013. Femininity, Time and Feminist Art. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Jones, Amelia. 1998. Body Art/Performing the Subject. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, La Ferla, Ruth. 2018. “Naomi Alderman on the World That Yielded ‘The Power.’” The New York Times (January 29). Modrek, Sepideh, and Bozhidar Chakalov. 2019. “The #MeToo Movement in the United States: Text Analysis of Early Twitter Conversations”. Journal of Medical Internet Research 21, no. 9: e13837 (September). doi: 10.2196/13837. Mulvey, Laura. 1996. “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes: Anita Loos/Howard Hawks/Marilyn Monroe.” In Howard Hawks: American Artist, edited by Jim Hillier and Peter Woollen, 214–30. London: British Film Institute. Neary, Lynn. 2017. “In ‘The Power,’ Women Develop a Weapon That Changes Everything.”NPR. All Things Considered (December 26). www.npr.org/2017/12/26/573507226/in-the-powerwomen-develop-a-weapon-that-changes-everything (Accessed 9 December 2020). Princenthal, Nancy. 2010. Hannah Wilke. New York: Prestel. Princenthal, Nancy. 2019. Unspeakable Acts: Women, Art, and Sexual Violence in the 1970s. New York: Thames & Hudson. Rekdal, Paisley. 2019. Nightingale. Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press. Wilke, Hannah. 1978. “Artist Hannah Wilke Talks with Ernst. Part 1.” Oasis d’Neon 1, no. 1: n.p. Wilke, Hannah, Marvin Jones, and Chris Huestis. 1985. “Politicizing Art: Hannah Wilke.” The New Common Good (May): 9. Wooster, Ann-Sargent. 1975. “Hannah Wilke.” Artforum 14 (December): 74–5.

6

Private Trauma, Public Healing Hannan Abu-Hussein’s The Vagina Series Tal Dekel

Palestinian artist Hannan Abu-Hussein (b. 1972), who is based in Israel, was born into a well-known Muslim family in Umm al Fahm in northern Israel and raised in a conservative Arab environment. Her works deal with personal and collective identity, traditional gender roles and sexuality. They expose and formulate the social and national forces affecting Palestinian women within their community as well as the general Israeli nation-state. Her many works, which she created in a strong and steady stream since the early 2000s, are driven by protest and the desire for social change. Through her unique, clear voice,1 Abu-Hussein highlights the exclusion and oppression that women of her community suffer as a consequence of belonging to a religious and national minority and to the female gender. Yet her work reaches out beyond the internal discourse of Arab-Palestinian society in Israel and spotlights oppressive conditions affecting all women living in patriarchal societies. Abu-Hussein is the very first artist in Israel to systematically refer to what ultimately came to be known as the #MeToo movement, a fact which is especially impressive in light of her conservative, even fundamentalist, religious background; the high rates of violence against women in the Arab community in Israel and the threats she personally suffered due to the provocative subject matter of her artwork (Interview by the author, 10 September 2020). 2 Abu-Hussein is a multidisciplinary artist, working in sculpture, installation, video and other media. However, in this chapter, I focus on examples from one series of soft sculpture pieces, titled the Vagina Series. The pieces are made of hanging nylon stockings that refer to the practice of sewing back the hymen of young Arab women before marriage, and skin-like stitched vaginal elements on small wooden frames. Although originating from the life experiences of members of the artists’ own community, they disclose all kinds of sexual violence women experience in patriarchal societies, as the series deals with traditional gender roles, sexuality and sexual oppression and issues of agency. The literature on Abu-Hussein’s work includes mostly articles in daily newspapers and magazines, and there are also a few articles on her art in academic contexts. Those in newspapers were mostly published as a result of, and response to, public criticism that the artist has received about her exhibitions (Livne 2003; Pere 2007; Regev 2003), 3 whereas the academic pieces were published in light of contemporary local art historians’ interest and who included her work as part of discussion about Palestinian women artists based in Israel (see Nassralla 2011 and Alkhateeb Shehada 2021). In addition, two academic articles focus exclusively on Abu-Hussein’s art (Nassralla 2016; Nassralla 2018), and recently, the first major exhibition catalogue of her late work (Harel 2019) was published. Apart from that, some textual information

Hannan Abu Hussein’s The Vagina Series  103 can be found online, while some “curator’s statements” that were offered as handouts when her shows were exhibited are available in archives (Smilan 2007). But although Abu-Hussein is known to the local art filed, and in the last couple of year perhaps could even be considered famous (or notorious, depending on one’s world view), her oeuvre still awaits in-depth comprehensive monographic research. This chapter, in which I focus on only one series from Abu-Hussein’s body of work, is intended to not only contribute to discourse about Abu-Hussein’s work but also to enhance understanding of the ways in which feminist art is created, perceived and deciphered in a specific region of the world.

Abu-Hussein’s Background During her studies towards a BA and an MFA in arts at the Bezalel Academy of Arts in Jerusalem, Abu-Hussein became gradually aware of feminist ideology and politics, deciding to integrate into her own work both personal and political elements, as she explains in an interview: I started to be interested in feminism, and understood that I must take an active part in changing my life, fighting against the tradition and religion that puts me behind, as a woman in Arab society. From childhood, our girls are policed. They are taught how to behave, how to sit and talk, where they may not go. This had pushed me not to want to be a woman at all. I started to wear loose clothes; I repressed any awareness of my body, of my awakening sexuality. Finally, through art I have gained the courage to accept myself, my gender, my body. My art has re-connected me to myself, to my femininity. (Pere 2007, 22)4 Art historian Aida Nassralla detects an especially strong influence of Egyptian feminist Nawal El-Saadawi on Abu-Hussein, who first encountered feminist theory during her academic studies (Nassralla 2018, 8). El Saadawi, a renowned Arab feminist activist, writer and physician born in 1931 in Egypt, has written many books about women in Islam, paying particular attention to the practice of female genital mutilation (FGM) in her society. She herself had suffered such violence, having undergone such a procedure at the age of six (Khaleeli 2010), but nonetheless, has risen to be one of the best known and most influential feminists in the Arab world, and indeed globally.

Hymens in Spiral Oppression Although dealing with the female body and its sexuality, Abu-Hussein was reluctant to create representations of fully naked women on canvas or any large-scale sculpture of unclothed women; therefore, she turned to create fragmented intimate parts of the body, in particular the female genitalia. As Aida Nassralla (2016) notes, all her projects outline a constant and clear strategy of reclaiming and representing the partial, and sometimes even completely absent, female body in patriarchal societies and in the Arab community in particular. The Vagina Series is an ongoing project that began in 2002. One of the first pieces in this series Abu-Hussein created was a large-scale installation constructed that year

104  Tal Dekel

Figure 6.1  Hannan Abu-Hussein, “Untitled”, from the Vagina Series, 2002. Mixed media. Source:  Photograph courtesy of the artist.

in the Jaffa Theatre hall, as part of the events for the International Woman’s Day, celebrated globally each year on March 8th. The piece was assembled out of hundreds of nylon stockings hanging from the ceiling, organised in a spiral form, each containing a ceramic white egg (Fig. 6.1). According to the artist, the piece refers to female genitalia and more specifically to the praxis of the membrane test many young Arab women undergo to ensure their virginity before marriage. In a conversation about the installation, Abu-Hussein said: This work is about the silenced subject of the sexuality of the Arab-Palestinian woman. The bride must be a virgin when married but it’s a taboo subject to talk about the fact that such tests are performed before the ceremony. (Interview with the author, 22 June 2015)5 The piece touches upon the correlations between the conservative community into which Abu-Hussein was born and the role that women take within the complex power relations of the patriarchal society, as the older women are often the ones to take on the role of performing the test and thus de facto police the sexuality of the young women in the community (Bjalkande et al. 2012, 120). As Abu-Hussein explains: This work has a direct connection to me. My grandmother, a midwife, was also the person performing the virginity tests for the brides-to-be. She would use a

Hannan Abu Hussein’s The Vagina Series  105 hard-boiled egg and insert it into the vagina of the woman. If the egg would get fully inserted and stay intact, then the woman would fail the test, proving she is “too wide”. Only if the egg is not successfully inserted then she is considered a virgin. This is, of course, absurd. It does not prove anything. And at any rate, we know that the virginity membrane is elastic. All this is just another way to police and oppress female sexuality. (Interview with the author, 22 June 2015) Indeed, many studies show that it is often the elderly of the community, both men and women, who decide when and how to regulate and police the sexuality of young Muslim women, sometimes even deciding to perform procedures such as FGM. Whereas it is women who usually perform FGM in the more rural areas, modern-trained professionals are the ones to conduct this practice in more urban centres (Leye et al. 2019).

Vaginas in Stitched Forms The next pieces in this series by Abu-Hussein were made with a more explicit focus on the vagina itself. The pieces she made in 2003 were constructed on square wooden frames sized 30 × 30 cm, on which the artist stretched nylon stockings, sewing the elastic substances in different ways, using thick, black thread (Fig. 6.2). In many ways, these pieces are reminiscent of feminist artworks describing female genitalia. Most significantly, Abu-Hussein’s series evokes feminist art of the 1970s, especially and directly those of the “cunt art” genre. Cunt art comprised the first political attempt to undermine traditional beliefs about a passive female sexuality and to challenge the phallocentric notion of women as simply an object for the sexual pleasure of men. In representing female sex organs, feminist artists produced a new lexicon of visual images that portrayed a political stance. From the early 1970s in the United States and elsewhere, some feminist artists in practical art studies and women’s and gender studies programmes deployed the vagina as a central motif within their work. During the 1970s, cunt art flourished in an abundance of styles, the artists engaging in it adopting a variety of materials, forms and images to depict the female sex organ (Dekel 2011, 37–45; Frueh 1994, 192–194). Vaginas appeared in photographs, paintings, wood and marble sculptures, casts, collages, sewn works and embroidery, and even moulded in latex on real bodies. It was perceived by its creators to represent an absolute female form that is not essentialist but profoundly political. Cunt art developed as part of the first-generation feminist artists’ attempt to deal with, examine and express their experiences in a social setting. Neither the anatomy nor the morphology of the vagina truly interested these artists. Rather, their principal motivation derived from the belief that by engaging with these shapes, women could come to value themselves and regard their bodies in an affirmative light. Cunt art was thus a significant personal art form as well as a social stance. For a variety of reasons, however, only in the late 1990s – two decades or more after feminist art movements had proliferated globally – did women artists in Israel begin to systematically and rigorously create art from a critical, feminist perspective.6 In Israel in the 1990s, women artists explored new, feminist, bodily discourses that challenged not only the modes of corporeal representation but also the concept

106  Tal Dekel

Figure 6.2  Hannan Abu-Hussein, “Untitled”, from the Vagina Series, 2003. Mixed media. Source:  Photograph courtesy of the artist.

of political art that was common in the contemporary mainstream local art field (Katz-Freiman 1994). Using materials in innovative ways not yet used by artists in Israel, Abu-Hussein was one of the very first to explore the fragmented bodily experience in local contemporary patriarchal culture, and especially to depict vaginas. Introducing a gendered understanding of the Palestinian female body, from a new, situated perspective, quickly made waves. The radical impact of her series lies in the new possibilities she created for self-representation and representations of vulnerability. The Vagina Series contributed to a more developed vocabulary, in terms of both iconography and material, pushing towards new representations of women’s corporal experience and subjectivity through the reappropriation of women’s intimate bodily parts. Abu-Hussein’s series destabilises cultural expectations, as her art echoes the characteristics introduced by feminist art in the United States and Europe, but never previously explored by women artists in Israel, offering a gendered reading of local Palestinian women in an innovative, bold manner (Alkhateeb Shehada 2021). Although Abu-Hussein’s works have some commonality with those of American feminist works, they differ in the critique they offer and the understandings of female

Hannan Abu Hussein’s The Vagina Series  107 sexuality underpinning it. Notwithstanding the strong and direct correlations to the feminist cunt art movement of the 1970s, Abu-Hussein’s vaginas do not celebrate sexual freedom and regained self-expression and self-satisfaction. Rather, her works voice a very basic attempt to rescue the vagina from violence, to stop the aggression it undergoes. Abu-Hussein’s Vagina Series became notorious and caused a storm even before the official opening of her exhibitions. For instance, the Imam of Jaffa,7 Sulaiman Stal, publicly called for a ban of her exhibition in 2003, stating that is not a proper subject to engage in, and proclaiming that “All Muslims should refrain from going to this exhibition. We are against this thing, and we have many other issues to deal with in our community. There should be a limit to what we should talk about in public” (Regev 2003, 12).8 In response to this, Abu-Hussein stated in interview: “All I want is the right to give my opinion. I do not object to religion, I really like most values and traditions in Islam, but some things are wrong. I want to open up a conversation about that” (Livne 2003).9 By addressing this through art and filling in the absence of visual representation of female experiences, and specifically of women’s sexuality, Abu-Hussein deploys visual activism (Deepwell 2020; Sliwinska 2021). This approach serves as an effective way to reveal the intersecting and overlapping oppressions of gender and religion that women suffer in Palestinian society in Israel (Nassralla 2018). This series gives visual form to the acute absence of the subject from public discourse. By choosing to represent just a fragmented part, not the whole body, she points to the fragmented position of the Palestinian woman within the state of Israel. Abu-Hussein’s choice points to the inherent inner tension between what is normally said and what is done de facto, as she explains in Nassralla’s research: We do not speak of the violence inflicted upon the woman’s body, but the female body is being violated and oppressed all the time. That is why I choose to create partial parts, disconnected to the entire body. This body cannot be completely revealed in its nakedness, it still needs to be somehow concealed. (Nassralla 2016, 65)10

Resonating Trauma The series derives its strength from the artistic processing of trauma, dissociation and the ability to interweave the private with a socio-political whole – a topic that keeps reappearing in Abu-Hussein’s rich body of work created over many years. The way Abu-Hussein deals with this sensitive topic makes an interesting comparison with images of sexual violence and assault on women in the Western art tradition. To begin with, most works were created by men. When those artists described women suffering sexual violence, their suffering was shown as a spectacle, with the subject matter of rape, or an impending violence, allowing emphasis on the beauty of female bodies displayed and arranged for the delight of male viewers. This is the case, for example, in Titian’s paintings of the “Rape of Lucretia” (1571), in Bernini’s sculpture “The Rape of Proserpina” (1621–1622) and in Giambologna’s “The abduction of the Sabine Women” (1581–1588). This practice, of course, has changed fundamentally, with the rise of so-called second wave feminism in the 1970s, as shown by Vivian Fryd (2019). Nonetheless, in contrast to the feminist works of the 1970s, AbuHussein chooses to avoid external evidence of agitation, horrified facial or physical

108  Tal Dekel expressions, and rather delivers the horror by restrained means, using a unique methodical aesthetic language. This approach turns her art into an intensive intellectual and political call for dealing with important and urgent matters, both within the Palestinian community and in broader Israeli and indeed global society at large. Abu-Hussein’s Vagina Series engenders a corporeal reading that facilitates viewers to feel the subject in a visceral way. Notably, the exact details of the works cannot be deciphered from a distance; only a close and intimate view reveals the tight, delicate, stretched nylon that was crudely sewn up with thick thread. The flesh-like mutilated vaginas generate an immediate and effective shock and pain to viewers’ bodies, especially those of women. Abu-Hussein stated that “I turn stockings, an object for women that is meant to cover and conceal the bare body, into the female body itself, a folded organ that is brutally stitched, that becomes blocked, closed off to the world” (Interview with the author, 22 June 2015). The choice of materiality and the likeness of the nylon fabric to human skin gives a strong impression of embodiment, evoking empathy that enhances engagement and a sense of shared destiny – that of falling victim to sexual violence that originates in living in a patriarchal, chauvinist society, and stemming from the shared experiences of silencing and lack of legitimacy to speak out about it. One of the greatest problems for women who fall victim to sexual violence is credibility, given patriarchal societies’ inherent disinclination to believe women’s complaints of sexual assault. Nicola Gavey (2019, 247–255) explains that a key pillar of rape culture is the extent to which rape narratives found across different legal and cultural sites show the persistence of a taken-for-granted “masculine point of view” that limits what can be spoken about rape, by whom and how it will be heard. Rape – both as a physical act and as an imagined threat – still keeps women in their place and protects existing hierarchies. Frequently, even the brave women who decide to take a stand and report such violence encounter a lack of belief and cooperation on the part of the police and official institutions. In her chapter titled “Sexual violence, transcultural silence and transversal solidarity”, Marsha Meskimmon writes: “In the case of sexual violence where the pressure upon survivors to remain silent is still widespread and those who do speak up can find themselves unheard, disbelieved or even subject to further violence” (Meskimmon 2020, 103). It is indeed a brave move to speak out, as such acts might elicit social sanctions, and in extreme cases even physical retaliation. Through the Vagina Series, Abu-Hussein brings closer to the viewer the experience of other women, who also have undergone sexual violence, and offers enhanced empathy and identification. She thus opens up a space in which the experiences of many, differently situated women can be engaged. By creating the Vagina Series, AbuHussein offers the possibility of freeing society from its taboos and freeing women of their shame, fear, stigma and silence. At the same time, by resonating countless testimonies, her own work gains powerful impact.

The Blanket and the Horrors Beneath it In 2007 Abu-Hussein created another stage of defiance in the Vagina Series, when she presented triangular stitched elements that refer to the vagina on large blankets (Fig. 6.3). The blankets belonged to her mother, who had received them as dowry when she got married, and as Abu-Hussein herself has never married (and often declared

Hannan Abu Hussein’s The Vagina Series  109

Figure 6.3  Hannan Abu-Hussein, “Vagina Blankets”, from the Vagina Series, 2007. Mixed media. Source:  Photograph courtesy of the artist.

her intention to stay single), she asked her mother for them in order to use them in her artwork. While sewing and stitching, she also added elements such as human hair, flower petals, razor blades and wax. Mimi Smilan (2007) writes about these works, indicating that they revolve around the repression of female sexuality. Using domestic materials, AbuHussein continues the tradition in Arab culture of crafting dowry objects passed down in the family from mother to daughter, but she adds subversive elements, creating alienation and estrangement. In addition to the embroidery that resembles scar-tissue of wounded vaginas, she embeds pieces of hair taken from the mother’s head and her own head.11 In an interview about this aspect of her work, Abu-Hussein explains: “In my community, the woman is expected to keep all cut hair throughout her life and upon her death to be buried with it” (Livne 2003).12 The presence of female body matter – pieces of hair (which in the local tradition must not be displayed in public) is a startling reminder of the intimate, often violent, intercourse performed underneath the covers of the bed, which is echoed through the embroidered scarred vaginas and remaining hair. A silenced testimony, the hair also refers to the abjected female body and especially to pubic hair. Thus, the direct challenge to the perceptions and fears associated with the female body made by bod(il)y art may well lie behind the harsh denunciation of all feminist art depicting female genitalia, not only cunt art of the 1970s. Such art, like performances involving sexual organs or invoking women’s anatomy and menstrual flow and other female

110  Tal Dekel “outrages”, is intended to draw the observers’ gaze towards their own deepest fears (Dekel 2013, 33–34). In an article entitled, “Horror and the Monstrous Feminine: An Imaginary Abject”, art critic Barbara Creed noted that [i]mages of blood, vomit, pus, shit, etc., are central to our culturally-constructed notions of the horrific. They signify a split between two orders: the maternal authority and the law of the father. On the one hand, these images of bodily wastes threaten a subject that is already constituted, in relation to the symbolic, as “whole and proper”. Consequently, they fill the subject with disgust and loathing. On the other hand, they also point back to a time when a “fusion between mother and nature” existed; when bodily wastes, while set apart from the body, were not seen as objects of embarrassment and shame. (Creed 1986, 51) The term “abjection” is primarily associated with the writing of Julia Kristeva. Among other issues in Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (1982), Kristeva discusses bodily secretions and the response they invoke in society, suggesting that it is precisely such items that arouse horror. Constituting a place where meaning collapses – the border between what is human and what is not – the abject threatens to annihilate the subject: “It is thus not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite” (Kristeva 1982, 3).13 Kristeva’s notion of perimeters and liminal sites adduces the notion of abjection – in the form of the woman’s body – being perceived not only as repellent but also as “attractive”, as it is linked to a broad spectrum of social and cultural norms and taboos alike. Thus, for example, the preoccupation with bodily secretions – particularly those of the woman’s body and thus also of sexual activity – symbolically regulates social customs and conduct. In her writing about Abu-Hussein’s Vagina Series, Aida Nassralla uses the term “Disgust Aesthetics” (Nassralla 2018). Introducing women’s hair in the works is what makes her works abject, Nassralla explains, as it holds cultural meaning in its very transgressiveness, from the erotically perceived hair of women’s hairstyles to associations with disgusting bodily sexual activity and female bodily fluids. Adding razor blades to the hairy stitched vaginas introduces a mixture of gendered functions – referring both to men’s praxis of shaving their beards and women’s shaving of the pubic hair, but also to the horrific praxis of female circumcision, or general violence towards the female genitalia (Smilan 2007). Of course, however, it is not only in traditional and religious societies that the female body is subjected to violence and at times even to surgical procedures of intimate parts. In the last decade, an ever-growing number of Western, non-religious women have chosen to undergo procedures such as “vaginal rejuvenation” (Braun 2009). As such, AbuHussein’s works resonate beyond traditional spheres, telling of the violence women undergo against their flesh – sometimes based on lack of choice but sometimes out of their desire to meet patriarchal motivations and endless demands of the “The Beauty Myth” (Wolf 1991).

Hannan Abu Hussein’s The Vagina Series  111

Local-Global – Sexual Violence against Women In the international Arab art scene, Abu-Hussein is not alone in overtly describing Arab women’s sexuality or explicit images of vaginas. Artists such as Egyptian Ghada Amer have undertaken similar journeys (Ankori 2006; Oguibe 2001). However, it is the specificity of Abu-Hussein and the position in which she is operating that distinguish her from other Arab women worldwide. The effects of living under occupation by the Israeli ethno-national state, where Palestinians suffer marginalisation, discrimination and systematic institutional violence, as well as general hostility from large parts of the Jewish population, trickles down and undoubtedly contributes to intra-community gender conflicts. Palestinian men, frustrated with their own difficult status within Israeli society characterised by a Jewish majority and ultra-militarist climate, sometimes act more violently towards women and girls in their community (Rought-Brooks et al. 2010). As a “minority within a minority”, Palestinian women are subjected to a two-fold oppression and therefore are doubly prone to violence against them. In Israel, a small country of 9,100,000 inhabitants deeply fissured along ethnonational lines, demographic issues are highly charged, given women’s key role in reproduction. Women’s bodies have been “expropriated” in favour of the ethno-national collective through social sanctions and even some actual laws that subordinate women to men in order to maintain the traditional gendered social order (Fogiel-Bijaoui 2017, 105). Israeli law serves as a tool for policing behaviour, thus heavily affecting women. Indeed, for all citizens, family laws (matters of marriage and divorce) are under the sole jurisdiction of religious tribunals, not civic courts. Jews are forced to manage their personal status in Rabbinical courts; Muslims must do so in the Sharia courts. This state of affairs, in which Israel does not separate between State and Religion, brings women in particular to a stratification point of inferiority, enabling gender-based crimes against them (although women in other countries also face the danger of falling victim to gender-based crimes). Abu-Hussein’s Vagina Series and her works in general serve as a vehicle for transnational feminist solidarity that women around the globe could relate to and unite around. The Vagina Series sends viewers on a deep and transformative journey – from situated knowledge to embodied empathy and onto cross-cultural feminist solidarity; it is as much a sensorial-corporeal project as it is an aesthetic and political one. While creating a situated, intersectional manifestation of Palestinian women’s oppression, Abu-Hussein nonetheless offers solidarity with women outside her community, pushing forward a sense of shared global destiny. Marsha Meskimmon notes that such feminist pieces deal not only with violence and silence, but with the possibility of embodied solidarities forged between diverse women … The imaginative tactility at the heart of the works forges solidarities across distances of language, culture and economic level; the work brings viewers close enough to touch and be touched. (Meskimmon 2020, 104) In Palestinian art history, the motherland, Palestine, was traditionally portrayed as a young, holy, virgin female (Malhi Sherwell 2001). Nonetheless, alongside other Palestinian women artists based in Israel, Abu-Hussein avoids this patriarchal discourse and imagery, preferring in its place to create a visual vocabulary aiming to a vast regional dialogue that reaches out to Arab feminisms in the Middle East

112  Tal Dekel (Ozpinar and Kelly 2020), while also creating a firm alliance for transnational feminisms (Meskimmon 2020; Reilly and Nochlin 2007). Meskimmon further notes that [s]exual violence is the litmus test of transnational feminist solidarity-building, situated, as it is, both as a “universal” structural continuum that underpins social, economic and ecological injustice globally, and, as highly specific acts of personal violence manifest in widely disparate “local” forms. In other words, the imbrication of the global with the intimate is nowhere more brutally evident than in the case of sexual violence, and for transnational feminist seeking to end such violence, articulating the particularities of intersectional scaffolding that supports a worldwide pattern of sex and gender-based injustice and inequality is imperative. (Meskimmon 2020, 102) I argue that by creating the Vagina Series, Abu-Hussein offers a strong and clear answer to the question posed by Gayatri Spivak (1993) in her seminal essay, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Abu-Hussein performs the kind of intervention the Spivak advocates – she disrupts both the masculine coloniser monologue and his cultural production, while simultaneously intervening in the artistic production of Western feminist artists. By producing trail-blazing images that carry on a complex dialogue about feminist representations of women’s vaginas, especially against cunt-positive art, she reminds the viewer of and attends to women who are not preoccupied with advanced exploration of the newly gained treasures of female sexual pleasures. Rather than advocating fully free experiences of the vagina like some other feminist artists, she reaches out to women who suffer immediate, extreme and daily sexual violence and mutilation of their vaginas. Moreover, like generations of women before her, she uses the highly gendered medium of embroidery; but she subverts it to create her vaginal pieces, employing a traditional realm of women’s subordination to realise what Schmahmann (2011) suggests is a craft with creative and liberating potential. By engaging in and commenting on the rich art history of needlework (Harper 2000; Parker 1994; Pristash et al. 2009), she engages with lived experiences of women in both Islamic cultures and other cultures. Although initially shocking, the Vagina Series was mostly ignored by the Israeli art scene and local art historiography, until Abu-Hussein won the prestigious Beki Prize in 2019 (Lee 2019), which is awarded annually to celebrate one prominent feminist artist in Israel,14 and held a solo show in one of the leading local establishments, the Eretz Israel Museum in Tel Aviv, that same year (Harel 2019). Nonetheless, she is yet to be “discovered” within international discourse as an important, pioneering feminist artist, capable of making a substantial contribution to global feminist art and transnational feminist solidarity.

Notes 1 Contemporary feminist thought suggests that “experience” and “voice” are discursive products; the voice is not simply “there”, and experiences do not merely “happen” to women. Therefore, I acknowledge that one cannot be satisfied with just giving space and “making an experience heard” as a political project for its own sake. 2 This interview was in Hebrew and has been translated by the author.

Hannan Abu Hussein’s The Vagina Series  113 3 Although the last newspaper piece about Abu-Hussein’s art, a double-spread article in one of the leading national papers, Haaretz, was published as a result of the announcement that she was the winner of the annual “Beki Prize for Best Woman Artist in Israel” for the year 2019 (Lee 2019). 4 This interview was in Hebrew and has been translated by the author. 5 This interview was in Hebrew and has been translated by the author. 6 For an in-depth examination of the reasons for the “delayed reaction” and late reception of feminist art in Israel, see Dekel (2011). 7 Imam is an Islamic leadership position, most commonly used to refer to the worship leader of a mosque and Muslim community. 8 This interview was in Hebrew and has been translated by the author. 9 This interview was in Hebrew and has been translated by the author. 10 This interview was in Hebrew and has been translated by the author. 11 This commentary was in Hebrew and has been translated by the author. 12 This interview was in Hebrew and has been translated by the author. 13 In Chapter 4, Brenda Schmahmann – who quotes the same passage by Kristeva – discusses Usha Seejarim’s work in the light of this idea. See also Chapter 7, where Karen von Veh invokes this idea in relation to a work by Diane Victor. 14 www.womenartandgender.com/awards. Retrieved on 21 October 2020.

References Alkhateeb Shehada, Housni. 2021. “Activism Nashi Ba’amanut Ha’falestinit Be’Israel” (Palestinian Activist Women Artists in Israel). In Activist Art in Israel, edited by Tal Dekel and Shula Keshet. Tel Aviv: Achoti Press (to be published in July 2021) [Hebrew]. Ankori, Ganit. 2006. Palestinian Art, London: Reaktion Books. Bjalkande, Owolabi, Bailah Leigh, Grace Harman, Staffan Bergström and Lars Almroth. 2012. “Female Genital Mutilation in Sierra Leone: Who are the Decision Makers?” African Journal of Reproductive Health 16 (4): 119–131. Braun, Verginia. 2009. “The Women Are Doing It for Themselves? The Rhetoric of Choice and Agency Around Female Genital ‘Cosmetic Surgery’. Australian Feminist Studies 24 (60): 233–249. Creed, Barbara. 1986. “Horror and the Monstrous Feminine: An Imaginary Abject”. Screen 27 (1): 44–71. Deepwell, Katy. 2020. Feminist Art Activisms and Artivisms, Amsterdam: Valiz Press. Dekel, Tal. ed., 2011. “From First-Wave to Third-Wave Feminist Art in Israel: A Quantum Leap”. Israel Studies Journal 16 (1): 149–178. Dekel, Tal. 2013. Gendered – Art and Feminist Theory, Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Fogiel-Bijaoui, Sylvia. 2017. “A Rising Tide? Mixed Families in Israel”. Journal of Israeli History 36 (2): 103–123. Frueh, Joanna. 1994. “The Body through Women’s Eyes”. In The Power of Feminist Art: The American Movement of the 1970s, History and Impact, edited by Norma Broude and Mary Garrard, 190–207. New York: Harper and Row. Fryd, Vivian Green. 2019. Against Our Will: Sexual Trauma in American Art Since 1970, Pennsylvania: Penn State University Press. Gavey, Nicola. 2019. “The Persistence of Masculine Point of View in Public Narratives about Rape”. In Rape Narrative in Motion, edited by Ulrika Andersson, Monika Edgren, Lena Karlsson, and Gabriella Nilsson, 247–255. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. Harel, Yona (curator). 2019. Hannan Abu-Hussein – Installations, Tel Aviv: Eretz Israel Museum. Harper, Paula. 2000. “The Chicago Resolutions”. Art in America 88 (6): 112–115, 137–138. Katz-Freiman, Tami. 1994. “Introduction”. In Meta Sex 94 – Identity, Body and Sexuality, edited by Tami Katz-Frieman and Tamar El-Or, 143–152. Ein Harod: Mishkan Le’Omanut. Khaleeli, Homa. 2010. “Nawal El Saadawi: Egypt’s Radical Feminist”. The Guardian, 15 April.

114  Tal Dekel Kristeva, Julia. 1982. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, New York: Columbia University Press. Lee, Vered. 2019. “Ani Lokahat Et Ma Shehutach Be Vemishtameshet Beze Ba’Amanut Sheli” (I take all that was thrown at me, and use it in my art), Haaretz, 14 February [Hebrew]www. haaretz.co.il/gallery/art/.premium-MAGAZINE-1.7683241. Accessed 18 October 2020. Leye, Els, Nina Ekert, Simukai Shamu, Tammary Esho and Hazel Barret. 2019. “Debating Medicalization of Female Genital Mutilation/Cutting (FGM/C): Learning from (Policy) Experiences across Countries”. Reproductive Health 16 (1): 1–10. Livne, Neri. 2003. “Konfliktim min Ha’vagina” (Conflicts from the Vagina), Haaretz, 24 March [Hebrew] www.haaretz.co.il/misc/1.864955. Accessed 18 October 2020. Malhi Sherwell, Tina. 2001. “Imaging Palestine as the Motherland”. In Self Portrait – Palestinian Women’s Art, edited by Tal Ben Zvi, 166–160. Tel Aviv: Anadalus Press. Meskimmon, Marsha. 2020. Transnational Feminisms, Transversal Politics and Art, London and New York: Routledge. Nassralla, Aida (Mahagna, Nassera). 2011. The Representation of the Female Body in the Performances and Art of Palestinian Women in Israel, from 1998 to 2010, Dissertation submitted at Tel Aviv University [Hebrew]. Nassralla, Aida. 2016. “Nochehut Ve’Headrut: Haguf Hameforak Ba’avodot havideo shel Hannan Abu-Hussein” (Presence and Absence: The Deconstructed Body in the Works of Hannan Abu-Hussein). Hamidrasha 16: 65–76 [Hebrew]. Nassralla, Aida. 2018. “Amanut, Bzut, Feminism: Hamag’il, Ha’doche, Vehabazui Beavodoteha shel Hannan Abu-Hussein” (Art, Abject, Feminism: The Disgusting in the Works of AbuHussein). Migdar – Interdisciplinary Journal for Gender Studies 5: 1–20 [Hebrew]. Oguibe, Olu. 2001. “Love and Desire: The Art of Ghada Amer”. Third Text 15 (55): 63–74. Ozpinar, Ceren and Mary Kelly. 2020. Under the Skin – Feminist Art from the Middle East and North Africa, London: Oxford University Press. Parker, Rozsika. 1994. The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine, London: The Women’s Press. Pere, Adamit. 2007. “Beged Kefet” (Double Cloth). Signon Magazine, 13 September, p. 22 [Hebrew]. Pristash, Heather, Inez Schaechterle and Sue Carter Wood. 2009. “The Needle as the Pen: Intentionality, Needlework, and the Production of Alternate Discourses of Power”. In Women and the Material Culture of Needlework and Textiles, 1750–1950, edited by Maureen Daly Goggin and Beth Fowkes Tobin, 13–30. London: Ashgate. Regev, Dana. 2003. “Se’ara: Meitzav Hakolel Evrei Meen Nashi’im Beyafo” (A Storm: An Installation in Jaffa that Presents Female Sex Organs). Iton Tel Aviv, 21 February, p. 12 [Hebrew]. Reilly, Maura and Linda Nochlin. ed., 2007. Global Feminisms – New Directions in Contemporary Art, London and New York: Merrell Press. Rought-Brooks, Hannah, Salwa Duaibis and Soraida Hussein. 2010. “Palestinian Women: Caught in the Cross of Fire between Occupation and Patriarchy”, Feminist Formations 22 (3): 124–145. Schmahmann, Brenda. 2011. “After Bayeux: The Keiskamma Tapestry and the Making of South African History”. Textile: Cloth and Culture 9 (2): 158–193. Sliwinska, Basia. ed., 2021. Feminist Visual Activism and the Body, London: Routledge. Smilan, Mimi (curator). 2007. “Kisui Had” (Sharp Cover), Jerusalem: The Daviv Yalin Gallery of Art. Accompanying curator’s statement (handout, not published) [Hebrew]. Spivak, Gayatri [1988] 1993. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Colonial Discourse and PostColonial Theory: A Reader, edited by Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman, 66–111. London: Harvester Whatsheaf. Wolf, Naomi. 1991. The Beauty Myth – How Images of Beauty Are Used against Women, New York: William Morrow and Company.

7

Transgressive Martyrs in Diane Victor’s Wise and Foolish Virgins (2008) Karen von Veh

Diane Victor (b.1964) is a South African artist who, since the 1980s, has been making drawings and prints that comment on social difficulties in South Africa and often those experienced by women specifically.1 The work discussed in this chapter is a triptych of drawings titled Wise and Foolish Virgins (2008) which was made while Victor was teaching at Rhodes University in Grahamstown and first exhibited at the Aardklop Art Festival in 2008 when Victor was festival artist (telephonic correspondence between Victor and the author, 27 March 2020). From 6 to 28 August 2009, the work was included in a group exhibition on domestic violence curated by Jacki McInnes and Melissa Mboweni. The exhibition, titled Domestic, was held at Goethe on Main Gallery in Johannesburg as a project for women’s month. The triptych was also exhibited at the Faulconer Gallery, Grinnell, Iowa from 28 January to 17 April 2011, as part of Victor’s solo exhibition, Of Fables and Folly, held after her residency at Grinnell College in the United States. Grinnell College then purchased the triptych and it is now in their collection (Interview with Victor by the author, 20 August 2019, in Johannesburg). A brief discussion of the triptych can be found in the Domestic catalogue (McInnes and Mboweni 2009), a few sentences in the catalogue for Of Fables and Folly: Diane Victor Recent Work (McInnes 2011) and a short analysis in a monograph on Diane Victor’s work: Diane Victor: Burning the Candle at Both Ends (von Veh 2012a). This chapter, however, provides the first sustained scholarly discussion of the triptych. Victor’s Wise and Foolish Virgins does not refer directly to Jesus’ eschatological parable of the wise and foolish virgins in the Bible (Matthew 25, 1–13), which concentrates on one’s preparation (or lack thereof) for the second coming and the Last Judgement. These figures are instead a direct commentary on patriarchal control of women, including the management of women’s sexuality, as they portray the “virgin martyrs” St. Catherine on the left (Fig. 7.1) and St. Agatha (Fig. 7.2) on the right, both representing women who suffered to protect their virginity. Between them, looking less than perfect with her exposed leg and ambiguous expression is the Virgin Mary (Fig. 7.3), perhaps portraying the successful Virgin who survived and eventually ascended into heaven without dying, according to some versions of apocryphal literature. These transgressive images refer directly to the role Christianity and the state have historically played in the regulation of women and their sexuality, thus broadly referencing feminist discourses that question the grand narratives of patriarchy. They are also part of Victor’s ongoing engagement with the horrific spectre of femicides and violence against women (VAW) that, while a global problem, occurs in South Africa with considerably greater frequency than in most other countries. I argue that it is this dual significance, global and local, that makes Victor’s Wise and Foolish Virgins

116  Karen von Veh

Figure 7.1  Diane Victor, St. Catherine. Left-hand panel of The Wise and Foolish Virgins, 2008, charcoal stain drawing on paper, 190 × 120 cm. Source:  Photograph courtesy of the artist.

Diane Victor’s Wise and Foolish Virgins (2008) 117

Figure 7.2  Diane Victor, St. Agatha. Right-hand panel of The Wise and Foolish Virgins, 2008, charcoal stain drawing on paper, 190 × 120 cm. Source:  Photograph courtesy of the artist.

118  Karen von Veh

Figure 7.3  Diane Victor, St. Mary. Middle panel  of  The Wise and Foolish Virgins, 2008, charcoal stain drawing on paper, 190 × 120 cm. Source:  Photograph courtesy of the artist.

Diane Victor’s Wise and Foolish Virgins (2008) 119 an iconic feminist work. My identification of it as a “Mistress-Piece” is explained here through a close analysis of the way these drawings engage with a matrix of social, religious, political and cultural forces to expose imbalances of power. I contextualise these images by firstly engaging with the history of church and state and their combined impact on the regulation of women, women’s sexuality and the creation of “docile bodies”. I draw on Michel Foucault’s identification of the Church’s role in enforcing gendered power relations. Using this framework, I show how Victor’s work interrogates and resists these controlling structures that persist in impacting negatively on the lives of women. I analyse the transgressive nature of Victor’s triptych followed by a discussion of the South African social context to which they respond, which relates to ongoing problems of gender inequality and VAW, including domestic violence and femicide. Ultimately, I argue that Victor’s Virgins are an enduring symbol of women’s resistance (globally) but also a pertinent reminder that women in South Africa cannot afford to be complacent, despite our country’s progressive constitution inferring that, on paper, we have entered a “post-feminist” milieu. 2

Problematising the Christian Construction of Women’s Identity Victor is one of several South African women artists who have critically engaged with an ecclesiastical construction of women’s identity which has been historically entrenched both through dogma and religious iconography. Tracey Rose (b.1974), for example, has transgressively employed her artmaking to fundamentally undermine the religious message and its implications for women. Her photographic series, Lucie’s Fur Version 1:1:1 (2003), is a revision of Christian Biblical dogma from a feminist perspective. Her version of the story includes a homosexual “Adam and Yves” in the garden of Eden (thus negating Eve’s culpability in original sin) and a female messiah in the person of La Messie in Lucie’s Fur Version 1:1:1 – la Messie (2003).3 La Messie is presented as a young, almost androgynous woman who is dressed in leopard print underwear and is posed suggestively lifting her top. Around her feet are what appear to be snake-like plants made of penises, twining suggestively around her feet and straining upwards. The background is a rainbow-coloured cloud with a hazy halo over her head. Despite the halo she is contradictory, with the flames of hell on her shirt and a suggestively ambiguous sexuality. She might be identified as a young Virgin Mary, a messiah figure, a devil or a fertility Goddess.4 She embraces dualities, hybridities, pluralism and overlaid identities that cannot be neatly pigeonholed as good or evil. Her transgressive nature lies in this inability to be neatly categorised, or “normalised” in Foucault’s terms. Majak Bredell (b.1945) aims to expose religious suppression of women by overtly promoting female sexuality. Her paintings include post-Christian quasi-religious images of unashamedly sexual Goddesses and Madonnas.5 In addition, Sacred Marriage I and II (1997) displays examples of Adam and Eve in sexual congress presented as a positive and equitable image of both male and female sexuality. The emphasis on women’s sexuality in these works arises from contemporary responses to the historic imperative to regulate sexual behaviour and contain it within official discourse. Foucault (1990, 24) has identified this as a manifestation of the mechanisms of religious and state control, stating: “Sex was not something one simply judged; it was a thing one administered”. Regulation of sexuality was considered so vital to

120  Karen von Veh state management that control was instituted by documenting birth rates, marriage practices, fertility and population control, leading to delineated gendered behaviour in both economic and political spheres. In the West, the implementation of necessary regulations was brought about by a symbiotic combination of state and religious power. Religious frameworks were employed to manipulate women in particular, by promoting virginity as a sign of moral virtue. Foucault (1979, 194) notes the introduction, from the late middle ages, of regulation through conformity as a mechanism of control in society. One outcome of this strategy was the production of “normalised bodies” or what has, in feminist terms, been coined as “docile bodies”. These are evident in the idealised saints and Madonnas, prevalent from the early Renaissance onwards, with demure downcast eyes in flawless faces, who embody purity, submission and restraint. Victor’s parodic and satirical re-interpretations of the Virgin Mary and virginal saints transgress the expectations of society, religion and art, to counter historic attempts at the control of women by countering this visual idealism of purity. The history of ecclesiastical attitudes to sexuality lies in the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. When first Eve and then Adam ate the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, they became aware of their sexuality, ashamed of their nakedness and made fig leaf aprons to cover themselves (Genesis 3, 7). St. Augustine, in The City of God, which was written in 413–426 (Augustine 1950), pointed out that the aprons covered their genitals rather than their mouths or hands that actively committed the deed. Marina Warner (1983, 54) explains: “From this he reasoned that the knowledge they acquired was of an inner force, which he called epithymia (concupiscence). It affects all areas of life, he wrote, but particularly the sexual act, which cannot be performed without passion”. Adam and Eve were punished for this knowledge by their expulsion from the Garden of Eden and ultimately by death, so sexuality, sin and death became conflated in church doctrine. By the fourth century AD, however, the church increasingly blames Eve as the sole perpetrator of original sin (Warner 1983, 58). Women, and by implication their sexuality, became demonised and the desire to neutralise their power by promoting asexuality developed as a pervasive motif in church doctrine. Those women who elected to protect their purity were sanctified by their actions, which were recognised as reparation for the sin of Eve. The promotion of physical denial and abstinence then became a mechanism of control over women so the images of virgin saints that abound in religious iconography are employed to reinforce the notion of virginity, which is conflated with spirituality. Furthermore, as Warner (1983, 72) states: “the image of the virgin body was the supreme image of wholeness, and wholeness was equated with holiness”. With reference to the importance of wholeness, shoring up and hermetically sealing the body, both Warner (1996, 241–243) and Lynda Nead (1997, 7–8) refer to an allegorical painting of Chastity (mid- to late 1550s) by Giovanni Battista Moroni. The figure is of Tuccia, the Vestal Virgin of Rome sitting proudly with a colander/ sieve on her knee that is full of water but is not leaking. According to the writings of both Pliny and Valerius in the first century AD, Tuccia was accused, unjustly, of breaking her vow of chastity. To prove her innocence, she filled a sieve with water from the Tiber River. She then carried the unleaking sieve back to the temple of Vesta and offered it to the goddess “as proof of her continence” (Warner 1996, 242). There is an accumulation in this story, as noted by Warner (1996, 242), of ideals of wholeness, integrity and the unviolated (continent) virginal body that has been conflated

Diane Victor’s Wise and Foolish Virgins (2008) 121 here with virtue and goodness.6 Nead (1997, 31–33) comes to a similar conclusion but rather than emphasising the religious connotations of wholeness and purity, she associates this image with an attempt to counteract the patriarchal horror of a woman’s sexual body that is porous and leaks, oozes, bleeds and is altogether unruly.7 Nead’s reading of the image of Tuccia metaphorically refers to a body that can be tamed, a docile body that is contained and made whole through the regulation of art as it cannot be in life. Between Nead and Warner, we are dealing with two separate discourses pursuing the same ends, religion underpinned by patriarchy and patriarchal aesthetics in art; both of which have conspired to contain and control the female body and thereby regulate female sexuality.

The Wise and Foolish Virgins Foucault (1990, 92, 93) has described social/political power as a dynamic network or web that is subject, in a fluid ever-changing manner, to resistance by dissidents or revolutionaries. Artists are just such dissidents; they raise awareness of certain injustices promoted by current structures of power and perform the vital function of disturbing society’s conscience. At the same time, they are part of this present society and work within its structures (Foucault 1990, 94). This understanding is important for what might be termed the contemporary iconoclasm identified in Victor’s Wise and Foolish Virgins, in that they could be said to question not only the “sacred” value of the images that they parody, but also the meanings conveyed by those images. Meaning accrues through dialogue between past and present incarnations, and the moral tenor implied by a biblical original automatically imbues the content of these transgressive parodies with an emotive ethical dimension that discourages uninterested or passive viewing. Victor’s images of The Wise and Foolish Virgins complicate the notion of wholeness as a requirement for virtue in both religious and aesthetic terms. Saints Catherine and Agatha were selected for this triptych by Victor as they each suffered and died to protect their virginity (Interview with Victor by the author, 27 July 2011, in Johannesburg). Saint Agatha (c. 231 AD) was born into a wealthy family in Sicily and consecrated her life and her virginity to Christ. She was purportedly very beautiful and pious, gentle and well-behaved (“ideal” qualities for a wife) so was pursued by a high-ranking diplomat, Quintianus, who tried to force her to marry him against her will. When she persistently refused his advances, he first sent her to a brothel as punishment for her disobedience, then to prison where she was “stretched on a rack … torn with iron hooks, burned with torches, and whipped” (St. Agatha [O]). After the rack both of her breasts were torn off and she was roasted over flaming coals until she died (Morgan 1994, 30–31). According to Tom Morgan (1994, 142), St. Catherine (c. 287–305 AD) was similarly well born (an Egyptian princess) beautiful, quiet and pious, and had numerous offers of marriage due to her obvious “marriageable qualities”. She converted to Christianity after receiving a vision of the Virgin Mary who exhorted her to become the “bride of Christ”. This resulted in her refusing all offers of marriage, after which she enraged the current emperor, Maxentius, by protesting against his persecution of Christians. He then (ironically) also pursued her for marriage but when she rejected his advances, he ordered her to be attached to a spiked wheel so her body could be pierced and broken.8 When she miraculously survived this torture, he had her

122  Karen von Veh beheaded (Morgan 1994, 145). The grisly deaths of both saints are referred to by Victor in her drawings. Each figure is stained with patches of charcoal and water, replicating the areas of damage caused by the torture to which they were subjected. The stains refer to blood from the wounds that they have received so the darkest stains on Agatha represent her torn breasts and Catherine is covered by a pattern of small perforations from the wheel. The stains obscure areas of the delicate linear drawings of each figure as if they have seeped onto a sheet that might have been wrapped, like a shroud, around the corpse of each victim.9 Ironically, this evidence of the piercing of their bodies emphasises their corporeality, foregrounding, in Nead’s (1997, 8) words, “the worrying connotations of yielding and porous skin or oozing gaps and orifices”. Despite their purported chastity and purity, these images express the antithesis of both the church’s notion of wholeness/holiness and the regulatory idealisation promoted by religious iconography when depicting submissive, beautiful saints as role models. St. Catherine, with her bared breasts and arched back presumably replicating the curve of the wheel, actually appears to be in the throes of sexual ecstasy. Her scant clothing and bodily expression is anathema to the chastity expected of saints. This does not appear to be a docile body but displays the antithesis of patriarchal control over women’s sexuality. At the same time, the bloodstains around her express the punishment received for her lack of submission. St. Agatha, although fully clothed and with a suitably submissive mien, appears to be cradling the evidence of her corporeality and her victimisation. Her gesture is a form of self-protection against the patriarchal violence she has been subjected to, despite apparently fulfilling all other patriarchal expectations. Her left hand has been arbitrarily sliced off at the wrist and she steps forwards towards a black mass in the lower register as if she is about to be engulfed by this cloud of oblivion (death). Victor’s interventions in these two saints appear to demonstrate that the fate of women in a violent patriarchal society does not depend necessarily on their behaviour or their sense of autonomy. All women are vulnerable both globally and particularly in South Africa today as will be discussed below. The analysis of Victor’s Virgin Mary has been left until last as the Virgin carries a weighty responsibility in religious iconography. She is the perfect woman in both religious and patriarchal terms and has been promoted as a role model for centuries, as the epitome of pure, submissive, self-renunciation. Religious iconography has underpinned her status by always presenting the most idealised and beautiful renditions of the Virgin with modestly downcast eyes in an unblemished face. She is identified primarily by her identification as Virgin, which, in the argument discussed above, automatically renders her whole/holy. Warner (1983, 73) states that this holiness was even maintained in images of Mary as the Madonna: “Her physical virginity post-partum was as important a part of orthodoxy in the early Church as her virginal conception by the power of the Holy Ghost”. Warner (1983, 77) goes on to explain that St. Augustine believed the marriage of Joseph and Mary to have been a marriage blanche with no sexual intercourse and no further children. Moreover, he advocated continence in marriage as the ideal expression of love, in as much as virginity was the ideal of womanly purity (Warner 1983, 77). Mary is the odd one out in this triptych because she was not martyred. According to apocryphal10 literature and medieval beliefs, because she was pure and perfect (i.e. prelapsarian), she was not even subject to death but ascended bodily into heaven

Diane Victor’s Wise and Foolish Virgins (2008) 123 like Jesus. This does not appear anywhere in the Bible but Warner (1983, 82) notes that from medieval times the stories became so coherent and widespread that they “influenced profoundly the dogma of the Assumption which was proclaimed an article of faith by Pope Pius XII in 1950”. Perhaps this is why, in Victor’s drawing, this Virgin Mary looks slightly smug, or at the very least enigmatic. Despite not suffering an earthly death, she is surrounded by the same “bloodstains” as the two saints on either side. Or perhaps in this instance they should just be read as dirty marks? They pool around and above her as if they are clouds of smoke emanating from her flaming heart. They almost obliterate the crown she wears, smothering the evidence of her status as a “Heavenly Queen” and perhaps rightly so in this instance as she only attained this accolade because her purity was not in question. Her purity also appears compromised by the suggestively revealed bare leg and the half-closed “bedroom eyes” while the whole figure is besmirched by watermarks and smudged charcoal. A more critical reading of the image is reinforced by further details, inserted by Victor, to ensure that we are not beguiled by the “rewards” of conformity to an impossible role model.12 Victor notes that this image was directly inspired by a small statue of a Virgin, Inmaculada Concepción by Spanish Baroque sculptor Gregorio Fernandez (1625/6), from Santa María de la Redonda, Logrono, Spain (Interview with Victor by the author, 27 July 2011, in Johannesburg). This statue has a crown and the same stance as Victor’s Virgin with hands clasped in prayer and one knee bent. The statue is surrounded by a gilded mandorla,13 consisting of radiating rays signifying emanations of light from her figure, like a bodily halo. Victor stated that the rays of light on the sculpture looked to her like spikes and she was immediately reminded of a wolf trap (Interview with Victor, 27 July 2011), so in her drawing, the slightly wavy lines of light in the sculpture become sharp teeth that signify Mary’s imprisonment within the constraints of patriarchal expectations. Where Fernandez’ Mary stands on the head of an angel, Victor’s Mary appears to be stepping forward to escape her prison but in so doing is about to step on the spring device that will snap the wolf-trap shut. She is not, therefore, the docile, submissive icon of perfection that permeates religious iconography. Her disobedience in daring to step forward out of her demarcated role will be “suitably” punished, however, as she is about to be trapped, pierced by the spikes, and thereby ultimately rendered unworthy. Victor’s wounded martyrs and foolish virgins are part of a much larger body of works that persistently raise the issue of rape, violence and femicide in her oeuvre. Her most recent examples include the installation for the Aardklop Art Festival in 2018 which was titled The Fourteen Stations – referring to the 14 Stations of the Cross. It consisted of 14 smoke drawings on glass, portraits of women killed by an intimate partner. Each drawing was projected onto brutalist cement walls in the atrium/ stairwell of the Sanlam Auditorium and provided a ghostly image for reflection and contemplation of the lost lives and wasted potential they represented.14 Victor also created an entire body of work on VAW, for an exhibition at the Goodman Gallery in Cape Town, held in June–July of 2018, titled Which Hunt. The ubiquitous nature of this problem in South Africa ensures that it is always foremost in Victor’s oeuvre,15 as making art is her way of processing upsetting subject matter (Interview with Victor, 27 July 2011). This brings me to the second aspect of these works, referring to a global problem, but one that is particularly rampant in South Africa. 11

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Violence against Women in South Africa The official South African statistics indicate that our country exceeds most others in the vulnerability of our women (other than a country at war). The Women’s Danger Index, published on the 15 July 2019 by Asher and Lyric Ferguson, indicates that South Africa is the most dangerous country in the world for women travelling alone (Ferguson and Ferguson 2019). It is the women who live in this country, however, who bear the brunt of daily abuse which is particularly prevalent within homes or perpetrated by intimate partners, as Jacki McInnes and Melissa Mboweni (2009, 3) explain: Domestic violence thrives in our country because it is typically ignored by those not directly involved, and suppressed by those who are. The topic continues to be shrouded in silence motivated by intimidation, shame and the fear of stigmatization. The statement above is taken from the catalogue for the exhibition they curated entitled Domestic.16 As mentioned in the introduction Victor’s Wise and Foolish Virgins was shown at this exhibition and clearly references the effects of patriarchal violence. Domestic includes many works by women artists who attempt to raise awareness of rape, femicides, beating and domestic violence in all its forms. Victor’s bloodstained martyrs fit perfectly into this theme as they “expose the hypocrisy of an ethos that promotes quiescent suffering and patient submission as ideal feminine virtues” (von Veh 2012a, 63). The widespread practice of effecting patriarchal control though physical means in the home is raised in the introduction to the study on Violence against Women in South Africa: [O]ne in five women older than 18 has experienced physical violence. This figure is reportedly higher in the poorest households, where at least one in three women has reported physical violence. A 2009 Medical Research Council study reported that three women die at the hands of their intimate partner every day. This femicide rate is five times more than the global average. The rate of sexual violence is also one of the highest in the world. (Sibanda-Moyo et al. 2017, 5) Domestic violence is, however, merely one aspect of a greater problem. In April 2017, the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation (CSVR) published a study titled Violence against Women in South Africa: A Country in Crisis (SibandaMoyo et al. 2017). In the executive summary, the researchers, Nonhlanhla SibandaMoyo et al. (2017, 5), state that violence towards women is endemic in South Africa. This is despite the advantages of a constitution that guarantees equality and strong legal policies aimed at protecting and promoting women’s rights. Legislatively, it appears that we have attained a post-feminist status yet the reality of women’s experience is the antithesis of post-feminism. Pumla Dineo Gqola (2016, 63) explains: This talk of the “empowerment of women”, as currently employed and aired in South Africa, rests on the assumption that ensuring that some women have access to wealth, positions in government and corporate office, is enough gender-progressive work for our society.

Diane Victor’s Wise and Foolish Virgins (2008) 125 In other words, the presumption of gender equality is deeply flawed as it rests on a small percentage of the population. It takes no cognisance of those with less access to education and thereby less access to economic empowerment or any kind of agency in social and political terms. The scale of the problem in South Africa is not only borne out by statistical studies but in constant media headlines; to the degree that the South African public are in danger of becoming numbed by relentless reports of assault, rape, gang rape, murder, mutilation and other ways of inflicting pain on women. The most common forms of violence are sexual attacks that include a high percentage of intimate partners as perpetrators.17 The problem is that in South Africa all forms of VAW appear to be insurmountable and, according to the study on Violence against Women in South Africa (Sibanda-Moyo et al. 2017, 10): The perpetrators cut across racial and colour lines, socioeconomic standing and educational background. Perpetrators of VAW in South Africa range from prominent sportsmen, high-ranking political officials and professors in universities, to the average man on the street. The pervasive nature of gender-based violence has been identified in some studies as a manifestation of the violence that permeates South African society in general. Reasons for such behaviour are complex and associated with historic injustices instigated by apartheid. Violent strategies employed in the struggle for liberation have created a legacy “that legitimises violence as means of resolving social, political and even domestic conflicts at family and community levels” (Sibanda-Moyo et al. 2017, 12). Steven Hunt (2003) furthermore suggests the inequality (both social and economic) that pertained during apartheid is still a factor exacerbating violence in contemporary South Africa. Many people who expected their lives to improve after the democratic government took power in 1994 have become increasingly angry at the fact that nothing seems to have changed. Gender-based violence has thus been understood in relation to this general milieu of disaffection that results from a country in transition, in other words, it is normalised by such studies. There are other pertinent issues in South Africa, however, relating to the historic prevalence of patriarchy in our society, that raise questions about the conclusions reached above. The relevance of patriarchal attitudes in exacerbating violent solutions is discussed in the Violence against Women report;18 it is inferred in the 2018 Statistics South Africa study on Crime against Women in South Africa;19 and is also raised by Kylie Thomas et al. (2013) who point to an underlying patriarchal bias both before and after transition. As Thomas et al. (2013, 520) explain, both sexual and other forms of gender-based violence must not be understood as “an aberration, but rather as systemic and structural, with a clear purpose in demonstrating male dominance over women … As feminists have shown its root cause is not turbulence but patriarchy”. 20 In terms of rape, Gqola (2016, 21) would agree with this statement. In her book Rape: A South African Nightmare, she defines rape as “the communication of patriarchal power, reigning in, enforcing submission and punishing defiance”. The perpetuation of what has been labelled “toxic masculinity” has had a long-lasting effect on gendered relationships. It resides at a social level and permeates other current realities that might exacerbate violent responses; such as a poor economic outlook (due to the high unemployment rate and lack of investment), alcohol abuse and

126  Karen von Veh the general uncertainty introduced by transition, which has been born out of a violent history. Yet it is mainly women who are vulnerable and who suffer the dire consequences of this disaffection at the hands of men. During the first week of September 2019, there were so many femicides and rapes reported in the news that all over South Africa there were outraged public responses, calling for a change in society, holding vigils for the victims and protesting at what has been identified as a “declaration of war on women and their bodies”. 21 Under these circumstances, we can certainly not class South Africa as a post-feminist society.

Conclusion Victor’s Wise and Foolish Virgins are bruised and stained. They represent victims of patriarchal violence but symbolically they are not beaten (in the metaphorical sense of the word). They transcend their victimisation by raising issues related to women’s personal identity, sexuality, patriarchal idealism, mechanisms of cultural power over women, the creation of “docile bodies”, the questioning of “grand narratives”, the influence of religious iconography, political inequalities in a South African context and the persistence of patriarchy. Through the transgressive nature of their appearance, they express both religious and aesthetic iconoclasm. In terms of Foucault’s (1990, 92–98) analysis of power, the Wise and Foolish Virgins exist as flexible symbols of the intersection of various power relations, both in South African society and in the larger Western arena of gendered discourse. As such, they interrogate and resist each of those controlling structures by demonstrating, though transgressive references to an art historical continuum, how much has not changed in our society. Finally, the Wise and Foolish Virgins are an enduring symbol of resistance as they raise the urgent need for a fundamentally feminist revision of society, both in South Africa and globally; and I suggest that this current and ongoing point of relevance underpins the status of this triptych as a “Mistress-Piece”.

Acknowledgements My research towards this article was made possible through generous financial support from the National Research Foundation (NRF) of South Africa. Please note, however, that any opinions, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed here are my own, and the NRF accepts no liability in this regard. I would also like to thank Diane Victor for the time she has kindly given to discuss her works and respond to all my questions.

Notes 1 Victor has made many hard-hitting works regarding violence against women that function as consciousness raising or activist forms of cultural expression. Examples include: several of her Disasters of Peace series (from 2001 and ongoing) such as Why Defy, In Sheep’s Clothing, Made to Measure and Witch Hunt for example; and her large gothic window triptych with smoke drawings of beaten and murdered women titled No Country for Old Women (2018). Information on these and other works can be found in Rankin and von Veh (2008) and von Veh (2011, 2012a, 2012b, 2018, 2019a and 2019b). 2 Post-feminism refers to a time/place where the equality fought for by the feminist movement is now in place. The reason that some people consider South Africa to be

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post-feminist is largely due to the new constitution which includes a bill of rights that guarantees the equality of all people. There has been more visibility of women in government and in certain spheres of work (in academia for example) but certainly no parity. The fact is that for many women in South Africa, particularly those in the rural areas, nothing has changed. 3 This image can be found on the Goodman Gallery website at: www.goodman-gallery. com/store/shop?ref_id=1476. 4 A full discussion of this work can be found in von Veh (2012b). 5 A catalogue of Majak Bredell’s work including essays and illustrations can be found online at: www.academia.edu/8780609/2_EXHIBITIONS. 6 Mary Douglas (2007, 54) makes the same point in her statement: “To be holy is to be whole, to be one; holiness is unity, integrity, perfection of the individual and its kind”. She is speaking here not only of bodily transgressions but pertaining to any matter that is out of place or not easily categorisable. 7 Nead is referring here to what Julia Kristeva has identified as the “abject body”. The term “abject” in feminist discourse is used to refer to any matter that was once part of the body and is now removed from it – like bodily wastes, cut hair, nail clippings, tears, blood, etc. In other words – that which transgresses the firm boundaries of identity. Julia Kristeva (1982) has defined this term in Powers of Horror: an Essay on Abjection which was inspired by Mary Douglas’ (2007) explanation of Taboo in Purity and Danger. Brenda Schmahmann discusses this idea in relation to works by Usha Seejarim (in Chapter 4), as does Tal Dekel in relation to art by Hannan Abu-Hussein (Chapter 6). 8 It is thought that this story of her torture is the origin for name of the circular spinning firework called the Catherine Wheel. However she purportedly escaped injury on this device through a miracle when she touched it and the device shattered, which is why she was beheaded instead (St. Catherine [O]). 9 There is an obvious reference here to the stains found on the famous Shroud of Turin. 10 The definition of apocryphal is “hidden, or secret” but in fact the documents that make up the apocrypha were all written in the first few centuries after the birth of Christ and are related to the stories in the Gospels by embellishing or reinterpreting or completing them in some way. They are termed apocrypha because they were not accepted as an official part of the biblical canon by the early church, but many of these writings instigated and shaped the cult and worship of Mary (Ebertshauser et al. 1998, 19–20). 11 The legends about Mary’s assumption into heaven arose directly after she was given the official title of “Mother of God” at the council of Ephesus in the fifth century (Ebertshauser et al. 1998, 20–21). 12 Mary, Virgin and Madonna, is identified as an impossible role model for women because she is the only woman on earth who has, purportedly, managed to maintain her virginity while being a mother and a wife. Julia Kristeva (1986, 99–118) interrogates the problematic nature of her status in detail in an essay titled “Stabat Mater”. 13 JC Cooper (1978, 103–104) describes this form as: “the ‘mystical almond’ which depicts divinity; holiness; the sacred; virginity; the vulva”. It is ironic that a stylised sign for the vulva is used in Christian iconography as a typical device to frame the Virgin. 14 For a fuller discussion of this work, see von Veh (2019a). 15 Victor forms part of a cohort of women artists who are trying to raise this issue as a matter of urgency in our country. For example, the artists who took part in the Domestic exhibition (see footnote 16). In addition, the Standard Bank young artist award in 2019 was awarded to Gabrielle Goliath who is known for her work in response to gendered violence. Her award-winning exhibition is titled This song is for… (2019) and is a hard-hitting and gut-wrenching exposé of the experiences of women who have survived rape. 16 Domestic included works by Jodi Bieber, Reshma Chhiba, Hannelie Coetzee, Penny George, Gabrielle Goliath, Nadine Hutton, Alison Kearney, Nandipha Mntambo, Zanele Muholi and Diane Victor (McInnes and Mboweni 2009). 17 Intimate partner violence is the most common and lethal kind of domestic violence in South Africa, with married women at highest risk ... Dahlberg and Krug suggest that South Africa’s rates of femicide are significantly higher than the global indications of

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4 per 100,000. Half of these acts of femicide are estimated to be perpetrated by intimate partners (Sibanda-Moyo et al. 2017, 13). 18 The ideology of patriarchy also features prominently in the explanations of Violence against Women in South Africa. This central feminist explanation of VAW suggests that the male-dominated power structure throughout institutionalised South Africa and in individual relationships forms the underlying bias that enables VAW. This bias enables the formation and entrenchment of norms and attitudes that disadvantage women and children, as the balance of social power is tilted to the advantage of men, their perspectives and their rights (Sibanda-Moyo et al. 2017, 13). 19 While this document looks more broadly at all crimes suffered by women (including robbery, petty theft, housebreakings, etc.), it concludes that more women live in fear for their safety than men in South Africa and that most crimes against women are perpetrated by men (Statistics South Africa 2018). 20 Thomas et al. (2013, 523) have found that patriarchy is the root cause of violence against women in all three countries in transition that they compared for their study (South Africa, Kenya and Zimbabwe). Their study clearly indicates that sexual and gender-based violence “is not caused by political transition, but is rather part of long histories of violence in each place”. 21 This statement is a paraphrase of commentary by South African radio presenter Bongani Bingwa who was discussing the latest scourge of violence against women on the Radio 702 morning talk show on Tuesday 3 September 2019 at 7.15 am.

References Augustine. 1950. City of God. Translated by M. Dods. New York: Random House. First published in 1467. Cooper, J.C. 1978. An Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Traditional Symbols. London: Thames and Hudson. Douglas, Mary. 2007. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concept of Pollution and Taboo. London and New York: Routledge Classics. First published in 1966. Ebertshauser, Caroline H., Herbert Haag, Joe H. Kirchenberger and Dorothee Sölle. 1998. Mary: Art, Culture, and Religion through the Ages. Translated by P. Heinegg. New York: Crossroad. Ferguson, Asher and Lyric Ferguson. 2019. “Women’s Danger Index”. Asher & Lyric. 15 July. [O]. Available: www.asherfergusson.com/solo-female-travel-safety/ Accessed: 20 August 2019. Foucault, Michel. 1979. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by A. Sheridan. New York: Penguin Books. First published in French in 1975. Foucault, Michel. 1990. A History of Sexuality Vol.1: An Introduction. Translated by R. Hurley. Harmondsworth: Penguin. First published in French in 1976. Gqola, Pumla Dineo. 2016. Rape: A South African Nightmare. Johannesburg: Jacana Media. Hunt, Steven. 2003. “Turning the Tide of Violence in South Africa”. The International Development Research Centre. [O]. Available: www.idrc.ca/en/ev-45629-201-1-DO_ TOPIC.html Accessed: 5 November 2010. Kristeva, Julia. 1982. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Translated by L.S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. First published in French in 1980. Kristeva, Julia. 1986. “Stabat Mater”. In The Female Body in Western Culture: Contemporary Perspectives, edited by Susan Suleiman, 99–118. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. McInnes, Jacki. 2011. Of Fables and Folly: Diane Victor Recent Work. Catalogue. Grinnell: Faulconer Gallery, Grinnell College. McInnes, Jacki, and Melissa Mboweni. 2009. Domestic. Catalogue. Johannesburg: Goethe-Institut. Morgan, Tom. 1994. Saints: A Visual Almanac of the Virtuous, Pure, Praiseworthy and Good. San Francisco: Chronicle Books.

Diane Victor’s Wise and Foolish Virgins (2008) 129 Nead, Lynda. 1997. The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity and Sexuality. London and New York: Routledge. Rankin, Elizabeth, and Karen von Veh. 2008. Taxi 013 Diane Victor. Johannesburg: David Krut Publishers. Sibanda-Moyo, Nonhlanhla, Eleanor Khonje and Maame Kyerewaa Brobbey. 2017. Violence against Women in South Africa: A Country in Crisis. Johannesburg: CSVR. Available: www.csvr.org.za/pdf/CSVR-Violence-Against-Women-in-SA.pdf. Statistics South Africa. 2018. Crime against Women in South Africa. Pretoria: STATS SA. St. Agatha, Catholic Online. [O] Available: www.catholic.org/saints/saint.php?saint_id=14 Accessed: 15 July 2019. St. Catherine, Catholic Online. [O]. Available: www.catholic.org/saints/saint.php?saint_ id=341 Accessed: 17 July 2019. Thomas, Kylie, Masheti Masinjila and Eunice Bere. 2013. “Political transition and sexual and gender-based violence in South Africa, Kenya, and Zimbabwe: a comparative analysis”. Gender and Development 21 (3): 519–532. von Veh, K. 2011. “Faith or Expediency/Religion or Art? A Consideration of Contemporary Transgressive Religious Images”. In Figuring Faith: Images of Faith in Africa, edited by Fiona Rankin-Smith, 174–186. Johannesburg: Fourthwall Books. von Veh, K. 2012a. “Life, Loss and Transience in the Work of Diane Victor”. In Diane Victor: Burning the Candle at Both Ends, 5–78. Johannesburg: David Krut Publishing. von Veh, K. 2012b. “Diane Victor, Tracey Rose, and the gender politics of Christian imagery”. African Arts 45 (4): 22–33, Winter. von Veh, K. 2018. “Diane Victor’s Upside-Down World”. In Little History: A Catalogue of Selected Works by Diane Victor, edited by J. van Eeden, 1–13. Bloemfontein: UFS. von Veh, K. 2019a. “The pain of martyrdom: Diane Victor’s ghostly victims”. IKON: Journal of Iconographic Studies 12: 259–268, June. von Veh, K. 2019b. “Feminism as Activism in Contemporary South African Art”. In A Companion to Feminist Art, edited by Maria Elena Buszek and Hilary Robinson, 69–90. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Blackwell. Warner, M. 1983. Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary. New York: Vintage Books. Warner, M. 1996. Monuments and Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form. London: Vintage.

8

Swoon’s Medea (2017) as a Feminist Intervention Re-producing the Maternal Paula J. Birnbaum

The American artist Caledonia Curry (born 1977), who works under the name of Swoon, uses her art to promote global awareness of social justice issues that include the intergenerational effects of sexual trauma. Her career began on the streets of New York City in the early 2000s, where she created life-size wheat-paste prints and paper cut-outs of anonymous figures inspired by German Expressionist woodblock prints and Indonesian shadow puppets, among many other sources (Deitch et al. 2010, 4–9). Situated illegally in uninhabited public places, such as abandoned buildings, fire escapes, bridges and water towers, these realistic portraits evoked the disenfranchised, urban poor – immigrants, mothers and children, workers and the homeless. One of the few well-known American women in the male-dominated world of street art, Swoon began showing her work in museums in 2005. Medea (Fig. 8.1), her site-specific interactive installation, was the conceptual centrepiece of Swoon’s 2017 mid-career retrospective exhibition at the Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati, Ohio. Named after the Greek myth that has inspired artists for centuries, it tells the story of Medea, the sorceress who killed her children for vengeance against her husband, who abandoned her in his quest for power (Clauss and Johnson 1997). The installation fills an entire gallery and consists of two interactive structural components: a main “house”, constructed in the corner, and a free-standing switchboard station, visible on the right wall of the gallery. The house combines diverse media ranging from the artist’s signature wheat-pasted portraiture and architectural details, to approximately 30 audio recordings that visitors can listen to through a range of devices, from telephone receivers to found objects. The piece also features a functionally refurbished vintage telephone switchboard, where visitors are encouraged to manually move the wire clamps in order to listen to audio content relating to themes that include emotional and sexual abuse, mental illness, addiction, filicide and family strife. The walls surrounding both the switchboard and the house are also part of the installation; they are covered with the artist’s hand-crafted wallpaper and a variety of wheat-pasted drawings that reference themes of motherhood and intergenerational trauma. My essay argues that Swoon’s Medea is a groundbreaking work of feminist art in that it offers new methods of engaging with community that promote both individual and collective healing in response to intergenerational trauma. In this piece, Swoon confronts her own traumatic familial history through her signature wheat-paste portraits of family members, combined with architectural elements and interactive audio content. The imagery draws from multiple sources and interventions, from Greek mythology, Buddhist and Hindi iconography, to fairy tales, to 1970s feminist art. By mobilising the feminist art movement’s engagement with tropes of reproduction and

Swoon’s Medea (2017) 131

Figure 8.1  Swoon, Medea, 2017, mixed media installation. Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art, Cincinnati, Ohio. Source:  Photograph courtesy of Tod Seelie.

domesticity, Medea highlights the relationship between emotional and sexual abuse, mental illness and addiction as a means to promote public dialogue and healing. The interactive audio components of the piece offer a wider social context for Swoon’s personal story as a means to create a space that promotes compassion and human commonality. They encourage visitors to confront their own histories and the culture of shame and silence surrounding intergenerational trauma. Finally, I argue that Medea is directly linked to the artist’s long-standing commitment to social practice art that builds community and promotes universal themes of vulnerability, empathy and healing by supporting people affected by cycles of trauma. This is the first essay to offer a critical analysis of this piece and the ways in which it is informed by feminist and gender discourses.

Unpacking the Medea The portraits in Swoon’s Medea installation represent members of the artist’s own maternal family line. While her father is not pictured, Swoon’s mother serves as the subject of most of the images of women throughout the installation. Each of her parents, recently deceased at the time the piece was made, struggled with substance addiction and mental illness since adolescence. Shortly before her mother’s death from lung cancer in 2013, the artist first learned that her mother had experienced prolonged sexual abuse as a child by a sexual predator that preyed viciously upon her and others in the family (Curry 2019; Peyton 2018). Swoon’s maternal grandmother,

132  Paula J. Birnbaum perhaps unaware or unwilling to confront the trauma, was herself emotionally abusive of her daughter. In response, Swoon’s mother turned to alcohol and drugs in an attempt to mask the pain that she was unable to face. The artist regularly feared her mother’s violent, drug-induced and suicidal behaviour and suffered from neglect. She used Medea as a vehicle for her to come to terms with the impact of her mother’s abuse on her own traumatised childhood. For years, Swoon engaged in different types of therapy – from talk therapy to psychedelic-assisted psychotherapies – as a means to reconnect her repressed fears with specific episodes from her childhood that had triggered them (Curry 2019; Telephone interview of Curry by the author, 3 February 2020). As she became engaged in this therapeutic work, she recalled that years earlier, she had collected a number of prints after art-historical images of Medea, without understanding what drew her to the theme. Revisiting those images, she read psychological studies on the theme of women who kill their children and considered the familiar list of risk factors – a history of domestic violence and abuse leading to psychosis, poverty, drug addiction and suicidal depression. She also studied versions of the Medea plays, pondering the motives that led Medea to kill her own children. In addition, Swoon read the work of psychologist Gabor Maté, who argues for an undeniable link between debilitating addictions and childhood trauma (Maté 2010). Through this intense work, the artist gained a better understanding of the role of rape and sexual trauma in causing her mother’s instability. This enabled Swoon to begin drawing her fears in order to break the taboo of sharing her own dark story with her public in her mid-career retrospective. Looking closely at the installation, we might begin by unpacking the imagery of the house. Created from recycled clapboard, its structure appears small in comparison to the art that fills it and covers the surrounding walls. The house features Swoon’s signature portraiture of women made in wheat paste. At the outer and topmost layer, emerging from the chimney, is a sculptural figure entitled the Ice Queen. It was constructed from an earlier piece created in 2011, as Swoon often re-uses or reproduces her work in multiple contexts (Telephone interview of Curry by the author, 3 February 2020). Made of screen prints sewn together on mylar and paper, the figure is comprised of two identically faced female heads that tower over the roof of the house. Their upper bodies are framed by a series of sharp, icicle-like formations. This piece offers a symbolic portrait of the artist’s maternal grandmother, the matriarch of the family. Swoon’s mother and her siblings referred to her as the Ice Queen because of her “cold, hard and formidable” nature (Swoon Studio 2017). With her head held high, the portrait represents what the artist describes as a moment when her grandmother was still capable of showing compassion. She watches over the house like a sentinel, her posture communicating strength and dignity. However, the spiky forms framing her portrait lead us to wonder whether the Ice Queen is able to protect those within. Perhaps she, too, bears the weight of her own undisclosed traumas. The portraits of women in Swoon’s matrilineal line continue at the bottomcentre of the house (Fig. 8.2). Framed by dramatic lighting that forms a pyramid, the Medea story is enacted in this composite portrait of her mother, grandmother and great grandmother. At the top of this section, we meet a female figure cut from white mylar, her long, flowing hair surrounded by ornamental forms that resemble lace. A portrait of the artist’s mother as a young woman, the figure looks calmly down upon the viewer from behind the frame of a two-dimensional pink house. We might think

Swoon’s Medea (2017) 133

Figure 8.2  Swoon, Medea, 2017, detail. Mixed media installation. Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art, Cincinnati, Ohio. Source:  Photograph courtesy of Tod Seelie.

of it as a doll’s house that is propped up within the larger, three-dimensional structure. Moving downwards, just below the roof gable, we notice a small, cameo-style portrait of the artist’s great-grandmother. Her face is framed by curly hair and her head is partially covered by a hooded robe. The placement of this portrait recalls Mexican retablo painting, where an image of a saint such as the Virgin of Guadalupe is strategically positioned to protect those who inhabit the home. Just below the cameo portrait, the artist reproduces the iconography of the supernatural Medea, common in classical imagery (Lusheck 2017, 115). The image conforms to Euripides’s version of the story, where Medea, as the granddaughter of the Sun, quickly flees the scene following the murder of her children, in a magical, serpent-driven chariot. Swoon depicts two allegorical women, dressed in classical garb, who appear as mirror images of one another. Each of these classical Medea figures swings her child’s body by the ankles, her muscular arms extended horizontally in a defiant gesture. The children’s corpses appear as if fused with Medea’s limbs, nearly doubling their length. Swoon incorporates a halo of flames or lightning bolts, also described in Euripides’s text, reinforcing the idea of her supernatural powers as the victorious goddess of vengeance (Boedeker 1996, 132–133). As our gaze moves downward, we arrive at the nucleus of the artist’s visual narrative of intergenerational trauma. Swoon named this drawing Tarantula Mother. It depicts her mother’s facial features upon the round head of a tarantula spider. The vision came to her during her very first psychedelic-assisted therapy session (Curry 2019). While her impulse was to avoid the disturbing image, her therapist encouraged

134  Paula J. Birnbaum her to draw it. This hybrid spider-woman is surrounded by six legs, their power accentuated by the lightning bolts emanating from supernatural Medea (Boedeker 1996, 132–133). The largest two legs in the foreground appear human, and are splayed apart in a vulnerable position. The most shocking part of this image is the spider’s mouth, which opens up to what the artist describes as “a kind of surrealist psychosexual vagina” (Swoon Studio 2017). This vaginal image is challenging to read. Is the spider’s mouth breathing fire, or does it possess a split tongue that licks the vagina? Or are those pincers that are biting the head, perhaps symbolic of a giant clitoris? The complex symbolism and its ambiguous relationship to the Medea story expresses the disorientation that many women feel who have experienced sexual trauma. The Tarantula Mother drawing is directly related to another image located outside of the house, on the right wall, above the switchboard component of the installation. Swoon calls this section of the piece The Devouring (Fig. 8.3). She created the face that is repeated in this drawing in 2011 when visiting her mother, who was then at a low point in her lifelong addiction cycle. Swoon recalled how her mother awoke in the middle of the night and lashed out at her in a fit of rage, realising she had arrived for an intervention. The portrait, which is repeated across the wall, expresses the complexity of the artist’s fears of her mother at this particularly vulnerable moment. The central figures reference the Greek mythological figure of Medusa, whose name means “guardian” or “protectress”. Described as a winged human woman with venomous snakes in place of her hair, her superpower turns the faces of those who gaze upon her to stone. Medusa, discussed by Freud in reference to the castration complex,

Figure 8.3  Swoon, Medea, 2017, detail (The Devouring). Mixed media installation. Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art, Cincinnati, Ohio. Source:  Photograph courtesy of Tod Seelie.

Swoon’s Medea (2017) 135 became a “cipher for intrepid femininity” for feminist scholars from philosophers Adriana Cavarero and Hélène Cixous (Kokoli 2016, 23–26, 42–46). We might consider the effect of such imagery in Swoon’s Medea in light of art historian Alexandra Kokoli’s theory of the “feminist uncanny”, in which she deconstructs the complicated relationship between psychoanalysis and feminism and explores the prevalence of charged “domestic spheres” in work by women artists. By juxtaposing the grimacing face and protruding tongue of The Devouring outside the house, and the exposed genitals of the Tarantula Mother within it, Swoon’s installation can be interpreted as a feminist response to “the Freudian link between woman, castration and death” (Kokoli 2016, 43). The imagery in The Devouring section of Medea was inspired by a wide range of sources, from Buddhist and Hindu wrathful deities to fairy tales, memories of sites and objects of personal resonance to the artist. The Hindu goddess Kali, also a symbolic protector, is known for her characteristic outstretched tongue that stands as a symbol of both power and shame, depending on the interpretation (Tull 2015, 302–303). Swoon also was drawn to the image of a female Buddha whose name translates as “Superbly Constant Diamond”, with flayed human flesh draped around her body: “I drew my mother wearing her own flayed flesh, as well as a string of pills around her neck, because after all, the battle she fought was with herself”. (Curry 2020) Other sources include the human skull and bone configurations of the Sedlec Ossuary in the Czech Republic the artist visited as a teenager, and a plastic doll she owned as a child representing musician Gene Simmons, with a protruding tongue that had intrigued her (Telephone interview of Curry by the author, 3 February 2020; Curry 2020). Throughout the Medea installation, Swoon conjures up fairy tales that engage with themes of childhood trauma. She inserts two dark, imposing figural drawings inspired by the classic fairy tale of Little Red Riding Hood to frame the imagery on the wall in The Devouring. First written by Charles Perrault (1697) and then adapted by the Brothers Grimm (1886), Little Red Riding Hood is known as a cautionary tale to young girls and women with themes of rape and violence at its core (Beckett 1995, 5–8). Swoon was inspired by feminist works of art created in response to the archetypal story, such as Kiki Smith’s large-scale ink and graphite drawing, Lying with the Wolf (2001, Centre Pompidou, Paris). By inserting her own version of this dark fairy tale within the Medea installation, she makes direct reference to her mother’s childhood trauma as the source of her addiction. The artist came to view the composite Medusa wrathful deity image as a kind of “portrait about suffering – also an amulet or talisman meant to keep safety at bay” (Curry 2019). Swoon’s Medea also plays upon other visual iconographies and strategies from the history of feminist art. We think of Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party, 1974–1979 (Brooklyn Museum – see Figures 0.1 and 0.2 of this volume) and other works from this period that employ vaginal iconography to symbolise female empowerment. However, Swoon’s imagery is much darker. The artist in fact describes the piece as “dark as fuck”, with the Tarantula Mother signifying “the wound of sexual abuse and the intergenerational effects of sexual trauma fused together as a single image” (Swoon Studio 2017). This drawing, in combination with the others, represents the

136  Paula J. Birnbaum cycles of trauma inflicted by a male sexual predator upon generations of women in Swoon’s family. Once she assembled the different components of the installation, the artist was surprised by her reaction. She read the image of her young mother in white mylar (Fig. 8.2) as in fact reclining rather than standing, the two posts of her narrow girlhood bed visible on either side of her head. Her body is draped under lacey, white sheets, and her eyes “cast up to heaven, away from the scene below” (Swoon Studio 2017). The splayed, tarantula legs become her legs, and expose her violated vagina as she looks down upon us. It seems that Swoon’s grandmother, the Ice Queen, and her great-grandmother, appearing in cameo, are complicit in the trauma by failing to protect her. This composite of matrilineal images can be read as Swoon’s symbolic self-portrait. Perhaps she identified most with the fate of Medea’s dead children. The artist recounts how the installation became a means of working through her own recently uncovered childhood fears that her mother intended to kill her: … Kill me because she was young and addicted, and never meant to have a baby. Kill me to take me with her as she committed suicide, in order to protect me from life without a mother. Or kill me to save me from the danger that was coming for us all in the midst of a psychotic fantasy. (Swoon Studio 2017) Swoon’s father, who also suffered from addiction and depression, is not mentioned, and men, including the male perpetrator that raped her mother, are noticeably absent from her visual narrative. By portraying the cycles of violence and addiction in her own matrilineal line, Swoon’s Medea becomes a place for both reckoning and healing from her experience of her mother as both nurturer and threat. Feminist artists have turned to domesticity and the structure of the house and home as a site of ambivalence and trauma for decades (Kokoli 2016, 91–118; Morineau and Pesapane 2018). In the case of Medea, Swoon describes the home as literally “split open to reveal deeper layers of understanding” (Swoon Studio 2017). Her choice of iconography recalls the iconic work of American feminist foremothers, from Louise Bourgeois’ Femme Maison (1946–1947) series of paintings, with themes of women’s domestic entrapment and silencing, to the collaborative 1972 Womanhouse developed by Chicago, Miriam Schapiro and their students in the Feminist Art Program at Cal Arts in Los Angeles, to the young Francesca Woodman’s haunting photographic self-portraits (1972–1980) of charged bodies confined and violated within tight, domestic spaces. Swoon’s placement of the Tarantula Mother drawing inside the structure of the house also responds to Bourgeois’ Spider series, offering maternal symbolism that is both protective and threatening. In Medea, the spider-mother is both a victim and a perpetrator. Once again, Kokoli’s theory of the “feminist uncanny” becomes a productive vehicle for understanding the unsettling nature of domestic spaces highlighted in Swoon’s installation. Medea also interacts with the work of another female precursor, Zaha Hadid, the late architect who designed the Cincinnati Center for Contemporary Art and was the first woman to ever design an American art museum (Jodidio 2009, 167). When Swoon first visited the museum and experienced Hadid’s atrium, she described the space as “soaring, diminutive and disorienting” (Molly Krause Communications 2017). “I want to make contact with the architecture and appreciate it”, she exclaimed. “I’ve

Swoon’s Medea (2017) 137 never played with this kind of language before; all these facets and all this modern architecture” (Seda-Reeder 2017). The Museum’s cubic gallery spaces, which Hadid herself described as a “jigsaw puzzle”, provided the artist with an ideal setting in which to explore the tension between domestic and public space (Olson 2008, 339). She chose to cover the gallery walls, both within the Medea installation and throughout the surrounding galleries of her retrospective exhibition, with her hand-crafted wallpaper. The designs incorporate fairy tales, folkloric imagery and geometric decorations as a means to activate the many planes of Hadid’s architecture, including its imposing black staircases. The wallpaper, which is ephemeral, like her wheat-pasted street art, relates to the structure of the house at the centre of the Medea installation in that it evokes the charged intimacy and complexity of familial relationships that transpire within domestic spaces. Swoon also plays with what Hadid referred to as her “urban carpet” design concept that integrates urban and public space through her innovative use of curved walls and ramps throughout the museum (Olson 2008, 338). She enhances the wall-papered passageways leading to and from the house at the centre of the Medea installation with imagery of the pregnant and nursing body, countering the cycles of violence highlighted in the house. Featured previously in her 2014 solo exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, these images offset the violent Tarantula Mother and Devouring imagery as symbols of unconditional maternal love. The Medea installation includes another drawing on the theme of reproduction from the Brooklyn exhibition, installed on the back wall just to the right of the house when facing it (Fig. 8.4). This image features a portrait of the artist’s mother “in the

Figure 8.4  Swoon, Medea, 2017, detail (Memento Mori). Mixed media installation. Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art, Cincinnati, Ohio. Source:  Photograph courtesy of Tod Seelie.

138  Paula J. Birnbaum cycles of her life and death” (Swoon Studio 2017). Referred to as Memento Mori by the artist, the drawing refers to the European artistic tradition of reflecting on the ephemerality of life. She created it just after learning of her mother’s cancer diagnosis. At the top of the drawing, we see Swoon’s mother as an older woman wearing an oxygen tube in her nose, her body reduced to a skeleton. She embraces an earlier version of herself, a young mother with curly hair, who cradles her daughter, the artist’s sister as a young girl. Below her mother’s midriff, in the pelvic area, we can identify a foetus growing inside of her uterus, a reference to the artist, dangling between two dancing skeletons. The drawing evokes Swoon’s compassion for the fragility of life, and for her own mother’s vulnerability. It also embraces her matrilineal line as an empowering counterpoint to the cycles of violence and oppression.

Medea – The Feminist It is helpful to reconsider the Medea myth through a contemporary feminist lens in order to give further context to Swoon’s interpretation. How might we see the figure of Medea herself, a mother who murders her children, as a victim of trauma whose violence comes from a place of pain and suffering? Betrayed by the man she loves and for whom she has made considerable sacrifices, Medea is often understood as representing the position of all oppressed women in a patriarchal society. In the Euripides text, she makes an empowered speech known as “Women of Corinth”, in which she presents herself as an ancient feminist (Van Zyl Smit 2002, 104). Medea shares her experience of disloyalty and marginalisation within her understanding of the collective subordination of women to an empathic Greek chorus. However, her identification as a feminist is complicated by her violent choice to kill her own children as means to seek revenge and justice. While her speech unites her among women, her decision, even though assertive and independent, isolates her from other women and from Greek society at large. Like Medea, Swoon’s feminism is not easily digested. She engages with subject matter that is infused with violence and darkness. However, by offsetting the scenes of violence with positive maternal imagery, Swoon emphasises a message of forgiveness and healing into her version of the Medea story. Feminist philosopher Adriana Cavarero, however, describes Medea’s identity as an inversion of the role of nurturing mother (Cavarero 2009, 25–28). For Cavarero, Medea is a symbol of female violence and emblematic of her theory of horrorism, a neologism she defines as distinct from terrorism in that it signifies “a violation of vulnerable humans who are defined by their simultaneous openness to the other’s care and harm” (Weber 2014, 237). A person is vulnerable, according to Cavarero, when they are “open to wounding and to caring”; she argues that Medea’s crime, the extreme in wounding, is horrorism (Cavarero 2009, 24, 30). Cavarero also emphasises Medea’s identity as a foreigner, “a mother who has arrived from elsewhere, from the distant regions of the Caucasus, from those lands beyond bounds of Greece onto which the infamy of the murder is projected” (Cavarero 2009, 26). She is an outsider among her peers, and her expression of maternal ambivalence and violence further stigmatises her. In contrast, Swoon, in making art from the perspective of the dead child/victim, comes both to embrace and forgive Medea by seeing her as a vulnerable victim in her own right. Rather than focusing solely on the pain of her personal trauma, Swoon’s goal is for the installation to promote healing among others who have experienced similar neglect and abuse: “Healing is possible and you can embody

Swoon’s Medea (2017) 139 it through the creative act. Women like my mother who are deeply wounded needed healing they didn’t get” (Curry 2019).

Promoting Empathy and Community Swoon includes several interactive components in the Medea installation that promote empathy and community through exposure to a selection of audio recordings. While standing beside the structure of the house, visitors can listen to buzzing sounds via 1980s-style telephone receivers, as well as found objects, including a coffee mug and a candlestick. All of these mundane household objects are wired together “tin can phone” style around the façade of the house, offering a metaphor for broken-down channels of communication among family members and households. Across the gallery on the right wall, the switchboard section of the installation incorporates an interactive sound collage comprised of several dozen audio recordings that are wired into a functionally refurbished vintage telephone switchboard. This material device delivers content relating to the artist’s lost, fragmented memories from her own childhood. While immersed in the installation, visitors can sit down and manually move the wire clamps of the switchboard and listen to readings of poems, lyrics, dark fairy tales, excerpts from Jungian psychotherapy, spoken-word pieces and stories of survivors growing up in a home plagued by trauma and addiction. In one of these audio pieces, the artist shares a memory from age 15 when she envisioned herself as a switchboard, her body filled with a mess of wires that she had deliberately crossed (Curry 2019; Peyton 2018). It served as a mechanism that allowed her to separate her reactions from painful events, and to mask her emotions. She reflected: “I understood that I had done this to hide an otherwise unbearable truth about how much I hated and feared the ones I depended on, and loved. Especially that precious one in the middle, the mother” (Swoon Studio 2017). We might also think about the wires visible throughout the installation as a metaphor for the umbilical cord that binds her to her mother and matrilineal line. The switchboard component of the piece shows Swoon’s reckoning with her past, as well as her desire to contextualise her own personal trauma within a larger communal narrative. The sound recordings offer glimpses into how victims of trauma come to disassociate from their underlying fears. The interactive and intimate nature of the set-up requires the visitor to sit alone, with headphones on and take in the words, which further promotes identification and empathy. Part of what makes Medea a feminist work is that Swoon gives an opportunity for this pain, usually suffered in isolation, to enter a space of community and the public. In addition to speaking her story through images and interactive audio, Swoon regularly engages her audience on social media. She describes her online presence as “a medium, like any medium, a way to communicate that makes you abbreviate your thoughts and share so that people can feel their relationship to the work” (Telephone interview of Curry by the author, 3 February 2020). Shortly after the exhibition opened in Cincinnati, she offered a lengthy explanation of the personal symbolism in Medea on social media: I saw that I had drawn the inter-generational cycle of abuse as it played out in my own family while also drawing a central figure that was in a state of detached disassociation from the history stored in her home and in her body. (Swoon Studio 2017)

140  Paula J. Birnbaum This prompted many who were unable to experience the installation in person to share their own Medea stories. By making herself vulnerable to unknown fans, her project raises public awareness of the links between trauma, addiction and mental illness, and also helps to go beyond stigmas associated with these conditions. It is helpful to analyse the ways in which Medea engages community in light of Judith Butler’s depiction of vulnerability. In Precarious Life, Butler proposes that we are corporeal beings and that an important aspect of our corporeality is our vulnerability (Butler 2004, 19). Written as a response to post-9/11 America and US policies to wage perpetual war, Butler examines the way in which human beings are connected, even in the form of loss and vulnerability. We can apply Butler’s call to reconsider our response to grief in light of Swoon’s sharing of her personal experiences of trauma in images, sound and via social media. By reminding us that interdependence and vulnerability are part of the human condition, Butler encourages a collective reimagining of the possibility of community. Swoon’s Medea proposes a similar response of empathy rather than judgment. Part of what is so powerful about the piece is the way in which she processes her familial trauma both in the public space of the museum and in her online community. Her desire to share her truth as part of a larger cultural conversation becomes a therapeutic mechanism both for the artist and for her audience.

Community-Based Projects Medea becomes an elaborate self-portrait that is linked to Swoon’s long-standing history of community-based work as well as to practices associated with the feminist art movement. Her retrospective in Cincinnati included a “Narrative Room” that featured numerous humanitarian projects confronting gender violence from a collaborative perspective. In one project, she collaborated with a group of international artists and activist organisations in memorialising Mexican teenager Silvia Elena Morales Huerta, who was murdered in 1995 in Juárez, across the US border from El Paso, Texas, in one of the worst global pandemics of femicide (Gaspar de Alba and Guzmán 2010; Watson 2015). In another, we learn that before engaging in art therapy as a personal practice, Swoon worked with sexual assault victims in Meru, in Eastern Kenya. She and collaborating artists Dana Bishop Root and Paulie Anne Duke partnered with a Canadian-based organisation called The Equality Effect, and the Kenyan-based Ripples International, which brings legal action against the country’s government to enforce constitutional protection against rape. Swoon and her collaborators engaged girls from the Tumaini Safe House in drawing, making masks, puppets and performing as a form of art therapy. As a result of this intervention, the girls learned how they can use creativity to express difficult emotions as well as to access positive feelings of inner strength. Swoon’s project also empowered local women to sell their art as a means to raise money for their legal fees. It demonstrates how her social activism – which she expanded upon by creating her own non-profit organisation called the Heliotrope Foundation in 2015 – intersects with her visual practice relating to her personal experiences of trauma (Peyton 2018). However, each international project warrants a closer examination in light of third-wave feminist critiques of colonialism, as well as the unifying tendencies of community. How does an artist ensure that such collaborations successfully integrate difference and alterity as part of their activism and social engagement?

Swoon’s Medea (2017) 141 One might relate Swoon’s project in Kenya to the therapeutic performances that occurred at Womanhouse – albeit that the latter were in 1972, nearly half a century earlier than the former, and in a different geographic, social and political context. Documented in a film by Johanna Demetrakas, these performances engaged with collective testimony and collaboration, with women recounting their personal experiences of rape and sexual violence. The result of consciousness-raising workshops that were part of the Feminist Art Program at Cal Arts, they were perhaps the first public “speak out” on sexual trauma in the United States. The performances at Womanhouse were followed by Ablutions (1972), a gallery performance by Suzanne Lacy, Judy Chicago, Sandra Orgel and Aviva Rahmani. The performers bathed themselves in eggs, blood and clay, then wrapped themselves in bandages, chains and ropes, with a soundtrack of women sharing their stories of rape and sexual violation. While Swoon and artists of her generation are more accustomed to the public sharing of such experiences, in 1972 it was a “painful, cathartic and shocking experience for women to name their fears and feelings of helplessness and rage” (Withers 1996, 168). Swoon builds community by moving her work fluidly in and out of a wide range of public spaces, from the street, to museums and galleries, community-based organisations and the internet and social media. She embeds herself in the communities in which she works and makes long-term commitments to address local concerns in collaboration with other artists, non-profit organisations and residents. For example, since 2017, Swoon has engaged in ongoing community work around links between trauma and addiction in the Kensington neighbourhood in Philadelphia, a neighbourhood hit hard by the opioid crisis. In a project with the local non-profit Mural Arts, she and her collaborators, artist and therapist Jessica Radovich, and storytelling coaches Heather Box and Julian Mocine-McQueen, hosted frequent open-door trauma-informed art and storytelling workshops in which visitors learn self-care techniques through narrative and visual art. In addition, they collaborated with community members on a mural entitled Healing Begins with Connection. In Medea, Swoon creates community differently – through social media and by engaging the museum public to empathise with her story through the interactive nature of the piece.

Feminist Art and the #MeToo Movement Medea was created and exhibited during the year in which the #MeToo movement went viral, where sexual violations were exposed publicly from Hollywood to the offices of the President and the Supreme Court of the United States.1 So many cultures and nations across the globe are failing to keep women and children safe, and even when victims speak out, they often are not taken seriously. Swoon’s installation offers a compelling mix of bold imagery and sound elements to foster empathy for what it feels like to experience trauma from multiple perspectives – as both a child and an adult – a daughter and a mother – a victim, and a perpetrator, who is also a victim. The multivalent imagery of rape and intergenerational trauma, echoed in the crossed wires of the switchboard, evokes the confusion that women feel over who is responsible for their abuse. It exposes why women cover up or are unable to acknowledge rape, domestic violence, incest and other forms of trauma. Medea is a groundbreaking feminist work of art that exemplifies the power of the artist’s collaborative, social practice art and its focus on collective healing. By forgiving her own mother and asking us, her audience, to exonerate Medea, Swoon’s work explores the

142  Paula J. Birnbaum universal themes of vulnerability and empathy. In response to #MeToo, her project asks, how can we produce art that goes beyond breaking the silence and begins to heal the wound that has been opened? While the American media characterises the #MeToo movement as a passing, disturbing eruption that will eventually resolve, Swoon’s piece shows how it is part of a deep and long-lasting cultural engagement. Her work is radical because it goes beyond exposing trauma and injustices. It asks how artists can play a leadership role in promoting dialogue and collective healing in response to intergenerational trauma through a set of interrelated practices of activist art. Whether through museum exhibitions, social media or hands-on work with community-based organisations. In choosing to organise Medea around the theme of filicide, she also pushes the parameters of what is conventionally considered “feminist art”. However, by giving voice to experiences of sexual violence and trauma in multiple generations of her own family, of which victims traditionally remained silent, she succeeds in bringing both empathy and empowerment into her work while extending her message into diverse communities through her online presence and related collaborative projects.

Acknowledgement I am especially grateful to Ruth I Iskin, Jennifer L Shaw and Mariel Solomon for their feedback on this essay. I also wish to acknowledge Brenda Schmahmann, as well as all of the scholars who participated in the “Mistress-Pieces” conference that she organised, for their helpful suggestions, especially Alexandra Kokoli.

Note 1 As noted in the Introduction to this volume, the #MeToo movement was founded over a decade earlier, in 2006, by Tarana Burke, and was focused on young Black women and girls from low-income communities in the United States.

References Beckett, Sandra L. 1995. Revisioning Red Riding Hood around the World: An Anthology of International Retellings. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Boedeker, Deborah. 1996. “Becoming Medea: Assimilation in Euripides”. In Medea: Essays on Medea in Myth, Literature, Philosophy and Art, edited by James J. Clauss and Sarah Iles Johnston, 127–148. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Butler, Judith. 2004. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso. Cavarero, Adriana. 2009. Horrorism: Naming Contemporary Violence. New York: Columbia University Press. Clauss, James, J. and Sarah Iles Johnson, ed. 1997. Medea: Essays on Medea in Myth, Literature, Philosophy, and Art. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Curry, Caledonia. 2019. “Unearthing the Medea: the Intersection of Art and Psychedelic Assisted Therapy”. Horizons: Perspectives on Psychedelics. October 13. New York, NY. www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_9RZWHrrbw. Curry, Caledonia. 2020. Email to the author. February 3. Deitch, Jeffrey, et al., ed. 2010. Swoon. New York: Abrams. Gaspar de Alba, Alicia and Georgina Guzmán. 2010. Making A Killing: Femicide, Free Trade and La Frontera. Austin: University of Texas Press. Jodidio, Philip. 2009. Zaha Hadid: Hadid: Complete Works 1979-2009. Köln: Taschen.

Swoon’s Medea (2017) 143 Kokoli, Alexandra M. 2016. The Feminist Uncanny: In Theory and Art Practice. London: Bloomsbury. Krause, Molly Communications. 2017. Press Release, “The Canyon, 1999-2017.” Contemporary Art Center’s Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art (CAC). Lusheck, Catherine H. 2017. Rubens and the Eloquence of Drawing. New York/London: Routledge. Maté, Gabor. 2010. In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books. Morineau, Camille and Lucia Pesapane, eds. 2018. Women House. Paris: Musée de la Monnaie; Washington, DC: National Museum of Women in the Arts. Manuela Editions. Olson, Kristina. 2008. “The temporal nature of Zaha Hadid’s Ramps at the Center for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati”. Southeastern College Art Conference Review 15, no. 3 (December): 338–345. Peyton, Katie. 2018. “Sending Out the Signal: Swoon Interviewed by Katie Peyton”. Bomb, June 28. https://bombmagazine.org/articles/sending-out-the-signal-swoon-interviewed/. Seda-Reeder, Maria. 2017. “Mixed-Media Artist Swoon’s Mid-Career Retrospective Opens at the Contemporary Arts Center”. CityBeat. September 22. www.citybeat.com/ arts-culture/visual-arts/article/20976588/mixedmedia-artist-swoons-midcareer-retrospective-opens-at-the-contemporary-arts-center. Swoon Studio. 2017. “Unpacking the Medea”. Facebook, October 18. www.facebook.com/ SwoonStudio. Tull, Herman. 2015. “Kali’s tongue: Shame, disgust, and the rejection of blood and violence in Vedic and Hindu thought”. International Journal of Hindu Studies 19, no. 3: 301–332. Van Zyl Smit, Betine. 2002. “Medea the feminist”. Acta Classica 45: 101–122. Watson, Tennessee. 2015. “Feminist street art in Juárez”. Signal: A Journal of International Political Graphics and Culture 04 (May): 54–73. Weber, Cynthia. 2014. “Encountering violence: terrorism and horrorism in war and citizenship”. International Political Sociology 8, no. 3: 237–255. Withers, Josephine. 1996. “Feminist Performance Art: Performing, Discovering, Transforming Ourselves”. In Power of Feminist Art: The American Movement of the 1970s, edited by Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard, 158–173. New York: Harry N. Abrams.

PART III

Great Goddess Iconographies

9

Ana Mendieta’s Silueta Series (1973–1980) In and Out of Feminism Sherry Buckberrough

Ana Mendieta’s Silueta Series began in the early 1970s, simultaneous with the appearance of second-wave feminist art. It numbers among the earliest examples of women’s body art and of the goddess revival and still today inspires hundreds of younger women artists across the world. With its multiple and repeated markings, incisions and assemblages, the series has compelled feminist thinking to expand into arenas not previously considered. It is iconic in feminist art history. At the time of the series’ inception, Mendieta vociferously allied her art and her politics with feminism. However, in 1980, she publicly withdrew that allegiance, distancing herself politically from a feminism that she then understood as white and bourgeois, limited and exclusionary. More broadly, she rebelled against being pigeonholed. Friends say that she remained privately sympathetic to the feminism that she supported in the 1970s, but her public statements denied it.1 This political shift came at the moment that is generally understood as the end of the Siluetas. It was also the moment that she returned to Cuba for the first time in 19 years. The present essay proposes that her encounter with Cuba, its alternative form of feminism and its nationalist politics were crucial to her change of political direction. It looks closely at the Siluetas and their aftermath in relation to Mendieta’s rejection of feminism. Its goal is to interrogate this rejection while simultaneously arguing for the continued significance of the Siluetas in feminist art history. At stake, in the end, is the status of “woman” in Mendieta’s art. The reception of the Siluetas has been more erratic than her political allegiances. In the 1970s, they were understood only within the context of second-wave feminism (Heit 1980; Lippard 1975, 1976, 1977, 1979; Orenstein 1978a, 1978b). Soon after they registered as Latina art (Griffin 1981; Lugo-Saavedro and Spray 1984; Poroner 1981). As early as 1984, they were of interest in the nascent field of eco-criticism (Weintraub 1984, 10–12). In the late 1980s and 1990s, at the height of feminist social constructionism, the Siluetas were rejected for reinforcing feminist essentialism.2 At the same time, they became pertinent examples of Cuban identity art (Camnitzer 1988, 1994, 89–99; Elogio 1998; Lippard 1986) and began to be considered in relation to Afro-Cuban religions such as Santeria and Abakua and to ritual processes in general (Galligan 1988; Jacob 1991, 1996; Merewether 1997). In the 1990s, a new wave of critics tackled Mendieta’s work with more complex readings through semiotics, psychoanalysis and performativity theories, effectively writing out its earlier associations with feminist essentialism (Blocker 1998, 1999; Kwon 1996; Raine 1996; Rogoff 1997). Since then, the Siluetas have been considered in relation to, among other categories, Conceptual Art (Godfrey 1998, 280, 282–284; Osborne 2002), Land Art (Kastner 1998, 121–123; Tufnell 2006, 69–73), ancient Cuban

148  Sherry Buckberrough cultures (Clearwater 1993), the Black Atlantic (Hyacinthe 2019), primitivism (Del Valle-Cordero 2018; Ocampo 2016), affect theory (Best 2014) and theories of time (Weiss 2015). In the midst of this, feminism faded, re-emerged, and now has more or less been lost again in the morass, however significant, of critical diversity.

A Brief Biography For readers who are not familiar with Mendieta’s life story, I will provide a summary, as it is essential to understanding her own statements about her work’s meaning and it is the starting point for many critical interpretations. Born in Cuba in 1948, she was raised in a well-respected bourgeois family. Her maternal great grandfather was a hero in the revolution of 1898 that freed Cuba from Spanish rule. In 1934–1935, her paternal great uncle served briefly as Cuba’s president. With the revolution in 1959, Mendieta’s father first supported Castro, but later clashed with revolutionary ideology over the issue of religion. Fired from his government post, he began working with counter-revolutionary forces. In 1961, in fear for their futures, the Mendietas put their two daughters, Ana (age 12) and Raquelin (age 15), on an Operation Peter Pan evacuation flight to Miami, sponsored by the Catholic Church. On arrival, the sisters were shipped to Iowa, in the northern Midwest of the country. For the next five years, Mendieta lived between Catholic orphanages and foster homes, suffered from intense culture and climate shock and endured racial discrimination. Iowa had a strongly homogeneous population – hard working, Protestant farmers of German descent. Brown faces and Latin culture were more or less unknown. Mendieta and her sister stood out as radically different and even potentially dangerous. In 1966, when Mendieta was heading to college, her mother and younger brother joined the sisters in Iowa. The reunion was marred by Mendieta’s continuing sense of abandonment. In her words: “Having been torn from my homeland (Cuba) during my adolescence, I am overwhelmed by the feeling of having been cast out of the womb …” (Viso 2008, 297). In high school, Mendieta found satisfaction in art classes and decided to major in painting at the University of Iowa, one of the best art schools in the nation during that era. She insisted later that if she had not discovered art, she would have become a criminal (Mendieta 1983). Upon completing her MA in painting in 1972, she made another major decision – that painting was not “real” enough for what she wanted to convey, which was power and magic (Mendieta 1988).3 She completed an MFA in the university’s experimental Intermedia Art programme headed by Hans Breder, a German immigrant well connected to the New York art scene. Breder’s interests combined performance, sculpture, video and critical and anthropological theory. Mendieta and Breder were lovers. Breder brought many important contemporary artists to Iowa for lectures and short residencies. The art school itself brought in contemporary critics. Mendieta was able to show her experimental work, including the Siluetas, to Lucy Lippard, who included her in several reviews of emerging feminist art. Encouraged by the positive reception she was enjoying though these contacts, she moved to New York in 1978. In 1980, Mendieta’s romantic relationship with Breder ended and soon thereafter one began with artist Carl Andre. During this period, she travelled frequently, producing work on various university campuses, in cities where she was sponsored by alternative arts organisations, in Florida where she had Cuban friends, and in Cuba,

Ana Mendieta’s Silueta Series (1973–80) 149 to which she made seven trips between 1980 and 1983. In the fall of 1983, she was awarded the American Academy in Rome Prize and moved to Europe. The following year Andre joined her. They married in Rome in February 1985. On 8 September of that year, her body fell from the 34th floor of Andre’s apartment building in New York City. Her death was reported prominently two days later in several New York newspapers. Andre was accused of her murder and stood trial for three years before his acquittal. For many years, the significance of Mendieta’s work was mired in the story of her death and speculations that it had been foretold in her work.4

Defining the Silueta Series A primary strength of the series, and the basis of any description of it, is its consistency in aspects of form and process. One can say that the Siluetas are a series of actions in which Mendieta positioned her own body, or a constructed proxy of it, in a carefully chosen and prepared location, most often in nature, though sometimes in archaeological ruins or on culturally sacred or religious sites. She then subjected her body or its substitute to a simple, specified process that incorporated natural forces – water, fire, earth, wind and/or natural growth. She documented these actions with photographs and Super-8 films. The images show either a female body (her own), or a female form, or a form so generalised that it might or might not be female, in a prepared environment in nature or one constructed of natural elements. Works labelled Silueta were produced from 1973 until 1980. The series began on a summer trip to Mexico with Breder’s Intermedia program. The Latin culture of Mexico recalled Cuba to her and she found the landscape overwhelming and thus comfortingly enveloping (Rosenthal 2013, 230). Mendieta explained her purposes: “My art is the way I reestablish the bonds that unite me to the Universe. It is a return to the maternal source. Through my earth/body sculptures I become one with the earth” (Mendieta, A 1988, 71). She developed her personal ritualistic practice in indigenous archaeological and natural sites in Mexico and natural sites in Iowa, where she also found places capable of providing the sense of power she required. By her own claim, the Siluetas began with Image of Yagul (1973: Fig. 9.1), though she never officially labelled this work a Silueta (Rosenthal 2013, 228).5 Mendieta lay in an ancient Zapotec gravesite, had white flowers placed over her body, and was photographed. This stunning piece establishes the series’ characteristics of site specificity, ritual action, the naked body, natural elements, the evocation of ancient cultures and the conjoining of life and death in the intermediary of the female body. In later works, the artist chose to have a silhouette drawn around her body. She then removed herself and enhanced the remaining form with natural materials. Not long after, she ceased using her body altogether and instead constructed its image, sometimes using a template, sometimes not, in a prepared environment. The consistencies of the series are significant. Firstly, there is its process: the body is placed or its proxy produced, after which it undergoes a transformation. The performance of the act, either of the body itself or the making of its substitute, constituted her ritual. Some consider it a mimesis of sacrifice and redemption related to Catholicism (Mendieta 2000; Merewether 1999). Others connect it with practices used in Santeria (Jacob 1991, 1996). However, it replicates neither of these precisely. Secondly, a good number of the Siluetas present arms raised at right angles, recalling ancient or contemporary folkloric figures of or related to goddesses (Fig. 9.2). It

150  Sherry Buckberrough

Figure 9.1  A na Mendieta, Imagen de Yagul (Image from Yagul), 1973. © The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection LLC Courtesy Galerie Lelong & Co. Source:  Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.

Ana Mendieta’s Silueta Series (1973–80) 151

Figure 9.2  A na Mendieta, Untitled: Silueta Series, Mexico From Silueta Works in Mexico, 1973-1977, 1976. © The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection LLC Courtesy Galerie Lelong & Co. Source:  Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.

152  Sherry Buckberrough

Figure 9.3  A na Mendieta, Untitled: Silueta Series, 1979. © The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection LLC Courtesy Galerie Lelong & Co. Source:  Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.

is a gesture of address without words or clear addressee. The figure may speak to the viewer, the earth or the artist herself. Without Mendieta’s body, we cannot tell if the Silueta faces front or back, the earth or the sky (Best 2007, 68–70). In this way, it is always one and more than one, escaping precise specifications, oscillating between possibilities, profoundly liminal. Thirdly, the Siluetas always measure just less than five feet (about a metre and a half) high, the size of the artist herself. For this and many other reasons, they have been called self-portraits (Camnitzer 1988, 1994, 88–89; Mendieta, R 1988). Fourthly, the body or its proxy is either surrounded by nature, partially or wholly covered by it or made of it. In later works in the series, it is actually difficult to discern the limits of the form as it dissolves into its surroundings (Fig. 9.3). Susan Best remarks that the Siluetas functioned “to assert her place in the world … and to suggest an ethic of dwelling … that is a kind of co-existence with nature” (Best 2007, 72). They are, to quote Mendieta again, “visualizing the body as an extension of nature and nature as an extension of the body” (Mendieta, A 1988, 71). They fluctuate between these positions. Fifthly, the artist makes an always temporary claim on nature, as all of the Siluetas are eventually subsumed into it again. In many critics’ minds, the Siluetas posit ephemerality as a female response to the aggressive gestures made by contemporaneous males working in land art (Rosenthal 2013, 231).6 This same ephemerality links them to ecological thinking in general. Today they are understood as eco-feminist (Baker 2016). Finally, following the artist’s explanation, the Siluetas all image a female form, even if, with some, gender assignment is not visually clear: “For over ten years my art

Ana Mendieta’s Silueta Series (1973–80) 153 consists of a dialogue between nature and me, using the feminine figure to explore the relation between the artist, the work of art, and its environment” (Lopez 2015, 113). This intention on her part has led critical interpretation not only to posit feminism as basic to her project, but also to assume that Mendieta was, in her insistent repetitions, seeking an essence – specifically the essence of “woman” (Best 2007, 57).7 Mendieta often confirmed these assumptions: “… my work, as a dialogue between nature and the mythical female body, has evolved dialectically in response to diverse landscapes as an emotional, sexual, biological affirmation of being” (Rosenthal 2013, 224). The form used in the Siluetas references both the body of the artist and the forms of ancient and Neolithic goddess figures, merging present and past in pursuit of the concept of “woman” as both fundamental and eternal (Rosenthal 2013, 208).8

Diversity in the Silueta Series A primary problem of the Silueta Series is that its limits are markedly permeable, both in terms of chronology and in its relationship to her other works. Furthermore, the locus of the actual “work” in any given Silueta slips easily between concept, action and documentation, depending on critical purpose.9 Susan Best admirably tackled these issues in her 2007 article, “The Serial Spaces of Ana Mendieta” and the following section of this essay relies heavily on her groundwork (Best 2007). Mendieta brought visual interest to the Siluetas and proposed myriad applications of their concept through their exceptional diversification. They differ in site, material, colour, texture, processes of making and legibility. They were made, for example, of blood, flowers, fireworks, dirt and moss. They were placed on beaches and hillsides, in ancient ruins, church grounds and jungles. They are black, red, white, green and pink. They were drawn, dug, gathered, grown and burned. If the consistency of the series confirms her adherence to the concept of “woman” as essence, its diversity may speak to the demise of that very same essence within the development of the work. In 1988, Gayatri Spivak asserted that essential categories always contain diversities and as an essence is diversified, it oozes away. Speaking specifically of the essence of “woman” she noted: “It is my task as a reader to see where in that grid there are the spaces where, in fact, woman oozes away” (Spivak 1994, 173).10 This idea is pertinent in relation to the development of Mendieta’s work within the Silueta Series and after. If the essence of the Siluetas is “woman”, could it be that “woman” too “oozes away”, that the concept of “woman” disappears in the ever-expanding quantity of works within the series and the evermore-abstracted quality of the forms that Mendieta employed? Is it possible that Mendieta’s public retreat from feminism corresponded to a parallel retreat of “woman” from the work? The remainder of this essay will be guided by these questions. Several authors have concluded that the series can be seen as endless. Best has carefully clarified the issues that support this stance (Best 2007 , 53–64). Its starting date is debated, with different arguments based on different definitions of the series: whether it must have an actual silhouette, must or must not have a body or must be in nature. Its ending date is not really clear. Mendieta produced works that look like Siluetas, though are not named so, in places where she travelled after 1980. The artist did not help with this. She often changed both her mind and her story. That problem is exacerbated by the fact that two other series, the Tree of Life Series and the Fetish Series, were created simultaneously with the Siluetas and are

154  Sherry Buckberrough sometimes considered to be part of them. Critics tend to separate them out. Curators tend to fold them in. The Tree of Life Series often reincorporates the artist’s body after she ceased to use it in the Siluetas. The Fetish Series poses the problem of occasionally not looking like a body at all. There is a further debate on what documentary material now constitutes the Siluetas. For many years, they were only known through photographs. Few of her over a 100 films were exhibited prior to the Hirshhorn’s major 2004 retrospective. Their emergence in high-quality format, through the Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, encouraged Lynn Lukkas and Howard Oransky’s 2015 exhibition, Covered in Time and History: The Films of Ana Mendieta. Finally, since the artist’s death, the estate has dived into the thousands of slides in her archives and begun producing prints from them. These “estate prints” are clearly distinguished upon sale from “lifetime prints” and are now in many museum collections. This has significantly burst the limits of the series. It has also allowed its richness to be known to the public. The Silueta Series seems to have a life of its own. It oozes in and out of categories, materials, media, locations and natural processes, striking critical pay dirt in each new territory.

Life, Politics and Art Mendieta protested all the confining labels that came her way. In much the same way that she backed away from feminism, she rejected being niched as a Latina or a Cuban. Her aspirations for her art were larger than the goals of any identity politics (Viso 2004, 117). Regardless, a review of her biography, concentrating on its cultural and political contexts, reveals some reasons for the continuing shifts of her allegiances. Mendieta’s infamous Untitled (Rape Scene) (1973), prompted by a rape/murder on the University of Iowa campus, was a clear product of feminist politics. For it, Mendieta staged a tableau in which she posed as a woman who had been raped. Classmates were invited to visit, unaware in advance of what they would see. In the same year as this work, she made her second trip to Mexico and began the Siluetas. In 1975, Lucy Lippard visited the University of Iowa. She tells the tale that Mendieta literally cornered her to tell her about her work.11 As mentioned earlier, Lippard became a strong supporter, foregrounding both Untitled (Rape Scene) and the Siluetas in several essays. Gloria Orenstein included a Silueta in her 1978 article “The Reemergence of the Archetype of the Great Goddess in Art by Contemporary Women” (Orenstein 1978, 77). On arrival in New York City, Mendieta was quickly connected with the women artists collective that formed A.I.R. Gallery. She had two one-person exhibitions there between 1979 and 1982. She exhibited in several other feminist venues at that time and participated in panel discussions on women’s art throughout the American northeast. New York offered Mendieta a much broader range of friends than had Iowa, people of Latin origin and people of colour. She thrived in these circles.12 By 1979, she was participating in panels and exhibitions of Latin American artists. In January 1980, two important events took place: she returned to Cuba for the first time and she was included in an exhibition of black and Hispanic artists at Franklin Furnace. The first event allowed her to see her homeland, visit relatives, make connections and plans to return and do work there. The second brought the interest of two black and

Ana Mendieta’s Silueta Series (1973–80) 155 engaged female critics – Judith Wilson and Gylbert Coker – to her work, allying her interests with women of colour. Coker reviewed her one-person show at A.I.R. in Art in America with a black and white photo of a Silueta made with fire in a cave (Coker 1980). Wilson published a full-page article in the Village Voice, read by everyone who had any interest in the arts in New York City (Wilson 1980). Both of these articles, and others, stressed Mendieta’s “story”. They explained the Siluetas in relation to her biography and to feminism. In September of 1980, after the Cuba trip, Mendieta curated a show at A.I.R. entitled Dialectics of Isolation: An Exhibition of Third World Women of the United States. In the catalogue introduction, she specified her own identity as a Third World artist, proclaiming: … as women in the United States politicized themselves and came together in the Feminist Movement with the purpose to end the domination and exploitation by the white male culture, they failed to remember us. American Feminism as it stands is basically a white middle class movement. (Mendieta 1980) In 1982, she dropped out of A.I.R.13 Mendieta returned to Cuba in January 1981 in the company of Lucy Lippard, Suzanne Lacy, Mel Edwards and several others figures from the American art world. On that trip, she was able to interact far more with the Cuban arts community. She and Lippard attended the opening exhibition of Volumen Uno, a group of young male artists who would revolutionise Cuban contemporary art in the 1980s. In preparation for this essay, I spoke to several members of Volumen Uno and other artists whom Mendieta met in Cuba.14 They all recalled their amazement at meeting her as they had seen her work in Coker’s article in Art in America and had been captivated. They took her in, showed her the countryside and introduced her to other artists and to officials in the Cuban art world. She, in turn, demystified the New York art world for them, taught them how to present their work professionally and made connections for them in the States. Eventually, most of this group left Cuba and now live in Mexico or Miami. This return to her homeland altered both her artistic production and her dedication to feminism. Nothing resembling American feminism existed in the Cuban cultural or political context of that time. In 1985, Betty LaDuke published an article on Cuban women artists in Woman’s Art Journal entitled “Feminism is Not Our Issue” (LaDuke 1984–1985). The title was a quote from a Cuban female art historian who insisted that Cuban women were among the most liberated in the world. Her assertion was not without merit. Castro’s revolutionary program championed equality for women at work and in the home. Improved health care, compulsory education, paid leave for childbirth and class equalisation greatly improved women’s status and functioning in the culture, with many women entering professions from which they had previously been barred (Molyneux 2000, 293–304). Most importantly, for Mendieta’s experience, the starting point for Cuban feminism was totally different than for American feminism. Its primary goal was to bring the majority of Cuban women, who were still rural, into the modern world, teaching them health care, childcare and literacy skills. Lippard explained to me that the group that accompanied Mendieta in 1981 quickly realised that the feminism they knew

156  Sherry Buckberrough had no resonance when the stakes were about basic hygiene. According to Cuban state policy, women and men were equal. The rise in women’s living standards there inclined Mendieta to believe it.15 Cuba forced her to come to grips with issues of class: the prior upper class standing of her Cuban family, the prior peasant status of most of the population and the bourgeois ideology of American feminism. I asked the artists I interviewed about the status of Cuban feminism at that time and their understanding of feminist politics in Mendieta’s work. Their answers were consistent: that there was no feminism (meaning of the American type) in Cuba when Mendieta came in 1981. They did not discuss feminism with her; they were interested in her work for its courage, its avant-garde demeanour and its tie to Cuba. My conclusion was that Cuban feminism had been remarkably effective, but the word itself remained unspoken in Cuban culture. Its efforts were understood as a result of the revolution. As Mendieta re-identified with her homeland and its people, she necessarily distanced herself from the American feminist bases of her prior work. Mendieta understood racial discrimination from her time in Iowa. On her visits to Cuba, she realised its roots in colonialism and its perpetuation in Cuba’s postcolonial period. She learned about the indigenous tribes of Cuba that were wiped out by the Spanish invasion. Her politics turned from white American feminism to issues of racism and colonialism and her intense identification with Cuba prompted her to assume its nationalism and its revolutionary zeal. In the summer of 1981, Mendieta carved the Rupestrian Sculptures in Jaruco National Park. These are the best known of the many rock carvings she did in Cuba. They mark another ending to the Siluetas in that, although they will eventually disappear (and some have already), they are comparatively more permanent. Hiking into the jungle to explore ancient caves, she emulated the technique of both the Taíno and European Paleolithic artists, allowing the natural projections and recessions of the rock wall to dictate the placement of the work and to guide its form. Carving in rock, albeit a rather soft limestone, made the production of the evenly spaced, parallel outlines of her prior Siluetas hard, if not impossible, to accomplish. Outlines dictated by the rock itself gave her figures new forms. Their reference to the female body was less in the replication of its outline than in the careful designation and prominence of female anatomical parts: breasts, vaginas, wombs (Fig. 9.4). Mendieta reduced the necessary information of her subject to specific biological essentials. In the transition from the Siluetas to the Rupestrian Sculptures, we witness what I will call “essentialism in process” in Mendieta’s art. It is carried out on the female form by means of abstraction, a standard technique of high modernism. But while the concept of “woman” is abstracted in form and “essentialised” in content, it is also particularised through naming. Many of the Rupestrian Sculptures are named after individual Taíno or Ciboney goddesses. Thus “woman” is again diversified. The sculptures’ measurement is still just under five feet, but their reference to the body of the artist is by no means direct. They ooze away from her and into biomorphic forms tied to the Cuban land. In the Rupestrian Sculptures, Mendieta rejected her own strongly Spanish heritage and endorsed the cultures that her ancient relatives destroyed. As religion is officially banned in Cuba, these sculptures were not received as religious figures. Rather they were understood as testaments to Cuban history, and they acknowledged the artist’s relation to it. In 1983, Mendieta became disenchanted with the Cuban government, ceased to visit Cuba and moved to Rome. Having marked her existence in the landscape there,

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Figure 9.4  A na Mendieta, Guacar (Esculturas Rupestres) [Our Menstruation (Rupestrian Sculptures)], 1981. © The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection LLC Courtesy Galerie Lelong & Co. Source:  Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.

158  Sherry Buckberrough she left both that home and her home in exile, the United States. By 1985, she had decided to settle in Rome. Nonetheless, the last two years of her life were essentially nomadic, with parts of her life in New York, in Rome, in Iowa and frequent travel for work on site. Leaving Cuba in 1983, she brought with her leaves from Cuban trees onto which she incised her repertoire of female forms. Her work became portable, carrying its site specificity, Cuba and homeland, as distanced indexes. The leaf pieces emulate the forms of a leaf as much as they do the forms of “woman”, a transformational oozing away of “woman” that had begun in Jaruco. In Rome, she burned images onto carefully chosen indigenous tree trunks, producing abstractions with vague references to both leaves and female bodies. Neither series have the measurement of the artist, who appears to have separated herself even more fully, “oozing away” along with “woman” through the subtleties of abstraction. Despite Mendieta’s seeming movement out of feminism, in the wake of her death feminists across the world claimed her art as a glorification of “woman” and her life as that of a martyr to women’s causes. Nor has that popularity waned.16 Thus despite the visual and conceptual evidence I have presented here, in answer to the question “Does ‘woman’ disappear in Mendieta’s late work?”, I say “No”. It doesn’t because of the intense association of her work with the image of “woman” in critical memory and the fusion of her life and her art around the same theme in popular discourse. The artist’s insistent repetitions of the female image, starting with the Siluetas, are themselves repeated in the minds of viewers. As Rachel Weiss proposes: “The repeated forms in … [Mendieta’s] stills become instantly familiar, converting the improbable into the inevitable” (Weiss 2015, 53). “Woman’s” presence as fundamental content, however, obscured in some of Mendieta’s diversified and abstracted forms, is, in the end, inevitable. The viewer ingests, digests, craves and finally reproduces it. Memory carries the Siluetas into all the later works, reinforcing the endlessness of the series and recalling Mendieta’s roots in feminism. As such, the Silueta Series is both essential to understanding Mendieta and to feminist art history.

Acknowledgements I would like to thank Raquel Cecilia Mendieta, Ana Mendieta’s niece, for answering endless questions and Sarah Landry, formerly of Galerie Lelong, for providing numerous documents for this project. I also sincerely thank Ricardo Brey, Gustavo Perez Monzon, Glexis Novoa, Leandro Soto and Lucy Lippard for their time spent in interviews.

Notes 1 I knew the artist personally from 1973 to 1976 in Iowa and later in New York and Rome. Although in 1980 she complained about white bourgeois feminism, she continued to support most of its ideals. Her private consistency as a feminist was confirmed to me in a telephone conversation with Lucy Lippard (22 October 2018). Mendieta remained part of the feminist Heresies collective for the 1981 issue on feminism and ecology and published in it twice more after leaving the collective (Heresies 4, no. 13, 1981: 22 and 4, no. 15, 1982: 41). 2 Mendieta’s rejection by the art world was manifest more by her lack of inclusion in exhibitions than by published critiques. Her own statements and her close friendship with Nancy Spero, whose public defence of feminist essentialism began as early as 1983, made her political orientation clear to the art public. During Mendieta’s 1987 New Museum

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retrospective, the museum hosted a well-attended public conversation entitled “The Great Goddess Debate: Spirituality versus Social Practice in Recent Feminist Art”. With Mendieta’s exhibition as a backdrop, Spero defended spirituality and, with it, essentialism, as a valid feminist art practice against attacks from social constructionist critics. 3 “The turning point in my art was in 1972, when I realised that my paintings were not real enough for what I wanted the image to convey – and by real I mean I wanted my images to have power, to be magic.” 4 Andre’s lawyers argued that the recurrent theme of death in her work and her frequent use of blood were evidence of her suicidal tendencies. This gave rise to ample popular press articles (see Katz 1990). Many art world figures and much of the public came to similar conclusions. See O’Hagen (2013) for recent press perpetuating this interpretation. 5 The first labelled Siluetas date from 1974. Yet Mendieta, in her 1985 interview with Joan Marter, claimed Image of Yagul to be the start of the series. The artist was often inconsistent with titles. 6 This interpretation derived originally from Mendieta’s own words: “And the culture of working with nature, it’s a different kind of landscape work. I am thinking of the males, Robert Smithson and those people … He brutalized nature. He used it”. 7 Best tackled the issue of essentialism in Mendieta’s work, defending its importance in any attempt to address the series in its totality. 8 The Siluetas resonated at the time with the feminist revival of the Great Goddess. Mendieta at first accepted this reading, but by 1981 found it too limiting. 9 First noted by Wilson (1980). 10 Amelia Jones has recently championed Spivak’s claim (Jones 2019). 11 Repeated to me in conversation in October 2018. 12 My own observation of the artist at the time. 13 Although this gesture is often seen as another indication of her rejection of feminism, she told me that it was because the options for her work had grown to the point that she no longer had time for the participation that a co-op gallery required. 14 Interviews with Ricardo Brey, Gustavo Perez Monzon, Leandro Soto and Glexis Novoa. October 2018. 15 For the record, neither official policy changes concerning gender equality nor the work of the FMC have eliminated engrained sexism in Cuba. According to Joseph de La Torre Dwyer, despite passage of the Family Code of 1975, declaring that work in the home must be equally shared, food preparation, childcare, housekeeping and sanitation are still considered the work of women. Violence against women persists. Despite the wide availability of contraceptives, abortion is ubiquitous, apparently because pregnancy upholds men’s virility. Men continue to dominate the upper levels of organisations of power, and therefore formulate policy according to male perceptions. 16 Protests at museums showing Andre’s work began in 1992 at the Guggenheim SoHo. Over two decades later they have recurred: at The Dia Foundation (2014), the Tate Modern (2016) and LA MOCA (2017).

References Baker, Elizabeth Ann. 2016. “To Be Magic: The Art of Ana Mendieta Through an Ecofeminist Lens”, B.A. Honors in the Major Thesis. 3, University of Central Florida. Best, Susan. 2007. “The Serial Spaces of Ana Mendieta”. Art History 30, no. 1 (February): 57–82. Best, Susan. 2014. “Ana Mendieta: Affect Miniaturization, Emotional Ties and the Silueta Series”. In Visualizing Feeling: Affect and the Feminine Avant-garde, 92–115. London and New York: I.B. Tauris. Blocker, Jane. 1998. “Ana Mendieta and the Politics of the Venus Negra”. Cultural Studies 12, no. 1 (January): 31–50. Blocker, Jane. 1999. Where Is Ana Mendieta? Identity, Performativity, Exile. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Camnitzer, Luis. 1988. “Ana Mendieta en el New Museum de Nueva York.” Arte en Columbia 38: 44–49, 133–135.

160  Sherry Buckberrough Camnitzer, Luis. 1994. New Art of Cuba, Austin: University of Texas Press. Clearwater, Bonnie. ed., 1993. Ana Mendieta: A Book of Works. Miami Beach: Grassfield Press. Coker, Gylbert. 1980. “Ana Mendieta at A.I.R”. Art in America 64, no. 4 (April): 133–134. Del Valle-Cordero, Alejandro J. 2018. “Las influencias de las ruinas arqueológicas de Yagul en el arte de Ana Mendieta”. Arte, Individuo y Sociedad 30, no. 1: 127–144. Dwyer, Joseph de la Torre. 2011. “Precarious Politics: Experiments in Market-Socialism and the Prospects for Cuban Women’s Unfinished Revolution”. New Political Science 33, no. 2 (June): 211–237. Eligio, Antonio. 1998. “A Tree from Many Shores: Cuban Art in Movement”. Art Journal 57, no. 4 (Winter): 62–71. Galligan, Gregory. 1988. “Ana Mendieta: A Retrospective”. Arts Magazine 62, no. 8 (April): 48–49. Godfrey, Tony. 1998. Conceptual Art, Art and Ideas. London: Phaidon. Griffin, Roberta. 1981. Latin American Art: A Woman’s View. María Brito-Avellana, Ana Mendieta, Elena Presser. Ex. cat. Miami: Frances Wolfson Art Gallery, Miami-Dade Community College. Heit, Janet. 1980. “Speaking the Measure of Feminist Art”. Women Artists News 3, no. 7 (April): 3. Hyacinthe, Genevieve. 2019. Radical Virtuosity: Ana Mendieta and the Black Atlantic. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press. Jacob, Mary Jane. 1991. Ana Mendieta: The ‘Silueta’ Series, 1973-1980. Ex. cat. New York: Galerie Lelong. Jacob, Mary Jane. 1996. “Ashé in the Art of Ana Mendieta”. In Santería Aesthetics in Contemporary Art, edited by Arturo Lindsay, 189–200. Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press. Jones, Amelia. 2019. “Essentialism, Feminism, and Art: Spaces Where Woman ‘Oozes Away’”. In A Companion to Feminist Art, edited by Hilary Robinson and Maria Elena Buzek, 157–179. Chichester, West Sussex and Hoboken, NJ: Wiley. Kastner, Jeffrey. ed., 1998. Land and Environmental Art. London and New York: Phaidon Press. Katz, Robert. 1990. Naked by the Window: The Fatal Marriage of Carl Andre and Ana Mendieta. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press. Kwon, Miwon. 1996. “Bloody Valentine: Afterimage by Ana Mendieta”. In Inside the Visible: In, of, and from the feminine, edited by Catherine M. De Zegher, 164–171. Boston: ICA Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press. LaDuke, Betty. 1984–1985. “Feminism Is Not Our Issue”. Women’s Art Journal 5, no. 2 (Autumn–Winter): 35. Lippard, Lucy. 1975. “Transformation Art”. Ms. 4, no. 4 (October): 33. Lippard, Lucy. 1976. “The Pains and Pleasures of Rebirth: European and American Women’s Body Art”. Art in America 64, no. 3 (May–June): 131–139. Lippard, Lucy. 1977. “Quite Contrary: Body, Nature, Ritual in Women’s Art”. Chrysalis 2 (July): 32–35. Lippard, Lucy. 1979. Exchanges I. New York: Henry Street Settlement, Louis Abrons Arts for Living Center. Lippard, Lucy. 1986. “Made in the U.S.A.: Art from Cuba”. Art in America 74 (April): 27. Lopez, Iraida H. 2015. “Ana Mendieta: Chiseling (in) Cuba”. In Impossible Returns: Narratives of the Cuban Diaspora, 90–120. Gainsville, Tallahassee, Tampa, Boca Raton, Pensacola, Orlando, Miami, Jacksonville, Ft. Meyers, Sarasota: University of Florida. Lugo-Saavedra, Denise and John Spray. 1984. Aquí: 27 Latin American Artists Living and Working in the United States. Ex. cat. Los Angeles: Fischer Gallery, USC. Mendieta, Ana. 1980. “Introduction”. In Dialectics of Isolation: An Exhibition of Third World Artists in the United States. Ex. cat. New York: A.I.R. Gallery, n.p.

Ana Mendieta’s Silueta Series (1973–80) 161 Mendieta, Ana. 1983. Interview with Cockcroft. “Culture and Survival: Interview with Juan Sanchez, Ana Mendieta and Willie Birch”. Art and Artists (February):16. Mendieta, Ana. 1988. “A Selection of Statements and Notes”. Sulfur 22 (Spring): 70. Mendieta, Ana. 2000. “Ana Mendieta”. Interview with Linda Montana. In Performance Artists Talking in the Eighties, edited by Linda Montana, 394–399. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press. Mendieta, Raquelin. 1988. “Ana Mendieta: Self-Portrait of a Goddess”. Review: Latin American Literature and Arts 39: 38–39. Merewether, Charles. 1997. “From Inscription to Dissolution: An Essay on Expenditure”. In Ana Mendieta. Ex. cat., edited by Gloria Moure, 83–131. Santiago de Compostela: Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea, in collaboration with Barcelona: Fundació Antoni Tàpies. Merewether, Charles. 1999. “Ana Mendieta”. Grand Street 18, no. 3 (Winter): 40–50. Molyneux, Maxine. 2000. “State, Gender, and Institutional Change: The Federación de Mujeres Cubanas”. In Hidden Histories of Gender and the State in Latin America, edited by Elizabeth Dore and Maxine Molyneux, 291–321. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Ocampo, Estela. 2016. “Primitivismo en el arte contempráneo”. Arte, Individuo y Socieded 28, no. 2: 311–324. O’Hagen, Sean. 2013. “Ana Mendieta: Death of an Artist Foretold in Blood”. The Guardian (September 21). Orenstein, Gloria, 1978a. “A Renaissance of Goddess Culture”. Fireweed 1 (Autumn): 35–45. Orenstein, Gloria. 1978b. “The Reemergence of the Archetype of the Great Goddess in Art by Contemporary Women”. Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics 5 (Spring): 74–84. Osborne, Peter, ed. 2002. Conceptual Art, Themes and Movements. London: Phaidon. Poroner, Palmer. 1981. “The Latin American Art Infusion”. Artspeak 111 (November 26): 10. Raine, Anne. 1996. “Embodied Geographies: Subjectivity and Materiality in the Work of Ana Mendieta”. In Generations and Geographies in the Visual Arts: Feminist Readings, edited by Griselda Pollock, 228–249. London and New York: Routledge. Rogoff, Irit. 1997. “In the Empire of the Object: The Geographies of Ana Mendieta”. In Outsider Art: Contesting Boundaries in Contemporary Culture, edited by Vera L. Zolberg and Joni Maya Cherbo, 159–171. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rosenthal, Stephanie. ed., 2013. Ana Mendieta: Traces. Ex. cat. London: Hayward Publishing. Spero, Nancy. 1983. “Letter to Art in America”. Art in America (November): 7. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1994. “In a word”. Interview with Ellen Rooney. In The Essential Difference, edited by Naomi Schor and Elizabeth Weed, 151–184. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Tufnell, Ben. 2006. Land Art. London: Tate Publishing. Viso, Olga. 2004. Ana Mendieta: Earth Body, Sculpture and Performance 1972-1985.Ex. cat. Washington, DC: Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institute; Ostfilden-Ruit: Hatje Cantz Verlag. Viso, Olga. 2008. Unseen Mendieta: The Unpublished Works of Ana Mendieta. Munich, Berlin, London, New York: Prestel Verlag. Weintraub, Linda. 1984. Land Marks: New Site Proposals by Twenty-two Original Pioneers of Environmental Art. Ex. cat. Annandale-on-Hudson: Edith C. Blum Institute. Weiss, Rachel. 2015. “Difficult Times: Watching Mendieta’s Films”. In Covered in Time and History: The Films of Ana Mendieta. Curated by Lynn Lukkas and Howard Oransky, 52– 63. Minneapolis: Katherine E. Nash Gallery, University of Minnesota with the University of California Press. Wilson, Judith. 1980. “Ana Mendieta Plants Her Garden”. The Village Voice (August 13–19): 71–72.

10 Clara Menéres’ WomanEarth-Life (1977) and the Politics of Censorship, Concealment and Vandalism Laura Castro Responses to misogyny, violence, censorship, puritanism and moralism have frequently characterised the works and artistic interventions of Portuguese sculptress Clara Menéres (Braga, 1943–Lisbon, 2018). This chapter addresses one of the most significant and influential projects by the artist – Mulher-Terra-Viva (Woman-EarthLife), an environment artwork shown in 1977. An iconic work of feminist art in Portugal that was developed after the April 1974 Portuguese democratic revolution, it was one of the very few Portuguese feminist works to be exhibited internationally at the time. I will address the circumstances which surrounded its creation and initial exhibition and the subsequent two reinstallations of the work, as well as its critical reception. My chapter underlines the connection between its feminist and ecological dimensions, an aspect that is pertinent to the work of the artist. It also considers overt as well as more surreptitious forms of censorship and prejudice within the contexts of museums and exhibition spaces that are evidenced through the events surrounding the project Woman-Earth-Life. I shall demonstrate how this project’s feminism and its use of female-bodied and female-centred tropes are intimately bound up in the prejudice and exclusion that has been at play when it has been exhibited. Amelia Jones wrote: “While not always clearly in evidence, beliefs about sexual and gender identifications and desire […] are absolutely central to how art is made, distributed, exhibited, discussed, valued, collected, historicized and given meaning in our culture” (Jones 2014, 12–13). This understanding has, however, been somewhat belated in Portuguese art history where, Filipa Vicente suggests, focus has been placed on artistic results rather than on the ways in which social identities inform creation processes (Vicente 2012a, 216–217).1 My text is intended as a contribution to feminist work on Portuguese art and a challenge to traditionalist art historical discourse which overlooks how “beliefs about sexual and gender identifications and desire” (Schor 2015, 159–164) play out in the visual domain. Whenever possible, I will use the artist’s own words, collected from conferences, interviews and published articles. The chapter begins with a brief biographical introduction to the creator of Woman-Earth-Life, followed by the presentation of her work and the critical dimension of the problems they address.

A Complex and Contradictory Identity Clara Menéres has produced numerous works underpinned by a feminist sensibility. This was particularly true during the first part of her career, between the decades of 1960 and 1990, when she addressed the situation of women in light of the social and

Clara Menéres’ Woman-Earth-Life (1977) 163 cultural context of the second half of that century. In an article published in 2000, she affirmed: “Any sculpture by me is an incarnation of women and their problems” (Menéres 2000, 161). 2 Whether in conferences, interviews or exhibitions, in an academic world dominated by men, Clara Menéres always took cognisance of her female identity, even when her work was focused on issues other than gender. She was one of the organisers of Portuguese Women Artists at the National Society of Fine Arts, in Lisbon, in 1977, an exhibition that formed part of a set of initiatives which would become known as “the first festival of feminine creativity in Portugal” (Menéres 2003, 53). In its catalogue, she presents a short view of several women artists’ career trajectories and, in line with the revision of art history which was starting to take place in Portugal and the questioning of the conditions in which these women worked and created, she alludes to the “dramatic fate resulting from social conventions” (Menéres 2003, 57). Menéres was one of the voices that contributed to the visibility of women artists in Portugal. Her work acted as a vehicle for breaking patriarchal models which confined women to a reserved sphere – household and motherhood – and recommended that female artists select themes centred on family, motherhood and household environments, or that they concentrate on still lifes. The artist denounces the passive acceptance of this supposed feminine sensibility – lyrical and delicate – and prescribed conduct which denied women “the other polarity, the one on the side of the night and the moon, the side of affections, of feelings and of the body, of life and of suffering” (Menéres 2003, 61).3 The sculptress was one of the few to commit to the feminist cause, in a context of severe conflict which may explain the ambiguities, ideological hesitations and defensive discourses surrounding the aforementioned exhibition (Oliveira 2017, 214, 228). From 1958 to 1964, Menéres studied at Porto’s School of Fine Arts, the most innovative centre of artistic education in Portugal at the time. From 1978 to 1981, she was awarded a scholarship by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation to study in Paris. She then graduated from the University of Paris VII in 1983. Between 1989 and 1991, she was a Research Fellow for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT. Menéres was also an educator, holding teaching roles at two of the most important Portuguese universities, in Lisbon and Évora, until 2007. She was the first woman to lecture studio practice (sculpture) at the School of Fine Arts,4 and she played a major role in affirming the importance of art, artistic education and artistic research, of which she was a staunch defender. Menéres never missed the chance to work with any new material she came upon, whether organic or technological. She worked in granite, marble, white limestone, wood, slate, bronze, steel, iron, copper, synthetic resins, clay, plaster, textiles, nylon, plastic and mirror; she worked with fluorescent lamps, neons, LEDs and fibre optics and she used earth, water and plant matter. She created installations, objects, drawings, photographs and digital prints, monuments and statues, oscillating between traditional art techniques and computer programming, and between artisanal and industrial production. She crossed contemporary sculpture with historical heritage, and she explored the intersections between sculpture and architecture, and between art and landscape.

Sculpture and Political Conflict Sculpture arguably awakens hidden impulses and responses that other art forms do not, due to its three-dimensionality, the effect of its presence, and the responses and interactions it may generate. The artist highlights the difference for her between

164  Laura Castro painting – as simulation – and sculpture – as action: “Sculpture is the art that continuously interferes with space and with people, that is to say, it is a permanent object of conflict” (Campos 2011, 124). The exhibition of sculpture in public spaces and museums multiply moments of tension and conflict, of dialogue and confrontation, of polemic and controversy. It is in these moments, I argue, that it is possible to recognise the political nature of the works of Clara Menéres, that closely connects her sculpture to political, social and environmental issues and events that took place in Portugal in the 1960s and 1970s. The Portuguese revolution in April 1974 and the installation of a democratic system ended a long period of political dictatorship, official censorship, the monitoring of cultural activities – exhibitions, theatre, cinema and literature – and restrictions on international travel of creators and artists. Even if Portuguese artists were aware of realities in other countries – thanks to personal contacts or through trips financed by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation after 1955 – the political change, when it came, symbolised an opening up of the country to Europe and the free circulation of ideas, artistic practices and creators. The revolution also brought to an end the colonial war in Portugal’s African colonies (1961–1974). As a result, many exiled intellectuals returned to the country, alongside 500,000 Portuguese who had been living in colonised African territories. The years that followed were characterised by popular unrest and agitation. The second half of the 1970s was, in Portugal, a time of political, social and cultural revision. The colonial wars were the subject of Menéres’ Jaz morto e arrefece o menino de sua mãe (The mother’s boy lies dead and cold, 1973), whose title was taken from a verse by poet Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935). Its exhibition, in Lisbon, generated great controversy in this time during the colonial wars where, according to the artist, the coffins of the dead were hidden from public view by being delivered to their waiting families at night. The aim of the work was to shine a light on what the political regime wanted to hide. Menéres told the story of a woman visitor to the exhibition at the National Society of Fine Arts fainting when she saw the work, which suggests its power and personal impact. Considering that the work was finished and displayed (in 1973) before the official end of the colonial wars (1974), one may understand the potential for controversy, the hesitation of the jury that selected the work for display and the doubts of the artist concerning the title of the piece. The work appeared in the catalogue under the title Escultura (Sculpture). Only in later exhibitions did the work appear with its original title. The title change arguably did not, however, dilute the power of the work or its allusions to contemporary events, as may be surmised by the affected visitor to the exhibition. Other works and interventions were related to the political and social situation in Portugal in the final years of the dictatorship and the first ones of the democratic regime. For example, the artist belonged to a group called ACRE, 5 active between 1974 and 1977, which carried out urban aesthetic guerrilla acts, calling into question the nature of both authority and power in a country which was undergoing a revolution. For example, in 1974, the group were accused of profaning the architectural heritage of Porto when they put a long yellow streak on the historical Tower that is a symbol of the town. The controversy courted (perhaps inadvertently) by Menéres’ work did not end after the 1960s and 1970s. Nearly 20 years after the end of the dictatorship, one of Menéres’ works in Porto became the target of acts of aggression for celebrating

Clara Menéres’ Woman-Earth-Life (1977) 165 German politician Willy Brandt (1993). Art historian José Guilherme Abreu has referred to an attack on the sculpture that took place during the run-up to the first referendum in Portugal on the liberalisation of abortion laws. On the Corten steel support of the sculpture was written “nem este foi abortado” (not even this one was aborted), which can be seen to illustrate how this sculpture (and possibly others in public spaces) appeared to represent a wide-ranging set of progressive socio-political values against which sections of the public held strong views.6 Other more contemporary works tackle environmental issues, such as a series of photographs which addressed the ecological disaster that struck the Galician coast, in northern Spain, in 2003, when the petrol tanker Prestige ran aground and caused an oil spill. Environmental issues are also explored in the celebration of places with anthropological and spiritual meanings. An example is Large Spiral, from 1988, a fallen dry-stone wall created in the shape of a spiral, installed in Serra da Lua, in the Serra de Aire e Candeeiros Natural Park. Menéres’ works transformed sculpture in Portugal. Their response to urgent and contemporary political, social and ecological issues were central to their meanings, then and now. The terms and concepts in the texts written about the artist reveal the influence of her work: sculpture as performance, sculpture as active art (Sousa 1975a); living work, bio sculpture (Ruivo 2009, 48); luminoart, luminous sculptures (Lambert 1996, 112). Other terms make its subversive stance clear: innovation and challenge, confrontation and transgression (Matos 2007, 526–528); affirmation, reform, diversion, action (Candeias 2009, 116–117); intervention, subversion, demystification, experimentation (Lambert 1996, 112–113) and revision (Sousa 1975b). But arguably no issues were more at the forefront of Menéres’ innovation, and challenge to existing norms within Portuguese society, than issues around gender.

Sculpture and/as Female and Feminist Libido Menéres defined sculpture as the art of conflict, and in no arena has this been more true in the reception of her work in Portugal. At this time, making the fact of her own gender – as well as her concern with issues that women and girls faced – apparent in her work became a political – and politicised – stance. Because of this dearth of representation of females from a female perspective, outside of normative conservative prescriptions, Menéres’ works were for many a revelation, for others a heresy. Because of this, I term the specificity of her female-centred and/or feminist visions “libido” (after Piteira 2018, 32) to acknowledge the energies, the vital impulses and the feelings that women had not been allowed to express. “Libido” also acknowledges the often violent and puritanical reactions that were triggered by her artworks’ overtly female-centred eroticism or feminist content. In the 1960s and 1970s, feminist ideas gained currency in Portugal. There were increasing numbers of feminist publications, leaflets and social interventions as well as discussion groups and women’s organisations with a feminist focus.7 Clara Menéres was involved in these activities, participating, for instance, in a conference in favour of the liberalisation of abortion in 1975 (Tavares 2011). Feminist issues had interested her since her student days. In her first solo exhibition in 1967, Clara Menéres validated female-centred experiences through a display of hand-made embroidered and felt dolls that recuperated handicraft and traditional knowledge and techniques passed down by women and interpreted them in contemporary sculpture (Matos 2007, 527).

166  Laura Castro In 1968, in the final work she produced as a student, she represented a prostitute in A Menina Amélia que vive na Rua do Almada (Amelia who lives on Almada Street). The work was displayed in a museum in the small town of Amarante, but was removed from the exhibition in 1973 following opposition by a well-known historian of the town who remarked in the museum’s visitors’ book: I must indignantly protest against the miserable contempt shown towards this important institution, otherwise to be admired for the wealth of its artistic contents, by its own directors, in allowing the exhibition of a wretched, shitty piece of pornographic sculpture that would only be appropriate in the lowest type of brothel. The contempt is so great that it flows beyond the walls of this museum, offending and befouling the honest inhabitants of this noble town, Amarante. (cited by Abreu 2014, 21–22) What was revealed here was the existence of a system that wholly negated female experiences and concerns, and instead privileged a paternalistic and patriarchal moral framework.8 Another controversial work was Relicário (Reliquary, 1969), exhibited in Porto’s National Museum Soares dos Reis, representing an erect phallus within a reliquary. The intention of the artist was to undermine the power of the phallus as a paradigm of masculine control, and instead represent it as object that may be used by a woman, if she chooses, simply for personal pleasure: When I made my work called Reliquary, I presented a phallus in a lacquered dark blue wooden box as if it was an enormous pink and transparent unwrapped boiled sweet, still with a few bits of foil clinging to it. […] Isolating the male sex organ and locking it in a box is not so much an act of castration as it is appropriation of a recreational object that is capable of producing pleasure. It is a way of removing sex from the arena of war and power and bringing it instead into the domestic environment of everyday objects that make up the innocence and joy of life. In this way, my little sculpture took the phallus from the masculine epic-heroic paradigm and inserted it into the feminine domestic-recreational paradigm. (Menéres 2000, 161) While the work referenced mythic tropes, recurrent in Menéres’ oeuvre, controversy stemmed from the use of a religious artefact – the reliquary – to protect and present the object (Tavares 2009, 160). At a conference in 2012, the artist revealed that the piece prompted her own mother to write her a letter in which she appealed to her to respect the family name and begged her not to make similar works in the future.9

Woman-Earth-Life as a Feminist Work in Portugal The work that is recognised, arguably, as the preeminent iconic work of Portuguese feminist art is Woman-Earth-Life which was displayed at the Alternativa Zero exhibition in 1977 (Fig. 10.1). The work was the first sculpture conceived by the artist after the democratic revolution that had occurred three years before. Before examining the piece, it is necessary to indicate the context in which the work was first exhibited. Ernesto de Sousa (1921–1988), conceived and organised the

Clara Menéres’ Woman-Earth-Life (1977) 167

Figure 10.1  Clara Menéres, Woman-Earth-Life. 1977, Acrylic, earth and grass, 80 × 270 × 160 cm. Alternativa Zero Exhibition, Galeria de Belém, Lisbon. Source:  © Courtesy the heirs of Clara Menéres.

Alternativa Zero exhibition. He was influenced by the world of cinema in Paris and London between 1949 and 1952, collaborated with members of Fluxus in the 1970s and met Joseph Beuys during documenta 5 in Kassel in 1972. De Sousa was a film director, a theatre director, a photographer, a mixed-media artist and an extremely active conference participant. He wrote widely about cinema, photography, modern art, popular art and the graphic arts. As a cultural programmer, he promoted “happenings”, “environments”, exhibitions and other artistic projects. Alternativa Zero was, without doubt, his most celebrated initiative and had the greatest impact in the landscape of Portuguese art.10 The exhibition took place in the Modern Art Gallery, in Lisbon, in the riverside neighbourhood of Belém. The variety of work on display was noteworthy: objects, installations, documentation of projects and creative processes, concerts, experimental poetry sessions, cinema and video, slide shows, performances and theatre (Alternativa Zero 1977). Some works, made specifically for the exhibition, would become emblematic of the Portuguese contemporary art scene. This is the case with Menéres’ Woman-Earth-Life, where the body of a woman was sculpted in earth and plant matter, measuring approximately 80 × 270 × 160 cm, and displayed behind plexiglass plates. Containing living grasses and plants, the work required regular

168  Laura Castro maintenance by the artist, which took on the dimension of a ritual act. On the woman’s nipples, plants that are commonly known as “mind your own business” (Soleirolia soleirolii, family: Urticaceae) were placed. The work referred to visual tropes that use the female body as a vehicle to carry myths of fertility, of the goddesses of maternity, of the Earth as fertilised element and as the ultimate symbol of the genesis of humanity. It was also the expression of the ecological principle of unity between nature and culture, rather than the positioning of nature and culture as a set of binaries, in perpetual conflict. The artist describes the work as follows: A work that identifies the contours of the landscape with the female body, in a clear reference to Mother Earth. It is a simple idea that is inscribed in the mythic and sacred traditions of humanity. […] This work made me understand that dealing with the feminine version of origin myths, gestation cycles, the mystery of the transformation of death in life and the manifestation of the body of the Great Mother also meant dealing with the depths of the human unconscious. It is obvious that this sculpture reflects my preoccupation with the environment and […] with respect for life and the conservation of culture […] (Menéres 2000, 162) Art historian and critic José-Augusto França highlights the sensation caused by the reproduction of the piece in the cover of the magazine Colóquio Artes,11 published by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. He remarked that it was “a magnificent piece by Clara Menéres, ferociously erotic, which caused trouble in the [institution]” (França 1997, 43–44). While acknowledging the power communicated by the female-centred tropes of Woman-Earth-Life, it is interesting to observe that his word choice renders the layers of meanings behind these tropes into an interpretation that emphasises the sexual (and/or sexualised) elements of the work. However, his reading gives insight into what was likely a widespread response to the work. This reception was not confined to critical responses by members of the art world or the wider community, but was expressed in actions that were violent and destructive. According to the artist, in an interview given to Mariana Campos (2011, 118), the belly of the work was attacked with a stick several times when the exhibition was closed at night. Although the offender was never identified, the artist suspected that it was actually the security guard who was meant to protect the exhibition. Whenever she found the work had been mutilated overnight, she was obliged to remake it. This remaking and tending to the work – a continuous recreation – adds a performative labour to the history, and the interpretation, of the work. In response to the outcry, and the repeated defacement, the piece was removed to a warehouse where subsequently a fire broke out, at the very moment the artist was negotiating with the City Council of Lisbon over the work’s possible display in the city (Campos 2009, 61). This outcome too becomes enfolded in the work’s performative history. A second version of the work was displayed in the XIV Biennial of São Paulo in 1977 (Fig. 10.2). According to the catalogue, in a text signed by the Arts and Culture Council, this Biennial represented a turning point: “finally, the Biennial is no more a place of consecration, but a place of experimentation” (XIV Bienal Internacional

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Figure 10.2  Clara Menéres, Woman-Earth-Life. 1977, 2nd version. Concrete, earth and grass (detail). c. 150 m 2 . XIV Biennial of São Paulo, Brazil. Source:  © Courtesy the heirs of Clara Menéres.

de São Paulo 1977, 2). It was organised thematically into Seven Contemporary Proposals, the second of which, entitled Landscape Recovery, aimed to reflect upon the visual manifestations of the natural environment – whether or not integrated in the urban environment. These included natural reserves, ecology, the documentation of the destruction or conservation of that landscape, and the intersections and the discovery of new possible landscapes, whether created by Man or offered by nature. (XIV Bienal Internacional de São Paulo 1977, 3) It was this context that led the commissioner of the Portuguese delegation, architect Sommer Ribeiro of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, to select Clara Menéres in this category, as well as Alberto Carneiro (1937–2017), a Portuguese sculptor whose work is based on a close relationship with nature. The exhibition of Woman-Earth-Life generated a diplomatic controversy entailing telephone conversations between Menéres and the entities involved, namely the Portuguese embassy, in which she lamented the constant delays in the work’s installation. Menéres points out that the conservative values of the military dictatorship that was in control of Brazil at the time can explain the reticence in installing the project. She recalls that the mayor of Sao Paulo had apparently considered not officially opening the exhibition for fear of being associated the ensuing scandal generated by Woman-Earth-Life, although in the end he did so.12

170  Laura Castro Woman-Earth-Life does not feature in the Biennial’s catalogue. In its place, another work of the artist is presented (XIV Bienal Internacional de São Paulo 1977, 171). It is unknown whether this absence was due to this controversy or simply the fact that the catalogue needed to be prepared before the work was finished. Menéres does however write about the work in the Portuguese delegation’s exclusive catalogue: One day I look around myself and find Mother Earth’s body-landscape. Watered with haze, damp, covered with a soft, green pelage on the belly made of hillock, and hills on her breasts […] a reality that multiplies in the transformation it suffers in time and space […] reproducing the genetic circle common to women. (Melo e Castro 1977) The artist prized this second version of the work particularly because it had left the gallery to occupy a space in the open air. As she stated: To remake what was already made, to make it more real, to define in limited terms that which has always appeared to us in fully formed extended state, this living, moving, life-giving and fertile body. […] From a previous garden project, integrated in other areas of relaxation and recreation, I recently carried out a work of much smaller dimensions that was like ripping a piece of landscape out of nature and transporting it to an exhibition hall. Today I have seen my initial vision made real, in a dimension adapted to an outdoor space, integrated in the land and taking into account all the conditioning factors of the environment in which it will live. (Melo e Castro 1977) A third version of Woman-Earth-Life was installed in the gardens of Serralves Contemporary Art Museum, in Porto, in 1997 (Fernandes & Ramos 1997), during the exhibition Perspectiva: Alternativa Zero (Fig. 10.3). According to the artist, the work at this site could have become a permanent exhibition, given an existing garden that was also within the ambit of the art museum, as well as the context of a historical revisiting of a major exhibition that had taken place 20 years before. However, again according to the artist, cultural prejudice meant that this possibility was rejected: It is impressive how the placing of a work of art in a garden, above all in this instance, with a work made of living matter, is considered an intrusion. […] Honestly, in my life and in my work, I have discussed more than anything the cultural prejudice encountered in people in leadership positions, often at the highest levels. Indeed, I must say that I refuse to make this piece again without a signed statement guaranteeing the conservation of the work for a stipulated number of years. It is outrageous, unfortunately, that in this country there is no notion of heritage or the preservation of heritage, above all when it comes to contemporary art. (Campos 2009, 117) Although Menéres does not say so here, I again postulate that the sculpture’s female and feminist subject matter played a large part in its continued exclusion from the Portuguese canon.

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Figure 10.3  Clara Menéres, Woman-Earth-Life. 1977, 3rd version. Concrete, earth and grass (detail). c. 150 m 2 . Park of Serralves Contemporary Art Museum, Porto. Source:  © Courtesy the heirs of Clara Menéres.

Created before the artist’s international exposure, the iconic Woman-Earth-Life reveals similar thematic preoccupations with other influential artists of the moment. This chapter does not intend, however, to identify the work’s direct influences nor its serendipitous connections, but rather to position it within the cultural atmosphere of the time, both in Portugal and abroad. Suffice to say however, that formally, there is a correspondence with projects by Belgian artist Evelyne Axell (1935–1972) that also depicts the supine feminine body and the pubic area, namely Le Petit Espace Vert and Petite fourrure verte (1970), Le Val Vert (1971) (Oliveira 2013, 248). Menéres’ drawing Corpo-paisagem com auto-estrada I (Body-landscape with a freeway I) (1978: Fig. 10.4), a variation of her iconic art piece, also dialogues with Axell’s Auto stop (1966). In the representation of the female body and the emphasis on the pubic area through green synthetic fur, and in the creation of landscape bodies, common aspects to both artists may be identified. However, Axell has not abandoned the fascination with artificial materials while Menéres explored natural matter. Axell’s alleged feminism is confined to iconography and pop language (which Menéres also adopted in the final work of her graduation, in 1968), having a more limited reach than that achieved by Menéres’ proposals. Conceptually, there is kinship with the works of Ana Mendieta (1948–1985). Although Menéres does not create work with her own body, both artists explore the natural cycles of regeneration, of life and death, and centre imagery of female goddesses, the return to the original source, and the universe’s maternal womb

172  Laura Castro

Figure 10.4  Clara Menéres, Body-Landscape with Motorway I, 1978, pastel drawing on paper, 50 × 70 cm. Source:  © Courtesy the heirs of Clara Menéres.

(Blocker 1999). Mendieta explores the traditions, beliefs and rituals of Central America (Viso 2004), whereas Menéres explores more generalised and archetypal imagery, and techniques of handcraft specific to Portugal. The ways in which both artists have valued and interrogated nature and the creative function of mythologies have revised the assumption that such an approach might relegate their work to a reading that conflates women with the feminine and the so-called natural (Ortner 2015, 17–26). Both ignored that risk and affirmed their capacity for cultural and artistic creations. Menéres’ Woman-Earth-Life is a global artistic project in several iterations that poses two feminist questions. Firstly, how may an ecological and spiritual connection to nature and its cycles be affirmed through a woman’s biological capacity to bear life, without succumbing to hierarchical polarities of nature/body/woman versus culture/mind/male? Secondly, how can the creation, performance and existence of and response to this work pose crucial questions regarding the construction of gender as a concept within society? The former would gain preponderance in the artist’s future work through land art, while the latter had already interested her. Woman-EarthLife embodies – literally and thematically – the unity between culture and nature, the female body and the artistic body, life and death and Eros and Thanatos. Following Woman-Earth-Life, Menéres continued to explore the alchemical and cyclic processes of matter – transformation, decomposition, union – and the libidinal images associated with them.

Clara Menéres’ Woman-Earth-Life (1977) 173

Conclusion Menéres memorably wrote: I have, on various occasions, taught my students a rule of the work of alchemy, telling them that sculpture must be undertaken “like women’s work, and child’s play” […] I know very well what women’s work means: it means to make something only for it to be unmade immediately, to see what you have produced consumed entirely until nothing is left, to accept the anonymous, constant and unrewarded routine. This persistence in the unseen hard labour is essential in order to concentrate and accumulate the energy that must impregnate the work. (Menéres 2014, XX) If this declaration by the artist suggests a specifically feminine condition, it also invokes a sense of her struggle for affirmation of her work. Menéres worked in a time that witnessed the growing acknowledgement of women artists in Portuguese contemporary art, such as Ana Hatherly (1929–2015), Lourdes Castro (b. 1930), Helena Almeida (1934–2018), Paula Rego (b. 1935) and Ana Vieira (1940–2016). Some of these artists engage overtly with female concerns within feminist frameworks, while others do not assume a clear feminist position and avoid practices associated with feminist movements. These artists are cited most frequently and known more widely than Menéres. It is mostly only texts in Portuguese produced by the universities where she taught for decades that acknowledge her pioneering role (Pereira 2008). Her path was radically independent and non-submissive. The internal contradictions present in her work, her attempts to reconcile historical and philosophical binaries, her embrace of female-bodied and female-centred imagery, her acceptance of religious commissions while producing other work whose iconography challenged the role ascribed to women by the Catholic Church, all played a role in her not being easily allied to or accepted in any ideological group. I have already written about “the indifference of legitimising voices of the artistic practice when art involves sacred figuration”, and have stressed that [t]he critical essays elaborated upon Menéres’ work reflect the narrow-mindedness characteristic to historiography and art criticism, which leads to the favouring of certain areas of the work […] ignoring or omitting others which seem to bother the type of argumentation at issue. (Castro 2016, 190, 202) I have proposed that a significant factor in the sparsity of Menéres’ representation in scholarship has been her ongoing interest in how female-bodied and -centred imagery may articulate archetypal as well as womanist narratives of spiritual unity that transcends historical and philosophical polarities. These narratives often directly challenge those presented by received religions, particularly Catholicism which habitually represses any role of the “feminine” or position for women and girls. Menéres also frankly represents female eroticism both as subject matter in and of itself as well as a libidinal vehicle for the dismantling of the aforementioned artificial philosophical polarities. Such neglect by scholarship corresponds to the “double process of exclusion”, identified by historian Filipa Vicente, which affects women artists: firstly,

174  Laura Castro by denying them a career, and secondly, by excluding them from the construction of history (Vicente 2012b, 20). Clara Menéres proves, I argue, that it is not necessary to harmonise artists’ voices, nor for artists to ascribe to one existing set of ideologies or techniques; they can exist in accordance with the unique experiences that shaped them. It is contradiction and provocation that testifies to the brave way that Menéres lived as a woman and to the artistic freedom with which she practiced.

Notes 1 Art criticism emerged in Portugal later than in the international scene. It began consistently in the 1990s, with associations, courses, academic research centres and publications dedicated to feminine studies. For a general view on this topic, see Vaquinhas (1993), Remédios (2003) and Conde (1999). Examples of the feminist rereading of art history of the past are Leandro (2011) and Flor and Flor (2016). Other researchers have shown how memories, art history and art criticism were marked by exclusion and invisibility. For an analysis of modern art criticism in this light, see Esquível (2010). 2 Translation of this and other quotations by Isabel Ferreira. 3 In the same text (p. 61), the artist takes a stand against the denial of the exhibition’s feminist content by other organisers such as painter Emília Nadal (1938) and the author of the catalogue, Salette Tavares (1922–1994). The exhibition was deeply studied, together with the cultural and political context of the time in the work (Oliveira 2017, 209–228). 4 The artist referred to the difficulties encountered along her academic journey in an interview with Márcia Oliveira. See Oliveira (2013, 118, 142 and 159). 5 The Portuguese word “acre” means acid or bitter. The group’s first public intervention used a lemon yellow colour that evokes that word. 6 Episode narrated by the artist during the conference Arte e Artistas. Histórias da Arte Pública em Portugal (Art and Artists – Stories of Public Art in Portugal), integrated in the Paredes Public Art Circuit, on 16 March 2012, at Paredes Municipal Library, with José Guilherme Abreu. 7 For a view on women’s participation in important Portuguese political movements, in the labour movement, the colonial war, student crises and censorship in the 20th and 21st centuries, see Tavares (2011), particularly Chapters 26 and 27. 8 The work was later reinstalled in the museum at the behest of a different director. 9 Episode narrated by the artist during the conference Arte e Artistas. Histórias da Arte Pública em Portugal (Art and Artists – Stories of Public at in Portugal), integrated in the Paredes Public Art Circle, on 16 March 2012, at Paredes Municipal Library, with José Guilherme Abreu. 10 The exhibition was the object of considerable critical reception and numerous academic works. In 2018, a double issue of OEI magazine was dedicated to it: see Magnusson et al. (2018). 11 França refers to Colóquio Artes magazine, no. 34, October 1977. 12 The artist has recounted other incidents during the preparation of the work which are revealing of a general incomprehension about contemporary art and its specific setting requirements: I had a meeting with one of the officials from the Sao Paulo city council in which I was asked whether it was possible to raise the piece on small legs, so as not to damage the garden. Imagine that, the enormous size of the piece, raised on small legs! I responded that this was not a knickknack to place on a table, but a work of civil engineering. (Campos 2009, 117)

References Abreu, José Guilherme. 2014. “Presença de António Cardoso no Museu de Amarante”. In António Cardoso, 14–23. Amarante: Museu Municipal Amadeo de Souza Cardoso. Alternativa Zero. Tendências Polémicas na Arte Portuguesa Contemporânea. 1977. Lisboa.

Clara Menéres’ Woman-Earth-Life (1977) 175 XIV Bienal Internacional de São Paulo. 1977. São Paulo: Prefeitura do Município de São Paulo, Governo do Estado de São Paulo, Governo Federal. Accessed December 5, 2019. www.bienal.org.br/publicacoes/2137. Blocker, Jane. 1999. Where Is Ana Mendieta? Identity, Performativity, and Exile. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Campos, Mariana Camarate. 2011. “Conservação na arte contemporânea. Curadoria como possível estratégia de conservação? Estudo de duas obras apresentadas na exposição Alternativa Zero”. Ms diss., Universidade de Lisboa. Candeias, Ana Filipa. 2009. “Grupo Acre”. In Anos 70 Atravessar Fronteiras, edited by Raquel Henriques da Silva, Ana Filipa Candeias and Ana Ruivo, 116–117. Lisboa: Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian. Castro, Laura. 2016. “Invenções Magníficas da Vida e da Morte. A Obra de Clara Menéres”. In Mulheres Escultoras em Portugal, edited by Sandra Leandro and Raquel Henriques da Silva, 185–211. Lisboa: Caleidoscópio. Conde, Idalina. 1999. Mulheres nas Artes e nos Media, Observatório das Actividades Culturais/Comissão para a Igualdade e para os Direitos das Mulheres. Bona: ERICARTS – European Institute for Cultural Affairs and the Art. Esquível, Patrícia. 2010. “Mulheres Artistas na Idade da Razão. Arte e Crítica na Década de 1960 em Portugal”. Ex-aequo, 21: 143–160. Fernandes, João and Maria Ramos. 1997. Perspectiva: Alternativa Zero. Porto: Fundação de Serralves. Flor, Susana Varela and Pedro Flor. 2016. Pintores de Lisboa. Séculos XVII-XVIII. A Irmandade de São Lucas. Lisboa: Scribe. França, José-Augusto. 1997. “Alternativa Zero em seu tempo”. In Perspectiva: Alternativa Zero, edited by João Fernandes and Maria Ramos, 37–45. Porto: Fundação de Serralves. Jones, Amelia. 2014. Sexuality. Documents of Contemporary Art. Cambridge: Whitechapel Gallery/The MIT Press. Lambert, Fátima. 1996. Acerca das Tendências da Escultura Portuguesa Actual. Santa Maria da Feira: Museu Municipal, Câmara Municipal. Leandro, Sandra. 2011. “Boa figura, má figura, sem figura: mulheres artistas no tempo da 1a República”. In Mulheres na 1a República. Percursos, conquistas e derrotas, edited by Zília Osório de Castro, João Esteves and Natividade Monteiro, 271–318. Lisboa: Colibri. Magnusson, Jonas J, Cecelia Grönberg, Tobi Maier and Hugo Canoilas, eds. 2018. OEI #80-81 The Zero Alternative: Ernesto de Sousa and Some Other Aesthetic Operators in Portuguese Art and Poetry from the 1960s Onwards. Stockholm: OEI editor. Matos, Lúcia Almeida. 2007. Escultura em Portugal no século XX (1910-1969). Lisboa: Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia. Melo e Castro, E. M. de, ed. 1977. Representação Portuguesa à XIV Bienal de S. Paulo. S. Paulo: MNE/SEC/SNBA/AICA/FCG. Menéres, Clara. 2000. “(Auto) – Retrato”. Faces de Eva, Revista de Estudos sobre a Mulher, 4: 159–164. Menéres, Clara. 2003. “A Criatividade Feminina nas Artes Plásticas em Portugal”. In Falar de Mulheres. Da Igualdade à Paridade, edited by Zília Osório de Castro, 53–62. Lisboa: Livros Horizonte. Menéres, Clara. 2014. “Figurações da Morte”. In Do Reino das Sombras. Figurações da Morte, edited by Ana Paula Pinto et al., 69–76. Braga: Aletheia. Oliveira, Márcia. 2013. “Arte e Feminismo em Portugal no contexto pós-revolução”. PhD diss., Universidade do Minho. Oliveira, Márcia. 2017. “Portuguese Women Artists at the National Society of Fine Arts (1977): Why was this not a feminist exhibition?” In All Women Art Spaces in Europe in the Long 1970s, edited by Katy Deepwell and Agata Jabukowska, 209–228. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.

176  Laura Castro Ortner, Sherry B. 2015 (1972). “Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?” In Feminism-ArtTheory. An Anthology 1968–2014, edited by Hillary Robinson, 17–26. Oxford: Blackwell. Pereira, José Fernandes. 2008. “Clara Menéres”. Arte Teoria, 11: 297–306. Piteira, Susana. 2018. “Escultura y Territorio: Contradicciones, dialécticas, complicidades e interacciones. Algunos apuntes en Portugal.” PhD diss., Universitat de Barcelona. Remédios, Maria José. 2003. “Mosaicos configuradores da afirmatividade dos Estudos sobre as Mulheres em Portugal”. Revista Lusófona de Educação, 2: 143–150. http://hdl.handle. net/10437/484. Ruivo, Ana. 2009. “…Velhos Meios?” In Anos 70 Atravessar Fronteiras, edited by Raquel Henriques da Silva, Ana Filipa Candeias and Ana Ruivo, 40–49. Lisboa: Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian. Schor, Mira. 2015 (1991). “Patrilineage”. In Feminism-Art-Theory. An Anthology 1968–2014, edited by Hilary Robinson, 159–164. Oxford: Blackwell. Sousa, Ernesto. 1975a. “O grupo Acre e a apropriação”. Vida Mundial, January 23. Sousa, Ernesto. 1975b. “A nova imagem”. Vida Mundial, April 3. Tavares, Cristina Azevedo. 2009. “O Eros e a Escultura Portuguesa”. In Arte & Eros, edited by Cristina Azevedo Tavares, Fernando Paulo Rosa Dias and José Quaresma, 150–164. Lisboa: Faculdade de Belas Artes da Universidade de Lisboa. Tavares, Manuela. 2011. Feminismos. Percursos e Desafios 1947–2007. Lisboa: Texto Editores (In English: Bermúdez, Silvia and Roberta Johnson, ed. 2018. A New History of Iberian Feminisms. Toronto: Toronto University Press). Vaquinhas, Irene. 1993. “Estudos sobre as Mulheres na área da História”. In Estudos sobre as Mulheres em Portugal, 107–139. Lisboa: Comissão para a Igualdade e os Direitos das Mulheres. Vicente, Filipa Lowndes. 2012a. “História da Arte e Feminismo: Uma Reflexão Sobre o Caso Português”. Revista de História da Arte, 10: 210–225. Vicente, Filipa Lowndes. 2012b. A Arte Sem História. Mulheres e Cultura Artística (Sécs XVI-XX). Lisboa: Athena. Viso, Olga M. 2004. Ana Mendieta Earth Body Sculpture and Performance, 1972–1985. Ostfildern: Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden – Smithsonian Institution/Hatje Cntz Publishers.

11 The Female Body and Spirituality in Ilse Fusková’s El Zapallo (1982) Series María Laura Rosa Ilse Fusková (b. Buenos Aires, 1929) is known in Argentina for being an important lesbian activist, whose work has been fundamental in the depathologising of homosexuality and promoting the rights of gay people, as a group, to have a voice and history of their own. Intellectually restless since her early years, she has taken on different activities and forms of employment throughout her life. Born to a German father and Czechoslovakian mother, Felka – the pseudonym that she used to sign her photographs in the 1950s – studied journalism. Between 1950 and 1952, she worked as a flight attendant for Scandinavian Airlines, and this job allowed her to learn about other cultures and life experiences. She subsequently collaborated with magazines such as El Hogar, Chicas, Histonium, Mundo Argentino and Para Ti y Lyra as a reporter and commentator. As a graphic reporter and urban flâneuse, Fusková reflects the city of Buenos Aires and her experience of modernity with her alternative lens. She draws attention to the richness of its cultural environment and at those marginalised through modernisation. In the course of her wanderings, she depicts ordinary people poetically, providing them with stature, as well as outstanding intellectuals and artists in such a way that their humanness is emphasised. After more than a decade of home retirement, Fusková joined the Feminine Liberation Movement in the late 1970s. It is within this feminist context that she commenced a deep exploration of the female gaze and the construction of identity through the female nude, with which she sought to expand the traditional canon of her photographic representation. This is the origin of the series El Zapallo (1982). An important example of feminist art that developed despite Argentina being under the de facto government after the military coup of 1976, it built on an early history of feminist art practice in the context of the Feminist Art Union of Argentina (UFA). Between 1984 and 1985, she took part in the group Imagema, formed by Horacio Coppola and Juan José Guttero. Back then she conducted several workshops held at Lugar de Mujer, a space created in Buenos Aires in August 1983. There and then, her activism began – feminist at first and then lesbian – in parallel with the urgency to initiate the process of depathologising homosexuality in Argentina, which led her – in 1992 – to organise the first LGBTTQ+ pride march, alongside Carlos Jáuregui. This chapter is an analysis of the series El Zapallo. In my opinion, this series is an engagement with the female body, one which questions constructions of youth and beauty imposed by the desiring heterosexual male gaze. Moreover, I believe that these photographic works contribute to ideas about female spirituality, integrating these with Goddess imagery that was of interest to several contemporary feminist artists.

178  María Laura Rosa

Second-Wave Feminism in Buenos Aires In 1969, the Unión Feminista Argentina (UFA – in English, Argentine Feminist Union) was born at the Café Tortoni. It included filmmaker María Luisa Bemberg, the photographer Alicia D’Amico, the writer Leonor Calvera, the theatre specialist Marta Migueles and the poet and writer Hilda Rais, among other women, most of whom were middle-class. The Movimiento de Liberación Femenina (MLF – in English, Female Liberation Movement), which would later be called Movimiento de Liberación Feminista (in English, Feminist Liberation Movement), was formed in 1971. Thanks to the MLF, abortion was discussed for the first time in our country. These groups organised awareness meetings, and identified feminist material for study and discussion. In this regard, Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex – published in Buenos Aires in 1954 by Psique Publishing Group and translated by Pablo Palant (Nari 2013, 291–307) – proved to be critical. Moreover, foreign women writers whose works were translated, such as Carla Lonzi, Shulamith Firestone and Kate Millet, were discussed during events organised by these movements. In addition to these activities, the organisations engaged in street activism by making flyers that would later be distributed to the general public. In the 1960s and 1970s, Argentina experienced a period of mass-media expansion, a scenario in which the media ceased to be purely a mechanism for the communication and circulation of information but also became a vehicle for promoting consumerism, in many cases using the female body to sell a diverse range of products (Calvera 1982). Women also became the target of TV commercials and several large circulation women’s publications, given the boom in the publishing market. Nonetheless, some female voices started to reject the sexism and objectification of women that had become a feature of this consumerist framework. Catalina Trebisacce comments in this regard: “The local feminists in the early seventies ceased identifying with the stereotype of passive and home-loving women and the ‘beautiful object’ ideal. Finally, they moved away from the social mandate of maternity as the basis of women’s identity” (Trebisacce 2013a, 253). Although for several years it was believed that Argentine feminists were excluded by left-wing groups so that they instead created their own spaces for expressing opposition, the latest research questions this assumption (Trebisacce 2013a, 439–462). The relations between left-wing groups and women’s movements were ambiguous, since one of the topics discussed by leftist organisations was the prevailing system of inequality, which resulted in bonds being established between them. According to Eva Rodríguez Agüero (2013, 149): Although the idea that the liberalization of private practices looked up to a model imposed by imperialist societies [left-wing organizations in the ’70s stated that feminist ideology had been imported from developed countries – mainly from the United States – thus disregarding the historical genealogy of local feminisms] undermined the creation of bridges between feminist struggles and other political experiences, there were certain attempts to forge ties between feminists and women politicians. One of them was the foundation of the Frente de Lucha por la Mujer (In English, Fighting for Women Front), which gathered feminists and women from left-wing political parties.

Ilse Fusková’s El Zapallo (1982) Series 179 The year 1982 was key for several reasons. The first is related to the development gained by feminist groups in Buenos Aires in the early 1970s, which was affected by the coup d’état that took place on 24 March 1976. In 1982, several groups underwent a reorganisation process through different activities planned by DIMA (Derechos Iguales para la Mujer Argentina – in English, Equal Rights for the Argentine Woman), such as the First Argentine Congress called La Mujer en el Mundo de Hoy (in English, Women in the Present World), which took place on 25–26 October of that year. Also, Leonor Calvera published her book El género mujer (in English, The Woman Gender), where the concept of gender was conceptualised and discussed for the first time in Argentina. Finally, 1982 witnessed the creation of the series El Zapallo, set within the context of a rebirth of feminist movements. One year later, the Jornadas de la Creatividad Femenina (in English, Feminine Creativity Workdays) took place on 1, 2 and 3 April 1983, with the motto: “In every woman there is a creator, and in every creator, there is a woman”. The second La Mujer en el Mundo Hoy (Women in the Present World) congress was organised in May of the same year. In August, a few months after the return of democracy with President Raúl Alfonsín, the civil association Lugar de Mujer1 was founded, to cater for all women who approached it, regardless whether or not they self-identified as feminists. This association hosted various events such as workshops, art shows, film projections and study groups. It provided a forum for local aesthetic interests and feminist activism to operate in tandem with one another, with artists such as Teresa Volco, Ilse Fusková, Josefina Quesada and Alicia D’Amico bringing discussions and proposals to the space. The result was a golden moment for Argentine feminist art. 2 Thanks to the return of democracy and the consequent freedom of expression, feminist work flourished in 1983. Feminists felt vindicated through the return to the country of women who had formerly been in exile, the increasing number of women who joined political parties (Trebisacce 2013b, 40–48) and the number of young women who approached feminist organisations, among other factors. The artistic arena was immediately affected too. Women artists were encouraged to actively participate, and to explore and expose challenges faced by their gender.

Building Other Body Images In 1979, thanks to an advertisement of the Persona magazine by María Elena Oddone3 that was published in the Buenos Aires Herald newspaper, Ilse Fusková met the founder of the MLF. As a result, she became acquainted with the theoretical literature by authors such as Simone de Beauvoir, Mary Daly, Carla Lonzi, Evelyn Reed, Victoria Sau, Valerie Sinason and Susan Sontag, whose Spanish translations had been brought to Argentina from abroad by Oddone. Fusková thus started to glean increased awareness of feminist issues through readings and conversations. In this regard, she said: Feminism saved my life: it made me realize that what I was living – the deep belittling, the lack of support in domestic and family life, all formed part of a system. When I discovered that, I managed to overcome my deep depression. … I am fully aware that getting in contact with this ideology – that explains what happens to all women – saved my life. (Ilse Fusková, Personal communication to author, 17 November 2004)

180  María Laura Rosa In those years, the photographer’s marriage came to an end, which caused her a serious personal crisis. This introspection led her to perceive everyday life from a different, perhaps more poetical perspective. She remembers this period of her life as one of the reasons why she felt compelled to take up photography once again: El Zapallo was the end of my marriage, I was very depressed. One of the things that comforted me was the beauty of creation, a rose given to me with my breakfast would actually save the day. Doing the shopping, going into a greengrocer and seeing those big pumpkins cut in half, I would see a world of magic, full of golden curtains, seeds. That was something magic to me. I don’t know if you have ever seen a pumpkin like that. To me, it was divine, blooming with fertility, and I said to myself: “I want to do a photographic series with this. And so, I bought the pumpkin”. (Ilse Fusková, Personal communication to author, 29 August 2008) Aware that she was entering a new phase in her life – being 53 years old – and looking at the world with a critical eye influenced by feminist reading material and discussions, she returned to photography, an art she had not practiced since the late 1950s because she had devoted herself to her children’s upbringing.4 She explains: I was tired of all the things my home demanded. I had a good camera, and Grete Stern and Horacio Cóppola were close friends of mine, so I started to take photographs. A friend introduced me to the model of painter Raúl Soldi. To me, the series topic was fertility, both biologically and at the brain level. (Ilse Fusková, Personal communication to author, 29 August 2008) The series consists of four black-and-white and eight colour photographs, and focuses on the study of two kinds of “nudities” – the pumpkin’s, with its inner fleshiness, and that of the model whose age was close to the photographer’s. 5 The vegetable and the woman form a single entity. The model conveys a sense that she has a strong personality, with a look that is engaged: “… she would instinctively move and I would take pictures”, commented Fusková (Personal communication to author, 7 August 2008). The photographic concept may have started with a photograph of Silvia Schmidt, a writer and friend of Ilse Fusková depicted carrying a pumpkin over her head. The photographer believes that fertility is both in the womb and the mind of women, and thus, when she decided to exhibit her work at Brígida Rubio’s workshops, also in 1982, this photograph was selected for the exhibition poster. Here, the pumpkin is related to the woman’s head, and the darkness and irregularities of the vegetable shell interact with Schmidt’s curly hair. The works were also introduced by a brief poem written by Fusková that was published on the invitation card (Fig. 11.1) and conveyed an interest in the idea of the female fertility: When I am at the market, I am always delighted to see an open pumpkin. In the inside, its subtle, golden curtains provide the setting for a liberating fantasy. And

Ilse Fusková’s El Zapallo (1982) Series 181

Figure 11.1  Ilse Fusková, El Zapallo invitation card, 1982. Source:  Ilse Fusková Archive.

this, together with the powerful alignment of its seeds, translated into the image of woman’s fertility. Fertile in terms of her womb. Fertile in terms of her mind. Her sons and daughters and ideas can change the world The open pumpkin, with its inside displayed, may be interpreted as a symbol of life. Fusková commented that she did not see the relation with the vagina. There were people that laughed because I showed this in San Telmo in 1982. But the idea that it was a vagina, a womb, came later. … I love these works because I feel they can be interpreted at different levels. … It is funny how, as time goes by, you can see your own work from a different perspective! (Ilse Fusková, Personal communication to author, 29 August 2008) One of the photographs shows the model holding the pumpkin above her pubic area, on her womb. The woman’s sex is located on the same line as the core opening of the vegetable, which exhibits a universe of seeds and woven strands within the pumpkin’s flesh. Also, in three photographs that show the model seated, the pumpkin is situated between her breasts and her pubic area, covering her sex (see Figures 11.2–11.4). The set of relationships between the woman and the pumpkin changes by her moving her hands along the body of the vegetable. In the first photograph, the woman covers part of the pumpkin’s heart with one hand while she caresses the shell with the other. Her face is cut by the framing, and the emphasis on the woman’s torso and on highlighting one of her breasts, which rests on the vegetable. In the second photograph (Fig. 11.2), however, the pumpkin is situated along a visual axis that directly links it to the head. The vegetable is placed against the pubic area, and its open and expressive heart complements the woman’s skin and the light reflected on her. The golden colour of both bodies, and the sheen of the smooth skin of both woman and pumpkin establish a mood of harmony, enhanced by the soft light falling on them. In the third picture (Fig. 11.3), the model stretches one arm – thus

182  María Laura Rosa

Figure 11.2  Ilse Fusková, El Zapallo, 1982, colour photograph. Source:  Ilse Fusková Collection.

Ilse Fusková’s El Zapallo (1982) Series 183

Figure 11.3  Ilse Fusková, El Zapallo, 1982, colour photograph. Source:  Ilse Fusková Collection.

slightly moving her breasts – while holding her hair with the other hand. Her posture expresses great freedom. As with the second photograph, the lighting highlights the smoothness of skin. The woman and the pumpkin become a single entity, with their hue and texture melding. Nevertheless, I believe that the photograph that manages to capture Fusková’s concept of fertility most successfully is the black-and-white photograph (Fig. 11.4) that was selected in 1986 to form part of the international photographic exhibition Women Photograph Women organised by Volkshochschule Munich.6 The model is seated on the floor and holds the open pumpkin in front of her pubic area, as if it were her vagina. Her hands are gently joined on the shell. Her breasts are partially hidden by the vegetable and her bent arms. Her legs and arms form a frame around the pumpkin. The image is not overly dramatic, and her eyes seem to focus simply on the pleasure of being there. What is actually compelling about the picture is the sheer voluptuousness of the vegetable. The light flows through the image, with the contrast between the inside and outside of the figure and the pumpkin somehow uniting them as a unique and different body – indeed, another body. Twelve years after this photographic series was created, Fusková wrote Amor de Mujeres (in English, Women’s Love) together with her partner Claudia Marek. El lesbianismo en la Argentina hoy (in English, Lesbianism in Argentina Today) articulates some of her ideas about the female body and spirituality. However, I consider

184  María Laura Rosa

Figure 11.4  Ilse Fusková, El Zapallo, 1982, black-and-white photograph, 35 mm. Source:  Ilse Fusková Collection.

that the series El Zapallo conveyed a deep reflection on these topics long before the photographer expressed them through the written word – a hypothesis supported by the various interviews and conversations I have had with her in the last 15 years. In this book, she contends that a woman’s naked body is taboo in the West: Most women in Western culture look at ourselves through the distorted view of a male-dominated society. This is true to our whole self and, in particular, to the perception we have of our own body. … I believe the woman’s body is the object of male desire, that man is both fascinated with and afraid of the female body. Nevertheless, the woman’s naked body, without any expression of seduction, is a forbidden image. … The nudity of the female body is a right that has been absolutely denied to us. (Fusková and Marek 1994, 42–43) Feminist theorist Janet Wolff reflects: … we have to ask what this means for feminist art practice (can women paint women’s bodies? are there ways of subverting or circumventing the dominant modes of representation?) and for body politics (can the body, after all, be site of cultural critique?). (Wolff 1990, 128)

Ilse Fusková’s El Zapallo (1982) Series 185 I think that Fusková’s works can be seen in light of the circumvention and criticality that Wolff speaks about as, visually speaking, they question and at the same time propose counter-hegemonic images of the feminine: the nudity of a middle-aged woman grants a central role to life experience within the construction of other bodily images while also exhibiting other possible constructions of beauty. What is more, the vegetable invites new reflections on sensuality and sexuality: due to its structure, its texture, the pumpkin resists the common hetero-masculine gaze towards female genitalia. Both the mental and biological fertility of women are implied to manifest in the pumpkin: located in front of the womb on the floor, it is also the counterpoint off the woman’s head, where her energy and her knowledge are received and retransmitted. It should be noted in this regard, however, that I understand the biological in the same way as Wolff: “Biology is always overlaid and mediated by culture, and the ways in which women experience their own bodies is largely a product on social and political process” (Wolff 1990, 133). In a well-known article about the female nude, theorist Lisa Tickner points out: Women are arguably closer to bodily process and transformations than men: their physical cycles are more insistent, and they are used to treating their body as raw material for manipulation and display. Women are never acceptable as they are, as de Beauvoir has suggested they are either the raw material for cosmetic transformations, in which nature is present but fetchingly “culturized”, or for the artist. Alternatively, and at a deeper level, they (we) are somehow inherently disgusting, and have to be deodorized, depilated, polished and painted into the delicacy appropriate to our sex. (Tickner 1978, 243) In this regard, disciplining the female body through hiding mechanisms supported by cultural practices has also impacted the representation of female sexuality. Tickner further explains: The acceptance and reintegration of the female genitals into art has thus been a political, rather than a directly erotic gesture. Like the associated violation of the menstrual taboo, it celebrates the mark of our “otherness” and replaces the connotations of inferiority with those of pride. It is a category that promotes a self-knowledge (like the self-examination health groups by which it has probably been influenced) and, as Barbara Rose has pointed out, it refutes at least rhetorically both the Freudian concept on penis envy and the notion of women as “The Dangerous Sex”. (Tickner 1978, 242) The presence of female genitalia in the El Zapallo series has been a political gesture, as was the decision to choose a mature woman as the photographic subject, given how scarce such a representation has been in the visual arts. When they appear in Western art at all, the naked bodies of older women have historically tended to be deployed as ugly or frightening – as memento mori signifiers, for example – rather than being appreciated as beautiful. Consequently, since the body is the means to live any experience, we should not forget that it is a place of social belonging and discursive production from which we

186  María Laura Rosa build our own identity. But discourses are somehow not only summarised or represented by images but also created by them. Thus, ever since the sixties, when feminists started to interrogate patriarchy, their criticism was directed at least partially on the mass media and its ideal of beauty, the objectification of females, privileging of male desire and a masculinist point of view, with the aim of manipulating capitalism for feminist ends. How could we challenge and interrupt the ubiquitous representation of female bodies within a capitalist system? (Millet 1975, 53). In this regard, Lynda Nead remarked: There may not be a body without clothes that is “different” from the naked body, since the body is always being represented. And, given the fact that this resource does not apply to a semiotically innocent, unmediated body, we should content ourselves with looking into the different ways in which the woman’s body is represented and promoting new body images and new identities. (Nead 1998, 34) Julia Antivilo Peña refers to the body as a key site for feminist engagement: Although the women’s body and sexuality are the core of their power and actually represent a defined political field that is disciplined for production and reproduction, above all, they are subverted by feminists. The woman’s body is a restrained body. And based on this statement, we can actually analyse the production of Latin American feminist art, which, whilst considering it a restrained body, subverts, paints, sculpts, photographs and/or transforms the female body as an aesthetic political action. (Antivilo Peña 2015, 39–40) The series El Zapallo allows Ilse Fusková to elaborate on her own female experience. Topics such as nature and fertility become physically and mentally important in these photographs, while they raise awareness from political and social points of view. Her personal experience was a means to express her aesthetic and political ideas.

El Zapallo and Goddess Imagery Although our Western herstorical foremothers from Hildegard of Bingen to Elizabeth Cady Stanton created feminist commentaries, critiques, and images in response to the divine or the sacred as it was inscribed and defined within patriarchal history, the 1970s were the first time that women’s artistic creations self-consciously extended beyond the patriarchal art-historical parameters and references, and reclaimed patristic visual models and materials from as far back as the Upper Palaeolithic and Neolithic eras. (Orenstein 1994, 176) In the mid-1980s – that is, a few years after El Zapallo was created – Fusková subscribed to the American magazines Ms. and Woman of Power. In particular, the latter was publicised as a magazine devoted to feminism, spirituality and politics – all of which were topics the photographer was interested in. Here, she learned about the research into spirituality and the new interpretations of prehistoric cults by archaeologist

Ilse Fusková’s El Zapallo (1982) Series 187 Marija Gimbutas, and became familiar with artist Merlin Stone’s research into the cult to the goddesses of Western Neolithic cultures. Ethel Morgan explained that: … in pre-patriarchal cultures, the Goddess was a cosmic figure, the creator of the Universe and its laws, governing nature, fate, time, eternity, truth, wisdom, justice, love, birth and death. The fact that they have been forgotten by Western societies can only be explained by a sustained campaign of denigration and demonization of the divine. (Morgan 2007, 92) In the 1970s and 1980s, the Great Goddess artistic movement developed mainly within Anglo-Saxon and European feminist art. Although some Latin American artists can be identified, they were in truth few. This movement analysed the links between a woman’s body and nature while also advocating a culture that had been obliterated by patriarchy. From a historical point of view, it studied woman as the protagonist of cults and rituals and, at the same time, the manager of a matriarchal culture. Several questions, discussions and perspectives cohere in the Great Goddess, all of which are closely related to art. Gloria Feman Orenstein pointed out: As she was reclaimed by women artists of the 1970s, the Goddess signalled a multilevel revolution vis à vis women’s art. This revolution included a change in the gender of the Creator, accompanied by a shift toward earth, the Mother Goddess religion; recover a women’s erased “herstory” from as far back as the Upper Palaeolithic (25000 BC); a holistic vision of the interconnectedness of spirit and matter, heaven and earth, male and female, human and nonhuman life forms; an empowering of women by reconnecting with the ancient energies, roles and talents both of mythological goddesses and of real women who lived in patristic cultures, and who are credited with the invention of agriculture, weaving, ceramics, healing, and many other important contributions to civilizations. … (Orenstein 1994, 187) The fact that the Goddess movement did not disengage politics from spirituality, and instead conceived of art as an arena where activism and feminist imagination might converge in pursuit of a shift both in awareness and culture, in the political and the spiritual, contributed to the rise of a sisterhood that viewed itself as united in a struggle against patriarchal oppression. In the United States, the bonds between the cult of the Goddess and art were enhanced by the reception and spreading of Jung’s notion of the archetype, as well as of the theory of a collective unconscious. The premises posed by the Swiss psychoanalyst allowed for interpretations of consistent models in the collective unconscious while motivating explanations as to why several female artists who disregarded the movement of the Great Goddess agreed on the need to research and work with images that include ancient symbols of patriarchal societies where women played highly relevant roles (Gadon 1989). In this sense, Ilse Fusková belongs to the group of artists who were interested in this topic, which she was acquainted with, thanks to her subscription to the magazines

188  María Laura Rosa Ms. and Woman of Power, after the creation of the series El Zapallo. She remarks that the cult of the Goddess is ignored for several reasons: … we should say that the extraordinary artistic manifestations of the Neolithic culture were known, although they were not attributed to a matrilineal culture, which we call the cult of the Goddess. What was considered truth was not based on serious analyses, but on mere “interpretations” based on disreputable patriarchal prejudice, … we should know that one of the best kept historical secrets is that almost all the basic material and social technologies had been developed before a dominant society was imposed. That is to say, before patriarchy. (Fusková and Marek 1994, 149–150) Moreover, when she learned about Marija Gimbutas’s archaeological work via Women of Power, she bought and studied her book The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe (1982) in the 1990s (Gimbutas 1982). The lack of a temporal links between the series El Zapallo and the photographer’s research on the cult of the Goddess should not prevent us from relating these photographs to work by artists in this movement. As I have already pointed out, there is congruity between the interests of artists who – in different ways and contexts – sought alternative images of women by linking the feminine to fertility, nature, thought and religious mythical creation, regardless of their knowledge of the movement. Fusková believes that there is in fact a female iconographic repertoire that reflects a way of interpreting life and the universe that has been “denied by patriarchy and that has to do with the respect for others. As we now know, they were part of the daily life of humanity, at least in Europe, until the emergence of patriarchy” (Fusková and Marek 1994, 150). Understood in light of this comment and the interests at play in feminist art practice, I would conclude that El Zapallo is part of a legacy of representations that look into women’s strength and intelligence while searching for other forms of looking at the female adult body. In 1975, American reviewer Lucy Lippard advised that “equality does not necessarily lie in androgyny alone”, adding: “If we as women do not return to the sources of our art and our experience before we attempt to transcend gender, the results will be far less fertile” (Lippard 1995, 57). The series by Fusková relates to a feminine imagery that has historically been at the edge of art historical discourse, if not made invisible. She reflects on physical and spiritual experience from a woman’s standpoint and, to do so, seeks female-related images that appear in her mind and through her research. Mental and physical fertility cohere in images that vindicate female strength throughout the history of humanity.

Conclusion The concern to create an iconography that reflects a woman’s view of her own physicality motivates Fusková’s engagement with another poetics of the female body. We should not forget that she is a woman observing the body of another woman of her own age. Analysing the construction of identity, she also questions how images work, and how they are impacted by a desiring, heterosexual male gaze. The El Zapallo series explores women’s own experiences of their physicality and desire, a topic that has for centuries been denied in the arena of visual representation.

Ilse Fusková’s El Zapallo (1982) Series 189 Both the woman-nature binomial and its relationship with fertility perform a critical role in her works. In this regard, her photographs may be analysed in the light of a female iconography promoted by the women’s movement in the seventies, one involving mythology, studies of matriarchy and the cult of the Goddess. El Zapallo is critical to the construction of a feminist visual genealogy that reasserts a link between mind and body, that explores a female gaze and that anticipates works to be created by other Argentinean artists in the future.

Acknowledgement To Ilse Fusková for so many years of deep friendship.

Notes 1 Some of its founders were Marta Migueles, Hilda Rais, María Luisa Lerer, María Luisa Bemberg, Sara Torres, Graciela Sikos, Lidia Marticorena, Ana Amado, Elizabeth Jelin and Alicia D’Amico. 2 For further information about this period, see Rosa (2014). 3 Persona was the pioneering Argentine feminist magazine of the time. It was created under the wing of the Feminist Liberation Movement (MLF), founded in 1972 by activist María Elena Oddone. Persona experienced two booms – between 1974 and 1975, when 6 editions were published, and in the eighties, when 13 editions were published between 1980 and 1983. 4 For further information about this stage of her career, see Rosa (2019). 5 The photographic exhibition El Zapallo took place at the Brígida Rubio workshops in Buenos Aires from 15 October to 24 October 1982. 6 There were 161 women from 27 countries who participated in the international exhibition from 3 September to 20 October 1986 in Munich. After that, the exhibition moved to several other countries.

References Antivilo Peña, Julia. 2015. Entre lo sagrado y lo profano se tejen rebeldías. Arte feminista latinoamericano. Colombia: Ediciones desde Abajo. Calvera, Leonor. 1982. El género mujer. Buenos Aires: Editorial de Belgrano. Fusková, Ilse and Marek, Claudina. 1994. Amor de mujeres. El lesbianismo en la Argentina hoy. Buenos Aires: Planeta. Gadon, Elinor. 1989. The Once and Future Goddess. San Francisco: Harper and Row Publishers. Gimbutas, Marija. 1982. The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe. London: Thames and Hudson. Lippard, Lucy. 1995. The Pink Glass Swan. Selected Feminist Essays on Art. New York: The New Press. Millet, Kate. 1975. Política Sexual. México: Aguilar. Morgan, Ethel. 2007. “Diosa”. In Diccionario de estudios de género y feminismos, edited by Gamba, Susana. Buenos Aires: Biblos. Nari, Marcela. 2013. “No se nace feminista, se llega a serlo. Readings and memories of Simone de Beauvoir in Argentina, 1950 and 1990”. In Cuerpos, género e identidades. Estudios de historias de género en Argentina, edited by Halperin, Paula and Acha, Omar, 291–307. Buenos Aires: Ediciones del Siglo. Nead, Lynda. 1998. El desnudo femenino. Arte, obscenidad y sexualidad (The Female Nude. Art, Obscenity and Sexuality). Madrid: Tecnos.

190  María Laura Rosa Orenstein, Gloria Feman. 1994. “Recovering Her Story: Feminist Artists Reclaim the Great Goddess”. In The Power of Feminist Art: The American Movement of the 1970s, History and Impact, edited by Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard, 174–189. New York: Harry N. Abrams. Rodríguez Agüero, Eva. 2013. Feminismos del Sur. Mujeres política y cultura en la Argentina de los ’70. Málaga: Atenea/Universidad de Málaga. Rosa, María Laura. 2014. Legados de libertad. El arte feminista en la efervescencia democrática. Buenos Aires: Biblos Rosa, María Laura. 2019. Ilse Fusková. La libertad de pasear sola. Buenos Aires: Walden Gallery. Trebisacce, Catalina. 2011. “An analysis of the narratives on the previous local feminism constructed by feminists in ATEM, November 25th, in the Eighties”. In II Jornadas del Centro Interdisciplinario de Investigaciones de Género, 40–48. University of La Plata: La Plata. www.memoria.fahce.unlp.edu.ar/trab_eventos/ev.4898/ev.4898.pdf. Trebisacce, Catalina. 2013a. Memorias del feminismo de la ciudad de Buenos Aires en la primera mitad de la década del setenta. PhD diss., Facultad de Filosofía y Letras. University of Buenos Aires. Trebisacce, Catalina. 2013b. Encuentros y desencuentros entre la militancia de izquierda y el feminismo en la Argentina. Magazine Estudos Feministas 21 (2): 2013. Tickner, Lisa. 1978. The Body Politic: Female Sexuality & Women Artists Since 1970. Art History 1 (2): 236–251, June 2. Wolff, Janet. 1990. Feminine Sentences. Essays on Women & Culture. Cambridge: Blackwell Publishing.

PART IV

Body Politics

12 Who Is Afraid of Natalia LL? Consumer Art (1972–1975) and the Pleasures and Dangers of Feminist Art in Communist Poland Joanna Inglot On 29 April 2019, Warsaw went bananas. Almost 1000 people gathered outside the National Museum to denounce the decision of the new, state-appointed museum director, Jerzy Miziołek, to remove the works of four well-known Polish feminist artists – Natalia LL, Katarzyna Kozyra, and the “Chief Judge” performance duo Karolina Wiktor and Aleksandra Kubiak. Two days earlier, the Polish media outlet Onet.pl had released reports of the decision to take down the “indecent” works from the galleries of the nation’s leading museum in order not to offend visitors and “upset sensitive youth” (Jagielski 2019).1 In response to the museum’s decision, protesters staged a collective banana-eating sit-in in front of the building and quickly took over social media with hundreds of “#bananagate” and “#bananaprotest” selfies, while ostentatiously playing with and consuming bananas to ridicule the ban (Fig. 12.1). Within hours, the story reached global media – including the Washington Post, BBC and CNN – bringing international letters of protest against censorship of art and freedom of expression by the National Museum in Warsaw, the Polish Ministry of Culture and National Heritage and the ruling right-wing Law and Justice Party (PiS). Giving in to public pressure, on April 30, Miziołek issued a statement that the works in question were only being rehung and would be back on view within a week (Makalintal 2019). Natalia LL’s notorious 16-minute video Consumer Art (Fig. 12.2), which was at the centre of the controversy, featured a montage of black-and-white and colour film clips from 1972 to 1975 that showed close-ups of young women licking, sucking and eating in a sexually suggestive manner bananas, sausages, breadsticks, candies, pudding, jelly and ice cream. The protesters immediately perceived Natalia LL’s video as an icon of feminism and a call for cultural and socio-political freedom. It resonated strongly in particular with a new generation of feminist activists who were at the forefront of large-scale, nationwide demonstrations for reproductive rights and women’s bodily autonomy that intensified in 2016 when women’s “Black Protests” defeated a government-proposed restrictive abortion bill in Poland (Majewska 2018). It took time, however, for Natalia LL to garner such wide public support and artistic recognition. From the beginning of her career in the late 1960s until the early 1990s, she had been marginalised in mainstream art circles in Poland as an “explicitly erotic” (Jakubowska 2007, 241–248) and even “pornographic” artist (Leszkowicz 2012, 127) and was occasionally censored by the communist regime for her “amoral” transgressions. At the same time, numerous internationally renowned Western feminist artists, critics and curators began to endorse her as an important feminist artist behind the Iron Curtain, a unique presence in a region in which allegedly there was

194  Joanna Inglot

Figure 12.1  Protest at the National Museum in Warsaw, 29 April 2019. Source:  Photograph courtesy Robert Kuszynski/Oko.Press.

no feminism. Working on the cusp of the second-wave feminist movement that swept the United States and Europe in the early and mid-1970s, Natalia LL emerged as a powerful voice interrogating issues of female eroticism and sexual pleasure in a manner that radically challenged social restrictions and prescribed moral codes for women in Eastern Europe. In this chapter, I show how Natalia LL established transnational dialogues with feminist art and intervened in phallocentric fetishisation of female bodies in Pop art culture while articulating female subjectivity. I also reveal how she redirected her expressions of sexual liberation into a subversive feminist critique of social, religious and economic realities under communism in Poland.

Natalia LL and Countercultural Imagery in Poland Natalia Lech-Lachowicz (b. 1937), better known as Natalia LL, had a long history of controversial reception of her work in her native country. One of her first installations, Intimate Photography was displayed in 1971 at the PERMAFO Gallery in Wrocław, which she co-founded with her husband, Andrzej Lachowicz, in 1970. The display was shut down after one day by the communist authorities, who deemed it obscene. The installation was a culmination of a series of early artistic forays she made into erotic photography during 1968–1969. She was inspired by the writings of the 18th-century libertine the Marquis de Sade and the 20th-century prophet of transgression” Georges Bataille (Noys 2000, 1), whose works were popularised in France during the sexual revolution and social unrest in the late 1960s as means of liberation from the entrenched hierarchies and systems of power (Mahon 2007).

Natalia LL’s Consumer Art (1972–75) 195

Figure 12.2  Natalia LL, Consumer Art, 1975, colour photograph, 60 × 50 cm. Source:  Courtesy of the artist and lokal_30.

Natalia LL used these works not only to claim but to celebrate her own sexual and artistic freedom. The artist recalled: At the end of the 1960s, I was taking loads of erotic, copulating documentation. It was called “Intimate Photography”. It was me with my husband Andrzej Lachowicz. We loved each other very much and it was amazingly liberating for us as artists to takes phots of each other during a sexual act. He was taking pictures, I was taking pictures …. I wasn’t allowed to exhibit these works. (Brzywczy 2015)

196  Joanna Inglot Pasted on the inside of a large box-like structure, with a vertical opening that allowed the viewer to enter the installation, were enlarged black-and-white close-up photographs of copulating couples, which could be examined closely by the viewers. Images of intermingling naked bodies, shot at different angles, registered an egalitarian relationship between male and female subjects. Natalia LL’s smiling self-portraits, serially reproduced on the exterior of the box within a grid-like format, seemed to boldly assert her agency and ownership of the pleasurable erotic content. By combining the seriality of conceptualism and minimalism with the private sexual content, the artist enacted a potent gesture of resistance against the disembodied abstraction of the modernist canon. She also openly disputed sexual repression by communist authorities who, as the art historian Paweł Leszkowicz has pointed out, sought to eliminate any “anarchic pleasures and desires giving a foretaste of freedom” (Leszkowicz 2012, 225). Natalia LL’s photographs of sexually charged scenes and playful erotic gestures in the late 1960s were in many ways reminiscent of the proto-feminist works of Carolee Schneemann and Yoko Ono, which were also initially banned when shown in New York and London. Schneemann’s seminal happening Meat Joy (1964), which she performed for the first time at the Festivals of Free Expression organised by the French artist and political activist Jean-Jacques Lebel in Paris during 1964–1967, resonated in some circles within the global avant-garde as a radical breakthrough in erotic art that “shattered the expected (normative, modernist) definitions of sex, gender, and art” (Middleman 2018, 29). Working with a group of four men and four women, Schneemann orchestrated an extravagant and sexually indulgent “erotic rite”, in which performers cavorted with raw meat, sausages, fish and chicken to explore the polymorphous dimensions of bodily pleasure. In her equally provocative Fuses, shown first in London (1967) and later at the 1969 Cannes Film Festival, Schneemann, whom Natalia LL later described as “the ideal of an artist” (Jarecki 2004, 485), inserted into scenes of her daily life explicit shots of lovemaking with her partner, James Tenney, to express the experience of mutual enjoyment of intercourse (Middleman 2018, 46–50). As Alyce Mahon noted, in Fuses Schneemann “allowed the sexual act to be seen, and most importantly, represented the female orgasm in a radically explicit way” (Mahon 2007). Coming from different social and political contexts, Natalia LL and Carolee Schneemann both explored totally new modes of representing sexuality, challenging the dichotomies upheld by the patriarchal ideologies in their own societies, in which sexual pleasure was the exclusive purview of heterosexual men exploiting female subjects. Stressing the importance of the equality between the sexual partners, they were both also claiming their status as active erotic subjects. They were both indebted to Bataille’s understanding of eroticism as a psychological and spiritual quest for inner life and a search for freedom from dominant social and ideological hegemonies. Bataille’s L’Erotisme (1957), although translated much later into Polish, circulated in small French-reading artistic and intellectual circles in Poland throughout the 1960s as it did throughout Europe and the United States, influencing Schneemann and many other artists interested in exploration of eroticism and transgression. One of the key champions of Bataille and eroticism in Europe, who indirectly impacted the avant-garde artistic circles in which Natalia LL developed, was JeanJacques Lebel (b. 1936). Lebel, who started his career as a Surrealist before he briefly associated himself with George Maciunas’ Fluxus group in New York in the early

Natalia LL’s Consumer Art (1972–75) 197 1960s, became best known in avant-garde circles in Europe, the United States and Japan for spearheading happenings and transgressive performances during which he “experimented with free sexuality as a means to access corporeal truths and transform psychic and social reality” (Fredrickson 2007, 42). Lebel invited to his Festivals international artists, poets, musicians and filmmakers, including Schneemann, Ono, Tetsumi Kudo, Claes Oldenburg and The Living Theatre. He did not work directly with Polish artists but garnered some attention in Poland and other Eastern European countries throughout the 1960s. He visited Poland as early as 1958, where he met with avant-garde artists in Warsaw and Cracow.2 Lebel particularly remembered meetings with the avant-garde artist and theatre director Tadeusz Kantor in Poland and then again in Paris in the 1960s and in Tokyo during the 1970s.3 Influenced by Dada, Antonin Artaud and the Marquis de Sade, Lebel retaliated against the commodity fetishism of capitalist society by deploying different forms of sexual expression to revise conceptions of obscenity and deviance. His famed happening 120 Minutes Dedicated to the Divine Marquis, performed in Paris as part of the Festival of Free Expression in 1965, was a tribute to Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom, The School of Libertinage. As art historian Alyce Mahon noted: “Lebel saw the happening in more libidinous and political terms, expanding the role of Sade as an energizing and disruptive force in the process” (Mahon 2020, 201). Many other artists of the 1960s avant-garde embraced Sade’s ideas. Mahon further explained: In his own lifetime Sade experienced repression, imprisonment, and censorship and narrowly missed the guillotine, but he was considered an icon of free and subversive expression by much of the twentieth-century avant-garde, and his distinctive concept of “philosophy in the bedroom” was seized as a radical engagement with sexual desire, society, and politics. Many writers, artists, dramatists, and filmmakers embraced Sadean sexual terror and taboo to make people see and think differently. (Mahon 2020, 1) In Poland, Kantor, who was the key transmitter of artistic ideas between Poland and the West, especially France, during the 1960s, paid homage to these ideas in his Panoramic Sea Happening (1967), which was performed during the state-sponsored Osieki Pleinair on the Baltic Coast. His “Erotic Barbouillage” in the third part of the happening, as Klara Kemp-Welch pointed out, was clearly a reprise of Schneemann’s Meat Joy “minus the meat, which remained in short supply” in Poland (Kemp-Welch 2017, 40). After marrying the conceptual photographer Andrzej Lachowicz in 1964, Natalia LL joined one of the most experimental artistic circles in Poland, including artists such as Jerzy Rosołowicz, Jerzy Ludwiński, Antoni Dzieduszycki and Zbigniew Dłubak, who were connected to Kantor and were all familiar with art developments in France. In 1970, she responded to a Sadean sexual imagination in a series of commanding colour self-portraits called Velvet Terror, in which the artist masqueraded as a dominatrix celebrating lesbian sexual jouissance. Sitting majestically in a black dress against a red background with a whip in her hand (Velvet Terror I), she opens her legs to receive oral sex from a naked woman kneeling in front of her (Velvet Terror II), determinedly asserting full control over her sexuality and forms of erotic pleasure. The counterculture social movements that emerged in France and the United States in the 1960s resonated strongly in Eastern Europe. The southwestern Polish city of

198  Joanna Inglot Wrocław, where Natalia LL lived and worked since 1957, was one of the central locations of the youth rebellion in Poland (Markowska 2015, 201). Hippie counterculture appeared in Wrocław almost immediately after the famous San Francisco “Summer of Love” of 1967. The hippies settled first in an abandoned building on Słodowa Street, near Market Square, and met regularly in the nearby Bar Barbara and at Wrocław’s International Book and Press Club Empik, where Jerzy Ludwiński ran an alternative gallery. The “At Mona Lisa Gallery” (1967–1971) (where Natalia LL used to spend much time and exhibited her work in 1970), attracted artists, students and professors who nourished the growth of alternative culture and “free love” (Jarecki 2004, 204, 482; Risch 2014, 82–84). The cultural communist commissars usually engaged in surveillance and suppression of hippie activism but occasionally co-opted their culture to promote the socialist youth “flower power” (Tracz 2014). In the late 1960s, the regime sponsored various “counterculture” events, including the Rolling Stones concerts at Congress Hall in Warsaw 1967, to provide young people with a sense of belonging to a wider global culture. Like many artists across Poland, Natalia LL was shaped by this growing alternative youth culture.4 Moreover, Wrocław (formerly known as Breslau), the largest city in the so-called Regained Territories (German lands re-appropriated to the People’s Republic of Poland as compensation for territorial losses in the east absorbed by the Soviet Union after World War II) attracted many creative individuals from different regions of the country like Jerzy Grotowski, Henryk Tomaszewski and Tadeusz Różewicz who developed there internationally renowned careers, and who like Natalia LL and Andrzej Lachowicz, were not interested in the nostalgic search for Polish national heritage that was being advocated in communist propaganda. As the Polish art historian Anna Markowska noted: “The young Wrocław artists did not want to emulate Kraków or Warsaw; they had global aspirations” (Markowska 2015, 200–201). They opened many alternative spaces, championing new art experiments, an alternative audience and independent systems of distribution (Markowska 2015, 17). Founded after the Visual Arts Symposium “Wrocław’70”, which popularised conceptualism in Poland, Natalia LL and Andrzej Lachowicz’s PERMAFO Gallery was the first to launch a radical critique of existing institutions in Poland. “Eventually the Lachowicz duo”, Markowska (2015, 201) observed, “triggered a domino effect and Wrocław became known in the 1970s as the unofficial ‘capital city of conceptual art’, where the term covered all post-conceptual movements with a special emphasis on the so-called new media (film, video, photography)” rather than painting and sculpture. The PERMAFO artists sought to reject social clichés and stereotypical systems of visual signification, while exploring what they called “permanent art, consumer art, penetrating photography, artificial photography, concrete photography, post-consumer art, and extreme art” (Markowska 2015, 13). Natalia LL’s efforts to create explicitly erotic expression in this context was an important and “the most profound” attempt by a woman artist to open the field of male-centred visual culture to radical exploration of female-based eroticism and multisensory sexual content (Leszkowicz 2012, 126–127). Consumer Art In 1972, Natalia LL began to present at PERMAFO her photographic works and short 16-mm films called Consumer Art (1972–1975), which all featured her signature

Natalia LL’s Consumer Art (1972–75) 199 images of young women suggestively eating and playing with bananas (Fig. 12.2), sausages (Fig. 12.3) and breadsticks. In the first set of images from 1972, the naive-looking blonde girls with hair tied in pigtails look at, touch, peel and eagerly consume bananas, while slowly uncovering the sexual enjoyment that unfolds during the erotic play with the phallic-looking fruit. In other variants of Consumer Art, Natalia LL included more mature models, both blondes and brunettes, who were playfully eating viscous foods resembling bodily fluids, such as pudding, jelly and ice cream. As the series grew, the images became increasingly sexually provocative and playful, at times recalling Věra Chytilová’s Czechoslovak New Wave film Daisies (1966), in which young women who are on a date with older men are more interested in consuming and cavorting with food than with their male companions (Crowley 2017, 139). The omnipresent motifs of eating, licking and caressing bananas in Consumer Art make a clear reference to Pop Art’s sexualised embrace of everyday objects and activities. Andy Warhol’s provocative banana design for the cover of the debut album by the

Figure 12.3  Natalia LL, Consumer Art, 1972, black-and-white photograph, 60 × 50 cm. Source:  Courtesy of the artist and lokal_30.

200  Joanna Inglot rock band The Velvet Underground and his homoerotic silent Mario Banana films of 1964, which sexualised representations of bananas in the context of queer subculture in New York, served as important inspirations for Natalia LL (Nabakowski 2013, 135). Moreover, Warhol’s silkscreen images of the popular sex icon Marilyn Monroe (MM) must have been appealing to Natalia LL, who made serial images of women and projected 16-mm films in a video format to mimic a television screen. At the same time, she adopted a Pop Art-like persona; she wore long platinum blond hair and dark glasses, and abbreviated her name to “LL” as if to mimic “MM” and ironically associate herself with American popular culture, which she saw from a distance as a performative place of fantasy (Fig. 12.4). Pop Art, which had become visible in Europe in the early 1960s, took its inspiration from advertisements, billboards, television commercials, magazines and movie posters. It swept Eastern Europe in the mid-1960s, even though communist regimes deplored Pop Art “as non-art, supermarket-art, Kitsch-art and as a coca-colonization

Figure 12.4  Natalia LL, Consumer Art, 1974, colour print, unique piece, 89.5 × 81 cm, Grażyna Kulczyk Collection. Source:  Courtesy of the artist and lokal_30.

Natalia LL’s Consumer Art (1972–75) 201 of Western Europe” (Huyssen 1975, 77). It remained popular in Poland during the early 1970s, when travel abroad and access to Western goods and American visual culture significantly increased. At the time when Natalia LL turned to popular depictions of sex as a source material, such images were more easily available to Polish audiences via film, television and in soft-porn magazines brought from the West (Crowley 2017, 135). During my interview with the artist, Natalia LL revealed that, in the 1960s, she used to bring soft-porn magazines herself for her research from Denmark, where she travelled often to visit her aunt. Denmark was the first country in the world to legalise pictorial pornography in 1969, responding to the changes in sexual behaviour bought about by the social and political liberalisation, the hippie movement and the artistic avant-garde. The artist recalled that, in Denmark, porn magazines were easily available for purchase in convenience stores and that porn films were broadcasted on TV and available for purchase or rent in video stores. She stated that all of these magazines were confiscated by the secret police during a raid on her apartment during the Martial Law in Poland (1981–1983) (Natalia LL, interview with the author, 29 April 2015). Like her American male Pop Art predecessors (Mel Ramos, Tom Wesselmann and Roy Lichtenstein), Natalia LL appropriated some of the most blatant sexist images that circulated in Western culture, almost directly quoting erotic gestures from softporn films and Playboy magazine, and restaging the cliché of the alluring “dumb blonde” from European and American pin-ups. Sexualised women in Natalia LL’s works, however, could not be easily consumed by the male gaze. Viewers were forced to recognise that these nude or topless women enjoying phallic-looking objects were consciously acting out and controlling their position as subjects and objects of their performance, dictating the rules of the game. Natalia LL personally directed the performers (Ela M, Anna D, Danuta N and others, who temporarily served as the artist’s alter ego; Nabakowski 2013, 131) to become ciphers of active female sexuality. In their enactment of eroticism, the models’ eyes catch the camera, laughing and carefully controlling their gestures to point out that they are satisfying their own desires rather than catering to male voyeurs. As art historian Kalliopi Minioudaki explained, since the early 1960s, several proto-feminist Pop artists – the Belgian painter Evelyn Axell, British co-founder of Pop art Pauline Boty and American painter, sculptor and performance artist Majorie Strider – used pin-up images extensively to expose them as a site of patriarchal oppression and as a vehicle to “re-imagine it [i.e. the pinup] in subversive ways” (Minioudaki 2011, 141). Relying on the formal conventions of modern pin-ups and soft-porn magazines and films, which (on both sides of the Atlantic) traditionally catered for male heterosexual viewers, these artists often employed ultra-feminine gestures and poses that parodied and debunked male fantasies and broke down the stereotypes of women. Natalia LL had much greater exposure to other female Pop artists who exhibited in Europe, such as French sculptor Niki de Saint Phalle and a French-Venezuelan artist who settled and worked in New York City. Marisol Escobar, who in 1968 represented Venezuela at the Venice Biennale and appeared in Documenta 4 in Kassel, became incorporated into American Pop due to her close connection with Warhol who cast her in two of his underground films in 1962. Marisol’s feminist response to Warhol’s iconic Coca-Cola bottles in her provocative sculpture Love of 1962, in which a woman seems to be drinking or sucking a Coca-Cola bottle, brings to mind

202  Joanna Inglot Natalia LL’s feminist reworkings of Warhol’s banana motif in her Consumer Art series. Using tactics similar to these proto-feminist female Pop artists, Natalia LL challenged the traditional, passive and submissive role ascribed to woman in patriarchal society not only within the Western canon but specifically the desexualised models of femininity promoted by the communist regime and the Catholic Church in Poland. Natalia LL, just as the international group of women Pop artists had done before her, embraced irony and appropriation to subversively critique of patriarchal society and politics, but in a specifically “socialist” Eastern European context. At the time Natalia LL was making Consumer Art, Poland was undergoing its own consumer revolution. A new government under the leadership of Edward Gierek, who took power in 1970, replacing much more politically conservative and socially restrictive regime of Władysław Gomułka, had promised to modernise the country, double productivity and increase access to consumer goods. Gierek had an ambitious plan to remake Poland in the image of Western modernity but without changing the foundations of the Soviet-style political and economic system (Crowley 2017, 138; Kubik 1994, 22). His policies, based on foreign loans and economic liberalisation, ultimately failed, and within a few years widespread shortages of consumer goods became commonplace. David Crowley explained that in the 1960s and 1970s the citizens of the people’s republics might have been unable to consume many branded consumer goods, or everyday luxuries like cars, washing machines and fashionable clothes but they were aware of the aesthetic codes which accompanied modern consumerism. (Crowley 2017, 134) Throughout the communist era, bananas and other “exotic” fruit like oranges became highly desirable and exceptionally sought-after food items. Eating bananas in Poland and in other Eastern European countries was often considered a luxury, accessible only to a lucky few who could acquire these goods on rare occasions. For Natalia LL, like for many others, the fruit became like a fetish. “When it comes to the banana”, Natalia LL recalled, I used it in my art as early as 1971-72. In communist Poland bananas were sold only during Christmas Eve, on July 22 [which is a national holiday], and on May 1 [which is a working-class holiday]. I also imported bananas from Germany”. (Nabakowski 2017, 25) In fact, bananas were objects of desire in other communist countries until the fall of the Berlin Wall. When the checkpoints opened in West Berlin in 1989 and people in East Germany rushed to the other side of the Iron Curtain, as German critic and editor Gislind Nabakowski reminded us, “they were exuberantly greeted with bananas. Fruits like bananas were part of the official ceremonies of welcome” (Nabakowski 2017, 25). Natalia LL’s engagement with bananas stands as an ironic commentary on the consumer deprivation and economic failure of the communist system, and a mocking statement on how pleasure was redefined during food shortages in Poland. The women in her photographs, toying with bananas, sausages and other ordinary items, direct their excitement and insatiable erotic desire towards scarce food products,

Natalia LL’s Consumer Art (1972–75) 203 which symbolise the shortages that were generated by a “socialist” economy. As Crowley summed it up, “Sexualizing food and emphasizing orality, they offer a provocative commentary about the elision of desire and need” in a communist state (Crowley 2017, 131). However, we can also argue that the adulation of the sausages, hot dogs and bananas by the playful heroines of Consumer Art signal the emergence of a woman as a new active subject claiming her place in the new consumerist socialist society and someone who has a power both to desire and to acquire new fantasies, while at the same time subversively undermine (or even cannibalise) the phallus of the signifier of power. Post-Consumer Art In her next series, Post-Consumer Art (1975: Fig. 12.5), Natalia LL focused on the production of images and videos showing extreme close-ups of good-looking blonde women, which redirected viewers’ attention from consumption of phallic-looking food products to the models’ lips. The women, their mouths filled with runny, gelatinous products such as cream, pudding and jelly, seem to be in orgasmic delight as they drink, slurp and dribble the amorphous liquids, letting them mix with saliva

Figure 12.5  Natalia LL, Post-Consumer Art, 1975, photograph. Source:  Courtesy of the artist and lokal_30.

204  Joanna Inglot and run down their faces. Instead of solid, discrete objects like sausages and bananas, the substances in these photographs exhibit fluidity and viscous uncontrollability, as a manifestation of feminine jouissance. Natalia LL’s images of female subjects performing in their mouths with liquids are engaged with the concept of “female fluidity”, which both physically and metaphorically challenges hegemonic structures in art and culture. Natalia LL’s ideas coincided with the emergence of the contemporaneous French feminist poststructuralist theories of Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva, which were published during 1974–1975 (Szczuka 2014, 47). They all contended that phallocentric structures, which are deeply embedded within language, art and culture, could be overcome by the practice of the so-called l’écriture féminine, or “feminine writing” rooted in women’s bodies to provide an alternative space for women’s subjectivity to emerge. Waging critiques of the psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan, who defined the feminine as “lack” in relation to the phallus, understood a “transcendental signifier” of meaning, they perceived feminine syntax as a process which is in a permanent state of metamorphosis, characterised by multiplicity, flux and excess, which would be able to deconstruct the “unified”, masculine subject and the phallocentric order (Ives 2016). Furthermore, in This Sex Which Is Not One (1974), Luce Irigaray proclaimed that to liberate herself, a woman first needs to understand her own sexuality and then find a way to express her pleasure outside of masculine paradigms. In an effort to move beyond the phallus, Irigaray proposed that the mouth, in particular the lips (the organ of speech, and metaphorically signifying the labial lips/vulva), is a site from which to counter phallic hegemony and through which to create an independent femininity. Irigaray views the lips as a metaphor for feminine jouissance and signifiers of female autoeroticism. Unlike the phallus, which stands for the Lacanian alienation and repression of the feminine, the lips suggest intimacy and immediacy through which women can achieve an ecstasy of becoming (Irigaray 1985, Ch. 11). In Post-Consumer Art, Natalia LL moves away from portraying the female body as embedded in the politics of the phallus to internalising feminine pleasure independently of it.

Reception of Natalia LL’s Works Natalia LL’s Consumer Art and Post-Consumer Art works were mostly well received by feminist critics and curators in Western Europe and the United States and were recognised as significant feminist statements. Yet, in the early 1970s, Natalia LL distanced herself from the emerging feminist art movement. When she was first approached by the art critic Lucy Lippard in 1971 as a representative of the feminist movement in Eastern Europe, the artist felt surprised and amused by the second-wave feminist agenda, claiming that it had been already achieved under socialism (Jurecki 2004, 484). By the mid-1970s, however, she was ready to join feminist art groups in the West. The breakthrough came in 1975, when Gislind Nabakowski put Consumer Art on the front cover of the German art journal heute Kunst to illustrate a special issue on “Feminism and Art”. Suddenly, Natalia LL found herself in the company of the new feminist avant-garde, including Yoko Ono, Lygia Clark, Valie Export, Carolee Schneemann, Marina Abramović, Katharina Sieverding, Gina Pane, Verita Monselles, Annette Messager and Suzy Lake. Her arrival on the international feminist art scene was undoubtedly one of the most important moments of her career.

Natalia LL’s Consumer Art (1972–75) 205 Another memorable event appeared when one of her images from her Post-Consumer Art appeared on the cover of the December 1975–February 1976 issue of Flash magazine. Recalling it decades later, Marina Abramović described this “epic cover” as unforgettable (America Is Not Ready for This 2013; Kozieradzki 2017, 11–12). The founder and editor in chief of Flash Art magazine, Giancarlo Piloti who promoted Natalia LL, came to Poland in 1975. He had contacted Natalia LL a few years earlier with the help of the German art historian of Polish descent, Klaus Groh and the Argentinian global art networker and founder of the Centro de Arte y Comunicación (CAyC) in Buenos Aires, Jore Glusberg (Natalia LL, interview with the author, 29 April 2015). Concurrently, the gallery owner and organiser of the Edinburgh Festivals, Richard Demarco, who had visited PERMAFO in 1972, also enhanced Natalia LL’s international visibility by including her in group exhibitions in Edinburgh, such as Atelier’72 at the Richard Demarco Gallery. By 1975, Natalia LL was exhibiting widely throughout Europe. Her Consumer Art and Post-Consumer Art series were featured that year at the Ninth Paris Biennale at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, France; the Fourth Festival of Extended Media at the Art Center in Belgrade, in the former Yugoslavia; the Frauen Kunst-Neue Tendenzen exhibition at Galerie Krinzinger in Innsbruck, Austria; at Magma: Rassegna Internzaionale di Donne Artiste curated by Romana Loda and Valie Export in Brescia, and in other Italian cities, and finally in Vienna, Austria. In subsequent years, her work was exhibited with other displays of feminist art in Bonn, The Hague and other Dutch cities (Jakubowska 2018). In 1977, Natalia LL together with her husband Andrzej Lachowicz received a three-month long Kościuszko Foundation Fellowship in New York and travelled to the United States and Canada to attend various meetings with artists and critics. Emboldened by her successes in Europe, Natalia LL hoped to exhibit and sell her work in the United States. She brought with her a portfolio of images from Consumer Art, Post-Consumer Art, and her explicit, autoerotic Artificial Photography (1975). She met with renowned New York art dealers – Leo Castelli, Ileana Sonnabend and John Gibson – but she did not get much of their professional attention. She also arranged for meetings with a group of conceptual artists (Dennis Oppenheim, Hans Haacke and Joseph Kosuth) and reconnected with Carolee Schneemann, Suzy Lake, Lucy Lippard and Marina Abramović (Tatar 2011, 11). However, as the Polish queer and multimedia artist, Karol Radziszewski’s documentary America Is Not Ready for This (2012) revealed (re-tracing Natalia LL’s encounters with many of these artist and art dealers 35 years later), Natalia LL did not understand well the art scene in the United States in the late 1970s. She was not searching for representation in alternative galleries where she might have found much more notice and support, but in the mainstream commercial venues that were not interested in representing women and feminist art, and especially an unknown (to them) woman artist from Eastern Europe (Radziszewski, America Is Not Ready for This 2013). However, Natalia LL remained energised by contacts with feminist artists in the United States. After she returned to Poland, she gave lectures on feminist art and in 1978, she organised the first feminist exhibition in Poland at the PSP Jatki Gallery in Wrocław. The exhibit included the works of her long-standing feminist friends Carolee Schneemann, Suzy Lake and Neomi Meidan, whom she met during her travels and at earlier art exhibitions. Polish art critics, however, did not provide feminist analysis. They argued that Natalia LL’s feminism was accidental and that she was

206  Joanna Inglot more interested in exploring “universal” issues rather than a specifically feminist content. The art historian Agata Jakubowska explained, “[F]eminist interpretations did not follow at all. At that time, no one – not even the artist herself – was able to propose such an interpretation”. According to Jakubowska, Natalia LL lacked “appropriate critical vocabulary” to convey her feminist ideas, even though she was fully immersed in exhibiting within the feminist context in the West (Jakubowska 2007, 243). Indeed, prior to 1989, the concept of feminism was not debated in Poland and East Central Europe. Many artists, critics and the public considered feminism an unnecessary “import” from the West (Pejić 2010, 21). The political leaders and communist governments claimed that women’s equality – represented by officially promoted ideas and policies of equal access to education, employment, childcare, maternity leave, and so on – were inscribed in the very foundation of state ideology. Moreover, legal abortion and divorce, which became staples of communist propaganda, were used as indicators of gender emancipation and sexual liberalisation (Pejić 2010, 32). Shortly after the communist takeover following World War II, when women entered the labour force in Eastern Europe in large numbers, they were portrayed as builders of the proletarian state along with their male counterparts, while at the same time they were caught up in maintaining the traditional gender roles that were widely upheld within the conservative society. The feminist debates in Poland and Eastern Europe were also hindered by socio-political circumstances. As the Czech art critic and curator Martina Pachmanová explained, “During this period, the biggest ‘enemy’ was the totalitarian regime which women and men in the counterculture fought against (…)” (Pachmanová 2010, 39). It is not surprising, then, that Natalia LL was not explicitly vocal about feminism and could not fully articulate the complexities of gender politics under communism. However, in her art, she responded strongly to the programmatic constructions of the female body and female sexuality that had been shaped by the communist ideology and by the mighty Catholic Church, which remained influential in Poland throughout the post-war years. During the Cold War, communist propaganda prominently featured images of women as muscular workers and peasants, but also professional women (scientists and medical doctors) who lacked sexual appeal. In her book Post-Communism and the Body Politic, Ellen Berry (1995, 3) claimed that under communism there was a complete “erasure of the body, sexuality, and gender relations as topic of public discourse”. Individual bodies and sexualities were replaced with a monolithic vision of a collective body, which oscillated between the classical ideal as “transcendent and monumental, closed, static, self-contained, symmetrical and sleek” and desexualised bodies of the hard-working proletariat (Maziarskia 2016). Attitudes towards the female body and sexuality were also defined by the Church and its vision of Catholic morality, where sexuality was equated with reproduction, and bodily transgressions, especially those committed by women, were classified as a grave sin. Discourses on the fulfilment of desire and the importance of individual agency were replaced with ideas of collective sacrifice and perpetual self-denial paradoxically by both the Catholic Church and the communists, who wanted to distinguish Poland as morally and socially superior from the “decadent” Western bourgeois capitalist system (Ibroscheva 2013, xii). Such negative attitudes towards sexuality were challenged in Polish art and film in the 1970s but primarily by male artists, who began to develop erotic themes

Natalia LL’s Consumer Art (1972–75) 207 following the sexual revolution of the 1960s. Natalia LL was not the only woman artist in Poland who introduced a radical feminist voice and employed sexual and erotic themes for personal, social and political liberation and to undermine patriarchal master narratives. However, she became the most visible Polish and East European artists on the international arena and best known in the feminist circles in Europe and the United States. Maria Pinińska-Bereś and Ewa Partum emerged as other Polish feminist provocateurs during the late 1960s and early 1970s. In their studies on the emergence of feminism in Poland, art historians Agata Jakubowska, Ewa Toniak and Izabela Kowalczyk often linked these artists (despite their different artistic styles and artistic directions), emphasising their shared quest in disseminating feminist ideas in Poland (Jakubowska 2018; Kowalczyk 1997; Toniak 2011). Despite her efforts, it took a long time for Natalia LL to become recognised as a precursor of feminist art in Poland in the canons of art history (including feminist art history) and to be acknowledged as a significant artist on the international art scene. She began enjoying serious scholarly attention in the 1990s, at the time that mistrust towards feminism in Poland was easing and new art historical studies were reassessing feminist art, while challenging traditional narratives of art history. In the last decade, the re-evaluations of Pop art as a transnational movement brought renewed attention to Natalia LL and her contributions to subversive, political and feminist directions within global Pop art movement. Significantly, her works, and particularly her iconic Consumer Art (1972–1975), were featured in the major exhibitions of global Pop art – International Pop organised by the Walker Art Center (2015) and The World Goes Pop at the Tate Modern in London (2016). Moreover, as revisionist and transnational approaches in art history develop, we are becoming increasingly aware that the metaphor of an Iron Curtain that supposedly divided the art world into two impenetrable spheres that dominated the imagination of the Cold War era was a myth and that there was much greater connectivity and exchanges between the artists, critics and curators living in the Eastern and Western “blocs” than previously assumed. Natalia LL’s career clearly demonstrates that artists living and working under communism were always connected to larger networks of artists, institutions and intellectual paradigms, and were nourished by the diffusion of ideas between different parts of the world. During the 1960s and 1970s, as she confronted conservative social mores and the restrictive social and political climate under communism in Poland, she continued to boldly investigate female sexuality and to forge her feminist agendas. Natalia LL’s art still causes controversy in conservative social and artistic circles and occasionally perturbs right-wing ideologues who condemn it as “indecent”. But she established for herself an undisputed position as an artist who not only pioneered but also radically transformed the feminist art scene in Poland.

Notes 1 Author’s translation from Polish. 2 Art critic and curator, Anka Ptaszkowska, who was closely associated with Foksal Gallery in Warsaw, remembers giving Lebel a tour of Poland and introducing him to various artists in 1958. Email correspondence with Anka Ptaszkowska, 12 June 2020. 3 Jean-Jacques Lebel provided this information to me via email on 10 June 2020. 4 Hippies also appeared at Warsaw’s Foksal Gallery and Cracow’s Krzysztofory Gallery. See Tracz (2014).

208  Joanna Inglot

References America Is Not Ready for This. 2013. [video] Dir. Karol Radziszewski. Berry, Ellen. 1995. Post-Communism and the Body Politic. New York: NYU Press. Brzywczy, Monika. 2015. “Sekretne słowo Natalii” Interview with Natalia LL. Ustamagazyn, March 2015. Crowley, David. 2017. “Consumer Art and Other Commodity Aesthetics in Eastern Europe under Communist Rule”. In Natalia LL. Consumer Art and Beyond, edited by Agata Jakubowska, 129–143. Warsaw: Ujazdowski Castle Center for Contemporary Art. Fredrickson, Laurel. 2007. “Kate Millett and Jean-Jacques Lebel: Sexual Outlaws in the Intermedia Borderlands of Art and Politics” (Ph.D. dissertation), Duke University. Huyssen, Andreas. 1975. “The Cultural Politics of Pop: Reception and Critique of US Pop Art in the Federal Republic of Germany”. New German Critique, No. 4, 77–97. Ibroscheva, Elza. 2007. Advertising Sex, and Post-Socialism: Women, Media, and Femininity in the Balkans. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Irigaray, Luce. 1985. This Sex Which Is Not One. Trans by Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press. Ives, Kelly. 2016. Cixous, Irigaray, Kristeva: The Jouissance of French Feminism. Kent: Crescent Moon Publishers. Jagielski, Piotr, 2019. “Jerzy Miziołek: jestem przeciwny eksponowaniu dzieł, które mogą irytować wrażliwą młodzież”. Onet.pl (Kultura), 27 April. Jakubowska, Agata. 2007. “The Attractive Banality of Natalia LL’s ‘Consumer Art’. Nordlit, No. 21, 241–248. Jakubowska, Agata. 2017. Natalia LL. Consumer Art and Beyond. Warsaw: Ujazdowski Castle Center for Contemporary Art. Jakubowska, Agata. 2018. “The Circulation of Feminist Ideas in Communist Poland”. In Globalizing East European Art Histories: Past and Present, edited by Beáta Hock and Anu Allas, 135–148. London and New York: Routledge. Jarecki, Krzysztof. 2004. “Interview with Natalia LL”. In Natalia LL Texts, edited by Agata Smalcesz, 480–488. Bielsko-Biala: Bielska Gallery. Kemp-Welch, Klara. 2017 [2014]. Antipolitics in Central European Art; Reticence as Dissidence under Post-Totalitarian Rule 1956–1989. London and New York: I.B. Tauris. Kowalczyk, Izabela, 1997. “Feminist Motifs in Polish Art”. Atrium Questiones, No. VIII, 135–152. Kozieradzki, Mateusz. 2017. “A Forgotten Episode from the Works of Natalia LL”. In Natalia LL Sum Ergo Sum, edited by Mateusz Kosieradzki, exh.cat., 11–14. Toruń: Centrum Sztuki Wspoółczesnej. Kubik, Jan. 1994. The Power of Symbols against the Symbols of Power: The Rise of Solidarity and the Fall of State Socialism in Poland. University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University. Leszkowicz, Paweł. 2012. Nagi mężczyzna: Akt męski w sztuce polskiej po 1945 roku. Poznań: Wydawnictwo Naukowe UAM. Mahon, Alyce. 2007. Eroticism and Art. Oxford History of Art, Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press (eBook). Mahon, Alyce. 2020. The Marquis de Sade and The Avant-Garde. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Majewska, Ewa. 2018. “When Polish Women Revolted”. Jacobin Magazine, 8 March. Makalintal, Bettina. 2019. “This Museum Removed an “Improper” Banana Video, Sparking Banana-Themed Protests”. Vice.com, 30 April. Markowska, Anna. 2013. “PERMAFO 1970–1981: Zbigniew Dłubak, Antoni Dzieduszycki, Natalia LL, Andrzej Lachowicz”. In Permafo, 1970–1981, edited by Anna Markowska, 13–103. Wrocław: Wrocław Contemporary Museum.

Natalia LL’s Consumer Art (1972–75) 209 Markowska, Anna. 2015. “New Media Tradition in Wrocław”. In The Wild West: A History of Wrocław’s Avant-Garde, edited by Dorota Monkiewicz, 199–211. Warsaw: Zache t̨ a – National Gallery of Art and Wrocław: Wrocław Contemporary Museum. Maziarska, Ewa. 2018. Cinematic Bodies of Eastern Europe and Russia. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Middleman, Rachel. 2018. Radical Eroticism: Women, Art, and Sex in the 1960s. Oakland, CA: University of California Press. Nabakowski, Gislind. 2013 “Natalia LL: Eight or Ten Things That I Know About Her Art”. In Permafo, 1970–1981, edited by Anna Markowska, 128–145. Wrocław: Wrocław Contemporary Museum. Nabakowski, Gislind. 2017. “Natalia LL-but What Is the Good Life? The Transience and Finiteness of Experience”. In Natalia LL Sum Ergo Sum, edited by Mateusz Kozieradzki. Toruń: Centrum Sztuki Współczesnej. Noys, Benjamin. 2000. Georges Bataille: A Critical Introduction. London: Pluto Press. Pachmanová, Martina. 2010. “In? Out? In Between? Some Notes on the Invisibility of a Nascent Eastern European Feminist and Gender Discourse in Contemporary Art Theory”. In Gender Check: Femininity and Masculinity in the Art of Eastern Europe, edited by Bojana Pejić, exh.cat., 214–248. Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandung Walter Konig. Pejić, Bojana. 2010. Gender Check: Femininity and Masculinity in the Art of Eastern Europe. exh.cat. Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandung Walter Konig. Risch, William Jay. 2014. “Only Rock’n’Roll? Rock Music, Hippies, and Urban Identities in Lviv and Wrocław, 1965–1980”. In Youth and Rock in the Soviet Bloc; Youth Cultures, Music, and the State in Russia and Eastern Europe, edited by William Jay Risch et al., 81–100. London: Lexington Books. Szczuka, Kazimiera. 2013. “Revolutionary Year 1974”. In Natalia LL Doing Gender, edited by Agnieszka Rayzacher and Dorota Jarecka, 45–52. Warsaw: Fundacja Lokal Sztuki/ Lokal_30. Teksty Natalii LL. 2004. Bielsko Biała: Galeria Bielska BWA. Toniak, Ewa and Marcin Wawrzyńczak. 2011. 3 Women: Maria Pinińska- Bereś, Natalia LL, Ewa Partum. Warsaw: Zachęta National Gallery of Art. Tracz, Bogusław. 2014. Hippiesi, kudłacze, chwasty: Hipisi w Polsce w Latach 1967–1975. Katowice and Krakow: Libron.

13 An Icon for the Aged Alice Neel’s Self-Portrait (1980) Pamela Allara

In this chapter, I argue that Alice Neel’s Self-Portrait (National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; Fig. 13.1) is an iconic image of womanhood redefined. Painted in 1980 when the artist was 80 years old, Self-Portrait images a naked elderly woman, a subject generally ignored in art history. In the 1970s and 1980s, feminist artists and critics were challenging the traditional presentation of the female nude, and as with her contemporaries, the portrait looks frankly at the women’s body. However, feminist artists at the time were examining the subject of the aging female body. Neel’s portrait was surprising, indeed shocking when first exhibited, and I will argue that the self-portrait broke barriers others were reluctant to address. In her depiction, Neel avoids the two metaphors commonly found in images of the aged female body: the aging body as either repulsive or grotesque, or as a memento mori, a fearsome reminder of death. Because the portrait’s date, 1980, also coincided with the beginnings of the anti-feminist backlash in the United States that continues to the present day, Neel’s Self-Portrait continues to be relevant, and may justly be considered an inspiration for contemporary gender politics, retaining its status as an icon.

Neel’s Self-Portrait in Context Whatever the painting’s potential contemporary relevance may be, Neel referred to herself in 1980 as a “dinosaur”, an artist working in a realist style in the medium of painting, both considered retrograde at the time. Yet, the “dinosaur” remained a rebel, and in creating this self-portrait, Neel broke a number of taboos. Although feminist artists had begun to insist on their right to represent their bodies without idealisation, nonetheless in 1971 public intellectual Susan Sontag wrote that female aging is a process of “becoming obscene … That old women are repulsive is one of the most profound esthetic and erotic feelings in our culture” (Sontag 1972, 37). Still today, media images of elderly women are virtually absent from the public realm, and the idea that embodied elderly women should also retreat into invisibility operates broadly, at least on a subconscious level. Neel’s self-representation refutes the notion that elderly women should remain in the background, out of sight, never displaying their disgusting naked flesh publicly. Instead, her body, reduced to a simple curved outline, is subordinate visually to her head and hands; indeed, her paintbrush establishes a clear line of demarcation between Neel’s intense expression, which projects a woman still creative and still actively working, and her less-than youthful flesh. By the time she painted Self-Portrait, Alice Neel herself could have been considered an icon. As the symbol of an important woman artist who had been ignored, even

Alice Neel’s Self-Portrait (1980) 211

Figure 13.1  A lice Neel, Self-Portrait, 1980, oil on canvas, 101.9 × 153 cm, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution. Source:  © Estate of Alice Neel, 1980.

212  Pamela Allara

Figure 13.2  A lice Neel, Linda Nochlin and Daisy, 1973, oil on canvas, 141 × 111.8 cm. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Seth K. Sweetser Fund. Source: © Estate of Alice Neel.

vilified, by male art historians and critics, Neel was championed by a generation of women art historians and critics determined to change the canon. During the decade of the 1970s, while aging and in increasingly poor health, Neel lectured and travelled widely and was included in numerous group and one-person exhibitions. She reciprocated this critical regard by painting a number of prominent feminist activists, including a brilliant portrait in 1973 of art historian Linda Nochlin, whose article “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” was foundational for feminist art and theory (Nochlin 1971, 22–39, 67–71, Fig. 13.2). Nonetheless, although her art was now recognised and applauded by the art world, and the artist had become something of a media celebrity, the work remained confined to exhibitions curated by or involving women – the alternative feminist network. In 1976, an especially busy year for Neel, critic Lucy Lippard expressed concern that women artists might become “satisfied with the newfound luxury of greater representation in museums and galleries (though not yet in teaching and art history books) rather than continuing to explore the alternatives” (Lippard 1976, 14). For Neel, these alternatives did not involve alternative art spaces for women artists exclusively; rather, she sought alternative perspectives, because she was of the opinion that second-wave feminism lacked the ability to “see politically and appraise the Third World” (Dimonsteen 1979, 258). Writing in the Communist newspaper,

Alice Neel’s Self-Portrait (1980) 213 the Daily World, a year before painting her portrait, Neel argued that true liberation required a fundamental change in economic and social structures: “[W]omen’s real liberation cannot occur without some change in the social organization … Property relations which reduce everything to the status of ‘things’ and ‘objects’ have also reduced women to the status of ‘sexual objects’” (Neel 1971, n.p.). Neel’s argument gained validity as second-wave feminism gave way to third-wave/ postcolonial feminism. Ironically, that crucial shift in feminist thought occurred during the decade of the 1980s, the same era as the backlash against feminism more broadly. At the very moment when the global perspective of third-wave feminism undermined the concept of an essential femininity, the backlash was concerned with reviving outmoded definitions of the feminine psyche and of women’s roles. In her early analysis of this era, Backlash (1991), Susan Faludi elucidated the Ronald Reagan administration’s efforts to “turn the clock back to 1954”. For example, “Reagan spokeswoman Faith Whittlesey declared feminism a ‘straitjacket’ for women, in the White House’s only policy speech on the status of the American female population – entitled ‘Radical Feminism in Retreat’” (Faludi 1991/2006, 4). In 1992, at the height of the backlash, art historian Amelia Jones wrote, We live in a particular cultural and historical moment of highly charged sexual politics. Within the last year supporters of women’s rights have seen a number of disturbing public displays of these politics: the ridicule of a well-educated African-American female lawyer by an all-white, male Senate commission for her exposure of sexual harassment by an African American male candidate for the Supreme Court … We have seen women professionals, both fictional and actual, become targets for reactionary rhetoric about “family values” and the “cultural elite”. And we have become aware that freedom of choice for women is hanging by a judicial thread … (Jones 1992, 10–15) Even decades later, the #MeToo movement from 2017, which exposed the existence of widespread sexual harassment in the workplace, had succumbed to a strong backlash by 2019 (Harvard Business Review 2019). As Neel’s daughter-inlaw, Ginny Neel, has recently observed: “Now, in this culturally fraught historical moment, when tolerance is threatened, stereotypes are resurgent, and lying is rampant, it is particularly timely to look at what Alice Neel gave herself room to represent” (Neel 2019, 8). During this reactionary backlash era, masculinist modes of criticism surfaced as “post-feminist” analysis. By example of what I am terming “masculinist modes of criticism”, I quote art historian Jeremy Lewison (2016, 206) in an important monograph on Neel: If accusations of brutality are sometimes applied to her depictions of other people, none could be more candid than this painting, which anticipates Lucian Freud’s naked self-portrait, holding a brush, by thirteen years … Neel’s body is ravaged by time, birthing children and indulgent eating habits. Her feet had for many years given her problems and she is not concerned to hide them … Neel’s quiet self-portrait is eloquent on the nature of old age and femaleness and suggests that the grotesque distortion of the body during the course of the life cycle

214  Pamela Allara is nothing but normal and not to be ignored. In her acceptance of old age and her drawing attention to its consequent malfunctions she sits alongside Picasso for whom this was a major theme. Although Lewison acknowledges that Neel’s painting is about old age as the normal part of the life cycle, he argues that the portrait is about the “grotesque distortion” of the aged female body (due not simply to aging but to “indulgent eating habits”). It is difficult to imagine that the phrase “grotesque distortion” would ever be applied to a portrait of an elderly male, including the Lucien Freud self-portrait he cites. His “masculinist analysis” ignores the strong will and artistic dedication resonating from this painting, by arguing that the image’s primary content concerns the passive acceptance of the aging body’s distortion as normal. By contrast, I would counter that the portrait is about the fact that artistic creativity does not necessarily decline with the body, but rather continues despite it. Self-Portrait is a celebration of the aging artist’s continuing ability to break boundaries.

Neel and the Portrait Nude The Self-Portrait is indicative of one of Neel’s major contributions to the history of American art: her reinterpretation of the representation of the human body, in particular, the human body when naked. Pushing past centuries of depictions of the idealised nude, Neel presented the body as integral to the subject’s individual identity. The portrait nude appeared early in her career, and remained a staple until her death. Although she cannot be credited with inventing it, given its immediate modernist precedents in German Expressionism, she can be credited with stripping from the body all references to the artist’s model. Between 1930 and 1980, Neel observed the changing definitions of sexuality and gender identity as they were inscribed on the naked bodies of her sitters, the majority of whom were female. For instance, in an early work, Ethel Ashton (1930; Fig. 13.3), she places her friend from student days at the Philadelphia School of Design for Women so close to the canvas’s front plane that she seems to enter the viewer’s space. At that uncomfortably close range, we confront not only the folds of her overweight flesh, but the look of shame and vulnerability that reflects her emotional relationship to her body and to interpersonal relationships as well. Ashton’s body is part and parcel of her psychological baggage, in stark contrast to Neel’s later approach to her own elderly body. Created a few years before Sigmund Freud’s essay “Femininity” was published in 1933, it can be considered to presage his argument that the woman’s lack of a penis condemns her to neurosis. As Kate Millet (1969/1990, 179) would argue in 1969 in her classic feminist tract, Sexual Politics, Coming as it did, at the peak of the sexual revolution, Freud’s theory of “penis envy” is in fact a superbly timed accusation, enabling a masculine sentiment to take the offensive again … The whole weight of responsibility, and even of guilt, is now placed on any woman unwilling to “stay in her place”. Of course, by the era of second-wave feminism, women were adamantly refusing to stay in their place. Women’s Liberation, as it was called in the 1970s, eschewed traditional roles. During this key decade of feminist activism, Neel painted a series

Alice Neel’s Self-Portrait (1980) 215

Figure 13.3  A lice Neel, Ethel Ashton, 1930. Oil on canvas, 61 × 55.9 cm. Tate Gallery, London. Presented by the American Fund for the Tate Gallery. Source:  Courtesy of Hartley and Richard Neel, the artist’s sons, 2012. © Estate of Alice Neel.

of seven pregnant nudes, a subject virtually absent in modern art. Here was a subject designed to demonstrate Freud’s theory that anatomy was destiny, the very theory that second-wave feminism was determined to discard as they escaped the kitchen and the nursery. As a reviewer of Susan Brownmiller’s Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape (Anon 1975) wrote in 1975, “Pregnability … has been the basis of female identity, the limit of freedom, the futility of education, the denial of growth” (Rich 1976, 14). Having endured her own intense conflicts between making art and raising children, creativity and procreativity, Neel was curious to see how the next generation was responding: no doubt this was the reason she included Nochlin’s daughter Daisy in her portrait of the iconic art historian. One of her subjects, in 1971, was her daughter-in-law Nancy, who for many years served as Neel’s personal secretary and administrator. Reclining on a couch too cursorily drawn to appear supportive, Nancy is solely a Pregnant Woman, as the title indicates (Fig. 13.4). Neel uses the device of visually separating the subject’s head from her body, as she would do subsequently in her own self-portrait, but in this instance, the rivulet of hair and her upraised arm highlight her expression of discomfort, indeed her very alienation from her distended, discoloured body. Whatever Nancy Neel’s personal thoughts may have been about the upcoming birth of her twin daughters, the painting is the representation of the very fears expressed by feminist writers. As Adrienne Rich wrote in 1976, cultural and institutional notions of pregnancy have “alienated women from our bodies by incarcerating us in them”

216  Pamela Allara

Figure 13.4  A lice Neel, Pregnant Woman, 1971, oil on canvas, 101.9 × 153 cm. Private collection, Singapore. Source:  © Estate of Alice Neel.

(Rich 1976, 13). Pregnancy was truly a sore subject in that era. However, shortly, with in vitro fertilisation and surrogacy, pregnancy would occur without sex, through medical technology. Neel’s pregnant nudes are thus the last of their breeders, the last moment in history when from conception to parturition the process was identified with the woman. With the insight and even prescience she brought to her portraiture, Neel was able to represent the changing meanings of “woman” as their bodies became indicators of shifting cultural norms. Given the prominence of the portrait nude in Neel’s oeuvre, one might expect that a series of elderly nudes would be included. However, this unfortunately is not the case. Most of her portraits of elderly subjects were painted when she herself was old, and in them she does explore the vicissitudes of aging, whether it be her depiction of The Soyer Brothers (1973), as introverted and rather frail, sitting on a daybed like timid mice, or by contrast, the wrinkled but still vivacious critic Meyer Schapiro (1983), who radiates intellectual energy. Both came to prominence during the Social Realist movement in the 1930s, but the Soyers are presented as historical relics, whereas Schapiro appears open and alert to the new. Given the fact that the Soyer brothers both taught from the nude model and used it as a frequent subject (Raphael even painted a pregnant nude in 1952), one would think that they would have been willing to remove their clothes for their long-time friend, but we have no way of knowing whether Neel even asked. The Self-Portrait must thus be considered unique in her oeuvre.

Alice Neel’s Self-Portrait (1980) 217

Representing the Aged Body Coupled with the fact that Neel eschewed self-portraits altogether after her early works from the 1920s, the Self-Portrait must be recognised as a radical departure, one that retains the ability to surprise even today. Today’s artists have no problem with depicting naked bodies, their own or others, but even now aged bodies remain few. The fact remains that because Western culture “provides us with almost no images of the aging body unclothed … older people … experience their bodies in the context of a profound cultural silence” (Twigg 2000, 46). Whereas it may seem strange that silence has been shared by feminist artists, art historian Kathleen Woodward has argued that “Ageism pervades our culture; and feminism in all its forms … has not been exempt from it” (Woodward 2006, 162). From advertising’s beginnings nearly a century ago, one of its major messages has been that to be socially accepted, women must look young and beautiful; devoting time to that effort has kept many women from more activist pursuits. In addition to Neel, one of the few artists to consistently confront this silence is Joan Semmel, who has been painting frank nude self-portraits since the 1970s and continues to depict what she calls “the inevitability of aging” with wit and verve at age 86. In the 1970s, Semmel was active in the feminist movement, and like Neel, was considered something of a rebel, as she continued to paint her nude body when the subject was “verboten”. Her painting, Aura (2016: Fig. 13.5), could almost be seen

Figure 13.5  Joan Semmel, Aura, 2016, oil on canvas, 72 × 60 ″, 182.88 × 152.4 cm. Source:  Courtesy Alexander Gray Associates Gallery, New York.

218  Pamela Allara as an homage to Neel in its frank depiction of her aging body. Although the vigorous pinks and oranges of her flesh suggest continuing vitality, the yellow outline of her body that overlays the vigorous figure also alludes to mortality and the acceptance of its inevitability. Yet Semmel’s seated self-portrait is dramatically different from Neel’s because she deliberately obscures her face with her arm. Her subject is not about the psychology of the sitter, but rather embodied identity: I assume that may be why she presented the rear of a leaping animal over her face in the overlay. In an interview in 2016 Semmel stated that women’s “self-hatred” of their bodies continues. Unfortunately, masculinist discourse lingers on as well. In a review of Semmel’s 2016 exhibition in New York city, critic Charles R Riley echoed Lewison’s analysis of Neel’s self-portrait when he wrote: Semmel does not try to defy or hide the effects of gravity or the creeping metamorphoses of a body in its 80s … When wrinkles and blemishes take on this level of heroic significance we are in the region of Rembrandt or Freud. (Riley II, 2016, n.p.) After all, Semmel argues, “… the biggest thing in life is the fear of death” (Haynes 2016, n.p.). Neel would not have disagreed with that statement, as she directly faces her own mortality in Self-Portrait. American society is at a moment when generational change is resulting in cultural strain. According to the US Population website, in 2016, there were 49.2 million people over 65 in the United States, or 1 in 7 Americans. This large generation of “baby boomers” has resulted in a vast proliferation of books on aging, with attention to both physical and mental health. As a 2019 article in The New Yorker magazine observed: “The library on old age has grown so voluminous that the fifty million Americans over the age of sixty-five could spend the rest of their lives reading such books …” (Krystal 2019, online). Increasing numbers of the elderly have either entered nursing homes, or are confined to home, with children or health care professionals as caretakers. But, as can be seen from the 2020 US Presidential candidates, the older generation is slow to yield power. “Ok, Boomer”, is the phrase the millennial generation uses to dismiss old canards expressed by the former, to let them know their supposed wisdom is no longer relevant to the present era. I want to argue that what is a normal generational conflict is also indicative of something deeper: an ageism still operative in a culture that has long been obsessed with youth, resulting in an urge to put the old out of sight despite their prevalence. A recent example from the Opinion page of The New York Times in November, 2019 provides some support for my argument. Responding to a photograph of the actor Keanu Reeves with an elegant date, Alexandra Grant, who happened to have grey hair, Ali Druker (2019), wrote an op-ed entitled “If Keanu Reeve’s Date Can Embrace Looking her Age, I Can too”: I’d love to stop thinking of the discussion around women and getting older as a transgression … I desperately want to see wrinkles and gray hair as an objectively good thing (look at these lovely markings of your full life on this planet) … but the truth is I don’t yet … I’m not afraid of getting older. I’m afraid of looking older … Middle-aged and older women, long portrayed as sexless and relegated to wise, maternal roles, are slowly but surely beginning to gain some pop culture

Alice Neel’s Self-Portrait (1980) 219 representation … For a time-tested public figure like Mr. Reeves to proudly stand there, beaming, with a woman who appears not to be in a battle against time sends a message to the rest of us … It says you can be both desirable and look exactly your age. One photograph of an exceptionally attractive woman who happens to have grey hair is hardly capable of providing the writer’s wished-for positive media images of aging women. In fact, there continues to be very little room in contemporary media culture for the aging or aged female.

Representing the Female Artist The continuing prevalence of outdated notions of women’s aging is but one example of the retreat of feminism in contemporary culture. It is discouraging but emblematic that an article by Rachel Cusk titled “Can a woman artist ever be just an artist?” was published in The New York Times magazine on 7 November 2019. The headline continued as follows: Can a woman artist – however virtuosic and talented, however disciplined – ever attain a fundamental freedom from the fact of her own womanhood? Must the politics of femininity invariably be accounted for, whether by determinedly ignoring them or by deliberately confronting them? The latter is a fateful choice that can shape an artist’s life and work; but does the former – the avoidance of oneself as a female subject – inevitably compromise the expressive act? The following analysis by journalist Cusk of the careers of two contemporary painters, Cecily Brown and Celia Paul, emphasised their dependence on their male mentors and the conflicts motherhood imposed on their creative output. Cusk then arrived at her reactionary conclusion: “Motherhood is an inextricable aspect of female being … if you can do both, be both, then surely the possibility of formulating a grander female vision and voice becomes graspable” (Cusk 2019). That this article would appear in The New York Times in 2019 demonstrates just how little progress has been made on the issue of the conflict between career and motherhood since it was first raised in the 1970s. As Ms. Cusk’s article unfortunately makes clear, women who came of age during the backlash have become part of it. The writer can only postulate that a “female vision” might be possible at some future time, instead of simply finding existing examples of that vision that were right before her eyes. Despite raising two sons as a single mother in very reduced circumstances, Neel grasped her “female vision and voice” through the very creative drive evidenced in her Self-Portrait. Neel’s Self-Portrait explicitly references painting by Old Masters, as the pose is clearly based on Rembrandt’s well-known etching of a naked older woman, Woman Seated on a Mound (1631). In doing so, Neel was making the case for her inclusion in what has been a male-dominated history of art. Within Western art history, a frequent subject has been the self-portrait of the artist in his studio. The studio, a separate space for creative activity alone, marks the artist as a sole creative actor, as opposed to a “mere” artisan. As Brenda Schmahmann has written in her article, “Cast in a Different Light: Women and the ‘Artist’s Studio’ Theme in George Segal’s Sculpture” (Schmahmann 1999/2000), by the 19th century, the artist’s studio had

220  Pamela Allara come to be seen as “… an isolated and mysterious realm in which he enjoys a supreme and seemingly God-given authority” (Schmahmann 1999/2000, 29). A woman who entered that space did so only as a model, an object to be shaped by the artist’s vision. And to provide the necessary inspiration to the artist, that model had to be young and beautiful. As Schmahmann concludes: The system of regulatory bodies in art demands the use of a youthful model: an aged body is not simply out of keeping with long-standing definitions of female beauty, but it is liable to become permeable and flaccid, to resist being subject to a system of order and containment. (Schmahmann 1999/2000, 40) By serving as her own artist’s model, Neel collapses that trope. Of equal importance is the fact that she is seated in one of the domestic chairs she frequently used to pose her sitters. For like so many women artists of her generation, Neel never was in a financial position to rent or buy a studio of her own, but rather painted in the living room of her various apartments in New York City. In all but a few of her portraits, the space in which her sitters are located is indeterminate; this device focuses attention on the sitters of course, but it also avoids revealing the necessity of using her domestic space as a studio. In her Self-Portrait, the seat floats on a schematically indicated “floor”, arbitrarily coloured half ochre and half green. While the physical location is left to the viewer’s imagination, the boldly striped armchair serves as a sort of flag to signal that this is an arena of creative activity. No doubt that is why she chose this particular chair to use in her portraits of fellow older women artists just gaining recognition: Faith Ringgold (1978) and Sari Dienes (1976). Neel has made the armchair more capacious than in her other portraits in order to accommodate the ¾ pose of her body and to ensure that her image commands the pictorial space both vertically and horizontally. The chair’s back pushes against the left edge of the canvas, while Neel’s head presses against the upper edge: this is not an artist who can be “subject to a system of … containment”. Rather, this is an artist who has earned her stripes!

Relevance to Women Artists Because until recently so many women artists failed to be recognised for their achievements until they were aged, the Self-Portrait is not simply a monument to Neel’s own oeuvre, but to the many women artists who, like herself, had to work in obscurity for many years. In addition to Semmel, a current example is African American artist Faith Ringgold, whose portrait is cited above, and whose painting Race Riot has recently been placed adjacent to Picasso’s iconic Demoiselles D’Avignon (1907) in the 2019 re-installation of the Museum of Modern Art’s permanent collection in New York City. As Ringgold observed when interviewed about the placement of her work, I am fully aware of the attention I am now getting in the art world, and grateful … But I am also aware that it has taken a very long time, for I had to live to be 89 years old to see it happen. (Cited in Naveri 2019)

Alice Neel’s Self-Portrait (1980) 221 The careers of both Neel and Ringgold exemplify the argument made by Simone de Beauvoir at the beginning of the 1970s. In The Coming of Age, her account of the miseries of old age, especially for women, de Beauvoir nonetheless finds an exception in elderly persons whose world remains “inhabited by projects: then busy and useful, he escapes both from boredom and from decay” (de Beauvoir 1973, 733). And they fortunately live long enough to enjoy public acknowledgement of a lifetime of work. Alice Neel’s Self-Portrait is now displayed prominently in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian Institution and is reproduced in almost every publication on Neel. Clearly, the museum and academic worlds consider the painting to have contemporary relevance, or at the very least to be a stimulus to conversation among members of the “backlash generation”. And, certainly, it can provide a precedent or prototype for global feminist artists working today.

Conclusion Alice Neel’s Self-Portrait is a challenge to the viewer to provide recognition, even admiration, for the aging female. In addition, by presenting herself to us so unsparingly, she brings us into confrontation with our embodied selves. Now that interpersonal exchanges frequently occur online rather than face-to-face, and images proliferate and metamorphose electronically without a connection to a body, identity has become ever more mobile and mutable. In her last important work, Neel chose not to create a work that depicts a portrait bust, as is seen so frequently in the genre, but to include, however schematically, her entire body. Her message to those who modify or create new identities digitally is that in the end we are bound to our bodies, and that fact must be acknowledged before we can understand who we are. Confident, unapologetic, Alice Neel’s iconic image confronts the inevitable end of her own life, while simultaneously assuring her legacy.

References Allara, Pamela. 1998/2000. Pictures of People: Alice Neel’s American Portrait Gallery. Lebanon, New Hampshire: University Press of New England. Anon. 1975. “Rape Has Many Forms: Review of Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will”.The Spokeswoman, vol. 6, no. 5, November 15, 1975. Cited in Rich, Andrienne. 1976. Of Woman Born. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 14. Anon. 2019. “Idea Watch: Gender: The #MeToo Backlash,” Harvard Business Review, September/October, n.p. Cusk, Rachel. 2019. “Can a Woman Who Is an Artist Ever Be Just an Artist?” The New York Times, November 7. Accessed online 7 November 2019. Dimonsteen, Barbara Lee. 1979. Inside New York’s Artworld. New York: Rizzoli. de Beauvoir, Simone. 1973. The Coming of Age. New York: Warner Paperback Library. Druker, Ali. 2019. “If Keanu Reeve’s Date Can Embrace Looking Her Age, I Can Too,”Opinion page, The New York Times, 6 November. Faludi, Susan. 1991/2006. Backlash. New York: Crown Publishing Group. Haynes, Clarity. 2016. “‘You have to get past the fear’: Joan Semmel on Painting Her Aging, Nude Body,” Hyperalleric.com, 9 September, n.p. Jones, Amelia. 1992. “Feminism, Incorporated: Reading ‘Post-Feminimsm’ in an AntiFeminist Age”. Afterimage 20 (3), (December), 10–15. Krystal, Arthur. 2019. “Why We Can’t Tell the Truth About Aging,” The New Yorker, November 4. Accessed online 18 December 2019.

222  Pamela Allara Lewison, Jeremy. 2016. “Alice Neel, Painter of Modern Life, an Introduction”. In Alice Neel Painter of Modern Life, edited by Jeremy Lewison, 10–13. Helsinki: Finnish National Gallery. Lippard, Lucy. 1976. From the Center: Feminist Essays on Women’s Art. New York: Plume Press. Millet, Kate. 1969/1990. Sexual Politics. New York: Columbia University Press. Nayeri, Farah. 2019. “ARTS/For Faith Ringgold, The Past Is Present. The Harlem Artist Will Have Works from the 1970s and 1990s on View at Art Basel Miami Beach,” The New York Times, 3 December. Neel, Alice. 1971. “Statement,” The Daily World, 17 April. Neel, Ginny. 2019. “Introduction”. In Alice Neel: Freedom, edited by Helen Molesworth. New York: David Zwirner Press. Nochlin, Linda. 1971. “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” ARTnews, vol. 69 (January), 22–39, 67–71. Rich, Adreinne. 1976/1986. Of Woman Born. Motherhood as Experience and Institution. New York: W.W. Norton & Co. Riley, Charles A. II. 2016. “Joan Semmel’s Self-Portraits Offer a Vibrant Affirmation of Aging,” Hamptons ArtHub.com, 29 November, n.p. Schmahmann, Brenda. 1999/2000. “Cast in a Different Light: Women and the ‘Artist’s Studio’ Theme in George Segal’s Sculpture”. Woman’s Art Journal, vol. 20, no. 2 (Fall/Winter), 29, 32–33, 34–41. Sontag, Susan. 1972. “The Double Standard of Aging,” Saturday Review (23 September 1972), 37. Cited in Joanna Freuh, “Visible Difference: Women Artists and Aging”, in Joanna Freuh, Cassandra L. Langer and Arlene Raven, eds. 1994. New Feminist Criticism: Art/Identity/Action. New York; Westview Press: ICON editions. Twigg, J. 2000. Bathing: The Body and Community Care. London: Routledge. Woodward, Kathleen. 2006. “Performing Age/Performing Gender”. NWSA Journal 18 (1).

14 Phaptawan Suwannakudt’s Akojorn (1995) Connecting Women Yvonne Low TAKING its cue from Cornelia Butler’s ground-breaking exhibition Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution (2007), this essay is a conscious attempt to invoke feminism’s “legacy of inclusivity” to consider other narratives of feminisms beyond the received canon of feminist art (Butler 2007, 15). While an exhibition such as Wack! might seem like a timely self-reflexive exercise to rethink feminism’s impact in the visual arts and art historical discourses of Europe and America, “feminist art” as a category of visual practice is still treated with much ambivalence in Southeast Asia and has yet to garner the same degree of theorisation and recognition. Postcolonial studies have criticised the term “feminism” for speaking from the perspective of a middle-class, educated, white woman. Despite later assertions of alternative viewpoints that more accurately express a collective notion of solidarity with one’s culture and race as well as one’s gender within the discourse of Western feminism, non-Western women have continued to re-assert their positions which they felt were marginalised by Western feminism. Within Asia, the recent increase in women artist collectives as designated contemporary art spaces exclusive to women which had grown in tandem with women associations that were not necessarily related to art, revealed significant changes in the social positions of women from urban spaces (Low 2015a, 4–6). In Bangkok, Thailand, the exhibition Tradisexion that took place in 1995 marked the first event in which women artists worked together on women’s issues, sparking the development of a transnational women’s artistic network, Womanifesto. Such collectives which may be inspired by feminist thinking were established not to promote feminist art per se but to provide women artists, whose participation in academies and artists’ societies appeared limited, with support and encouragement. These sex-segregated collectives grew out from a fundamental desire to address issues of inequality. In 2007, the same year that Butler sought to revise canonical narratives of feminist art, Indonesia saw the staging of another ground-breaking exhibition entitled Intimate distance: Exploring traces of feminism in Indonesian Contemporary Art. This was ground-breaking for a much different reason. Held at the National Gallery of Jakarta, the exhibition examined traces of feminism in women’s art, marking what might well be the first attempt to discuss feminist strategies in Indonesian art. The three curators further used the occasion to launch their jointly authored book, Indonesian Women Artists: The Curtains Open, which was very much in line with other established “recovery” efforts (Bianpoen et al. 2007).1 As the first major survey on the lives and works of purportedly Indonesia’s “most prominent women artists from the early twentieth century to the present”, Indonesian Women Artists was an unapologetic celebration of women’s art (Goeltom 2007, 6). It marked the

224  Yvonne Low first attempt to map the issues that are related to creative development and femininities in “Indonesia’s patriarchal art world”, a subject that was later developed into a cogent doctoral study by one of the curators, Wulan Dirgantoro. She subsequently went on a decade later to publish what was to be the first major monograph on Indonesian feminist art, advancing a field that has yet to gain ground in the region. Feminisms and Contemporary Art in Indonesia: Defining Experiences (Dirgantoro 2017) saw the author stake her feminist position as the basis on which her readings of the works by Indonesian women artists were made, regardless of whether the artists themselves necessarily intended the work to be “feminist” as such. In Indonesia, women artists felt “extremely uncomfortable” when associated with the “F word” (read: Feminism), arguing that feminism was a “Western ideology” that was incompatible with Indonesian social and religious norms (Bianpoen et al. 2007, 22–33). As Kumari Jayawardena has shown, words like “feminism” and “feminist” have become emotive words that often evoke hostile reactions due to misconceptions about their origins and significations. Concepts of feminism were viewed in Third World countries by political conservatives as products of a “decadent” Western capitalism and as non-indigenous to Asia or Africa (Jayawardena 1986, 2). This discrepancy in “feminist” thinking is further illuminated by the extensive ethnographic accounts of anthropologists such as Aihwa Ong and Michael Peletz (1995) who have through the use of case studies in Malay and Indonesian societies convincingly showed the complexity of how patriarchy operated across the “official” and “practical” levels. The statuses of women in such instances are usually ambiguous because at the practical level, women are not necessarily disempowered in ways that the official ideology purportedly insists. It is in the light of such developments informing feminist discourses in Southeast Asia that such texts and exhibitions on women artists and feminist art as mentioned here could be viewed as ground-breaking in advancing a political position for women artists at the official level. They were seminal examples of the many sporadic feminist art developments that took place in the region especially in the last three decades – all variously ground-breaking in how they sought to counter the existing canon in the respective country or to unsettle the status quo in their aims in spite of various socio-political and culturally specific challenges. It is beyond the scope of this chapter to provide an overview of feminist art in Southeast Asia – it remains a narrative yet to be written. Rather, I have highlighted the seemingly belatedness of feminist discourses in the region compared to the West as a point of departure for the following investigation of the making and showing of feminist art that had emerged out from the region in the last three decades. Marsha Meskimmon (2007, 322–335) reminds us to re-think the narrow view that feminism in art has emanated from European and American centres to other parts of the world through a kind of global “ripple effect”. Her insights reveal that, however compelling a view this might be to account for the belatedness in feminist discourses in artistic practices of Southeast Asian countries, it would be misleading to attribute entirely the onslaught of critical theory (“Western/post-structuralist”) in the nineties as the point of beginning at which feminist artists first enter the scene (Dirgantoro 2017). Feminism in Southeast Asian art, as various scholars, myself included, have shown, has a much longer, and understandably complex history of struggle and materialisation that ran parallel to rather than merely modelled after Western feminist art developments and movements. 2 Thus the following account of the “feminist art” produced

Phaptawan Suwannakudt’s Akojorn (1995) 225 as a result of a woman’s gathering, later entitled Womanifesto, under the programme of an “art exchange” – as the co-founder, Varsha Nair puts it – needs to be viewed in the context of this larger historical narrative.3 Focusing on the contemporary practice of Phaptawan Suwannakudt, I argue that Womanifesto, as an artist-initiated platform for women, has enabled the artist to come to terms with her own oppression as a female; it has also critically facilitated her coming out to become a feminist Thai artist on her own terms, enabling her and others to achieve some degree of self-determination within patriarchal societies and male-dominated systems. Her formal entry into the contemporary art world took place in the nineties, a period that witnessed a reconstitution of art’s meaning, and the introduction of so-called “new” concept-based and performance-based practices.4 The iconic status of the feminist art by her and others, produced there in Bangkok and then in the nineties, could be traced back to this particular moment of women’s revolution that quite simply but crucially offered women artists a platform of their own.

Making Feminist Art: A Public Act Phaptawan Suwannakudt (2013) once remarked, “Womanifesto does not have a permanent office, nor is it a formal organization, but it has provided mental space for many of the women artists involved, particularly for me”. How Womanifesto came about has been told, and re-told, by a number of its founding and associated members.5 Yet its place in art history within the region remained fraught. Formalised in the late nineties by a small group of dedicated women artists, Womanifesto is a Bangkok-based women’s art collective that initiated a number of feminist exhibitions and projects that saw participation from international artists; it stayed active throughout the years till 2008 before it took a brief hiatus when “life took over” (Interview 2019). Womanifesto’s recent re-appearance in the form of two archival exhibition projects in 2019 has prompted urgent reassessment of its role in contributing to global and regional contemporary artistic developments (Low et al. 2020). Its history was overshadowed by a contemporary event-based association, Chiang Mai Social Installation (CMSI) (1992–1997) which on the other hand received much more critical and scholarly attention in comparison.6 The events organised by CMSI and Womanifesto are being gradually recognised as the precursor to biennales and art events in Thailand but because the activities they supported were often ephemeral in form, retrospective research conducted depended heavily on the state of documentation including especially oral historical accounts which presented its own set of challenges. Unsurprisingly, much of the history of that period are contained in the memories of the participants who bore witness to the events; they include artists, collaborators, curators, writers and the many audience members. Occasions that enabled the reminiscing of Womanifesto’s gatherings during the “Gender in Southeast Asian Art Histories” seminar and conferences held in Bangkok and Sydney in 2019 served as critical reminders of the gaps in art history, and how women’s historical contributions and feminist history are clearly at stake.7 Yet, Flaudette May Datuin who gave a keynote lecture, “The wind in the Trees: From Tradisexion to Womanifesto” (Datuin 2019), at the latter event, cautioned against harbouring total control over the process of documentation, asserting that for her it was liberating to be able to interact freely

226  Yvonne Low with her artists, relying solely on memory and without the use of recording tools. To resist documenting conversations was to refuse to succumb to the idea of the totalities of identity and to refuse to submit to the hierarchical relations that underpin such processes upheld in academia – a point May (as she would rather we call her) raised self-reflexively in her reflection on her lifelong work as a female academic and feminist art historian. May was among the small cohort of scholars in the region to have done so-called “spade work” needed to recover “forgotten” women artists, writing the first monograph on Filipina women artists, Home, body, memory: Filipina artists in the visual arts, 19th century to the present (Datuin 2002) and organising the first region-specific, women-centred conference in the visual arts, “Women Imaging Women” (1999). Her book was both historical as well as thematic in the way she framed her discussion of Filipina women artists, where she examined their role and place in the context of a male-centric/phallocentric art history in the Philippines. There, she argues for a re-framing of semiotics and materialist feminist theory within the feminine tropes of “Home”, “Body” and “Memory” which she identifies as the theoretical categories through which the feminine is given material form. Significantly, she credited her formative work conducted on women artists and feminist art history to a personal story of a seminal moment in 1995, when she had encountered Phaptawan Suwannakudt’s iconic piece, Akojorn (in English, No-Go Zone), at the Tradisexion exhibition that eventually led to the formal founding and development of Womanifesto. She wrote: Phaptawan’s work also holds a more personal significance for me. It was during that opening in 1995 when I first met her; while speaking with Phaptawan, right there under the sarong clothesline, that the idea of researching and documenting the lives and works of women artists in Southeast Asia occurred for me for the first time. By telling me about her life and her works that afternoon, Phaptawan unknowingly nudged me into taking the next step towards a more vigorous engagement with women artists and their practice. (Datuin 2000, 16–31) Of course, Phaptawan was never to have known that her work was to have such profound impact on any individual least of all for it to later spark an entire research project and the beginning of a field of study on gender in Southeast Asian art history. Nor was she to know that she was going to be part of a larger transnational community of feminist thinkers and practitioners. The work that had such a strong effect on May was in fact Phaptawan’s first “contemporary” piece of its kind outside of her area of training as a traditional temple muralist. An installation made up of several clotheslines held up with poles that hung her most private garments across the gallery, provocative and indignant, was nothing like the paintings narrating the Jataka tales of the lives of the Buddha (Fig. 14.1). Her teenage years were spent under the apprenticeship of her father, Paiboon Suwannakudt (Tan Kudt), a renowned mural master who had revived this dead art, where she assisted his team of male painters on a range of tasks, from cleaning to painting; it was a position that was deemed exceptional in a patriarchal religious system which typically excluded women from ordination, or socially privileged positions such as that of a mural painter.

Phaptawan Suwannakudt’s Akojorn (1995) 227

Figure 14.1  Phaptawan Suwannakudt, Wat Tha Suthawat Angthong (detail), 1994. Medium: acrylic, gold leaves and tempera on wall. Source:  Photograph by Aroon Peampoonsopon.

As a child, she learned that her place and behaviour in society were in fact biologically determined. Reflecting on her childhood spent within the Sangha community, Suwannakudt (2013, 95–102) wrote: As a girl, I was not allowed to address monks directly. Women are not allowed to offer or take things directly from the hands of monks. …Without any other women in the temple, it was almost as if I had been singled out to be treated differently, while everyone else on the mural team moved and worked freely. Ironically, when her father passed away in 1982, halfway through a mural project for a prominent hotel, Phaptawan, then only 22 years old, inherited the prestigious position, and became one of the first female mural painters to lead an entire team of male painters (Suwannakudt 2013, 96). Throughout the eighties, Phaptawan worked as a professional muralist where her reputation attracted young students wishing to learn from her; however, she harboured desires to pursue other forms of artistic work. Her opportunity came when she befriended Nitaya Ue-areeworakul, an enterprising artist who ran her own art space, Studio Xang, which was frequented by artists from diverse circles (Suwannakudt 2019, 175–180). She then became acquainted with the organiser of Concrete House, an alternative art space and the founder of Empower, a non-governmental organization (NGO) supporting sex workers, which was temporarily housed there. It was these formative relationships among others that opened up her world to the wider contemporary art community and to the wider social world beyond the temple confines. Though she had participated regularly in

228  Yvonne Low group exhibitions for women’s charities and programmes, it was her participation together with five others as co-organiser of an all-women exhibition dedicated to women’s issues, at Concrete House to coincide with International Women’s Day, that cemented her practice as a contemporary feminist artist. The team comprised writers and artists who recognised that, as women, they faced a lack of support and shared the common view that a platform for women was needed. The title Tradisexion played with the words “dissect” and “tradition” to evoke the challenge against Thai traditions perceived to be the basis of female prejudices and discrimination. It was an exhibition that was independent of any model; its strong feminist messages conceived largely as a result of their own “experiences in life and work” (Suwannakudt 2019, 175–180). Indeed Akojorn (No-Go Zone) spoke of the deeply personal experiences of prejudices and discrimination that the artist has had to endure all her life. In the catalogue accompanying the exhibition, she explained that the pahtung (a tube-shaped cloth worn by women) is synonymous with the identity of Thai women; like the pahtung whose rightful place dictated by tradition was “at the back of the garden or behind the back door”, so too is the status of Thai women. She recalled: For men it is bad luck to go under the Pahtung line with or without a hung piece of garment on it. I had no choice but to comply when my male cousin refused to use the bathroom unless I had already removed my Pahtung left on the bathroom rail. (Suwannakudt 2007, 3–6) In yet another account relayed to May, the incident took place when she was a teenager, when she had her pahtung that was hanging out to dry in the common bathroom, thrown out of the window by one of the male staff. While the work itself was self-explanatory to any Thai person, it was not immediately evident to a foreigner. May soon learned from Phaptawan that the pahtung was associated with women’s menstrual blood and for this reason cannot be hung above a man’s head which is deemed the most sacred part of the body in Thai culture (Datuin 2000, 16–31). To hoist it up in the gallery across the entrance, under which every viewer had to walk in order to enter, was thus a clear act of defiance against tradition. Her fear, if not anxiety, was clearly expressed in the remark she later made about the import of the work “At Baan Duek [Concrete House] I held my breath each time a member of the audience entered the gallery” (Suwannakudt 2007, 3–6). It was, as she has proclaimed in the catalogue, intended to “provoke the audience into reacting” and to “invoke in people feelings towards the medium hung in front of them” (Suwannakudt 2019b, 181).8 This was as challenging to the artist as it was to the audience as she reflected on the gravity of the moment: Because women’s clothes are considered polluted, it was a social taboo for women to do this in a public space. Men, knowing this, tried to walk around to the back door of the gallery without crossing under the line. (Suwannakudt 2013, 95–102) Akojorn was never documented in any formal sense. There is no video of the work, just a sketch of it that the artist had made (Fig. 14.2) and a poorly printed blackand-white image of the work that was published in two local articles reviewing the

Phaptawan Suwannakudt’s Akojorn (1995) 229

Figure 14.2  Phaptawan Suwannakudt, Akojorn (No-Go Zone), sketch of installation, 1995, pencil on postcard-sized paper. Source:  Image supplied by the artist.

exhibition.9 As a site-specific installation, it needed to be experienced within the immediacy of the environment for it was a work that spoke directly to the Thai community; without the audience, the work would not be complete. As the artist herself had once remarked about the significance of the site and context, “To put up the washing line in a gallery in Sydney would be irrelevant and would indeed look ridiculous” (Suwannakudt 2007, 3–6). Instead, documentation of the work took form in other ways – such as in the manner of the artist’s reflective and introspective essays about it which embedded the work within a larger biographical history about her “coming out” story and becoming the feminist practitioner that she is today. It also took the form of eye-witness accounts as seen in the feminist interpretation and reading of the work by May, who argued that such representations of the feminine could be transformed into a form of dissident power and strength. Of the menstrual blood that is so closely associated with women’s uncontrolled physiological process, she wrote: The fluid, while constraining women’s practices, also represents a power destructive, polluting and morally degrading to men. This power does not give women social prestige or superiority … By re-coding her personal memory of oppression

230  Yvonne Low into an act of defiance and resistance, she transformed her sarong into a source of “feminine”, albeit illegitimate power and strength. (Datuin 2000, 16–31) This encounter, evocative of the most visceral of feelings, introspective and affective, went on to inspire an entire body of writing by May about women imaging women as a visual strategy in itself: … the strategy of imaging “themselves” (that is woman) whether in narratives or artworks, women artists are showing that imaging is not only about putting forward alternative images, and of freeing women from unidimensional and oppressive imageries as victims, nuestra senoras, mater dolorosas, whores, virgins, and goddesses. It is also about how women transform their homes, bodies and memories into forms that reinvest the technology and signifying systems of art with the power to prefigure new modes and conditions of seeing, feeling, thinking. (Datuin 2000, 16–31) It also marked the beginning of a friendship that May paid homage to in her 2019 keynote lecture in Sydney with Suwannakudt in the audience. It was a result of her friendship with Suwannakudt – a shared moment in 1995 when they were free to exchange their thoughts and views – that she had been able to create new knowledge and form critical feminist perspectives, a point that was raised within the larger context of how we “do” research in the digital age.

Staying Connected: Art after Akojorn For Phaptawan, Tradisexion marked the beginning and end of a chapter. The event became the catalyst for similar such exhibitions conceived and executed on women’s terms. Almost as if emboldened by the success of this inaugural effort, the three artists, Nitaya, Nopparat and Phaptawan, got started immediately with the planning for a second exhibition to follow. The name “Womanifesto” stuck, and the artist-organisers poured their energies into fundraising and planning for it, with the view that it was to be as inclusive as possible, extending the invitation to women artists from all across the world (Suwannakudt, 2019a). It was a good two years later, in 1997, that the event finally took place at Baan Chaophraya on modest support. By then, the original team had changed somewhat, with Phaptawan relocated to Sydney in 1996 to be with her partner, and Varsha Nair, who had just moved from Baroda, stepped up as co-organiser with Nitaya. This partnership blossomed into a long-lasting friendship that saw them collaborate with other artists on subsequent Womanifesto projects from 1997 to 2008. Though Womanifesto did not make explicit the conditions of women’s oppression in the Thai context, it did, however, adopt the use of strategic essentialism to justify giving women a unique platform to make and show art on their own terms. Describing Womanifesto as an “exciting playground”, Nair (2019, 147–173) explained that it was one in which they could “take the initiative as women and as artists, rather than being just passive players, to set up projects and make diverse creative processes and thinking visible”. Certainly, a platform like this was unprecedented at any institutional level in Thailand at that time where the role of the artist

Phaptawan Suwannakudt’s Akojorn (1995) 231 as the “source” for initiating and conceptualising the projects lay at the heart of the collective (Nair 2019). In assessing the impact that Womanifesto might have, this essay is less interested in the grand notions of momentous contribution that have traditionally earned artists the title of greatness. Instead, it seeks to explore how a platform such as this has at a more personal and agential level, been crucial for the formulation and development of feminisms for the individual artists and artist-organisers. Indeed, the formation of Womanifesto, like other women-centred networks, has been crucial for women artists to come to terms with the nature of their oppression. As feminist historian, Gerda Lerner (1993, 279), has shown, sex-segregated social space became the terrain in which “women could confirm their own ideas and test them against the knowledge and experience of other women”, and in so doing help “women to advance from a simple analysis of their condition to the level of theory formation”. Its first exhibition, Womanifesto I saw the participation of 18 women artists from across the world that included prominent feminist artists from the region such as Arahmaiani from Indonesia and Amanda Heng from Singapore.10 The former remarked that it was an important time for them as they were able to discuss about their role as “woman and woman artist in the patriarchal system”; in her admission, meeting Varsha and Nitaya was crucial then for they could “share and stimulate each other” (Arahmaiani, e-mail to author, 25 January 2020). To Phaptawan, a women’s network such as Womanifesto had crucially provided a “mental space” for her; it “provided a space in Thailand for [her] to temporarily hold on to” (Suwannakudt 2013, 95–102). For that exhibition, she submitted a series of paintings entitled Nariphon III, (1996) (Fig. 14.3). Nariphon is a mythological plant in the Thai Buddhist doctrine that bears fruit in the form of young girls. Each painting in the triptych depicts three young children in identical clothes with pods attached to their heads amid falling leaves. The background of each painting changes from green to red to brown, echoing the life cycle of fruit and directly commenting on the continual exploitation of innocent people. It was inspired by a tragic story of a 12-year-old girl whom Phaptawan had bought noodles from, sold to a brothel agency by her family. It happened in front of the temple where she was working some time in 1990; disillusioned, she wrote, “It was at that moment I realized that when my silence had become empty, it was time for me to leave” (Suwannakudt 2013, 95–102). Nariphon was completed in 1996 when Phaptawan moved to Sydney. Feelings of dislocation and alienation in a new environment have strengthened memories of her past. As she found the new location “suffocating” for art making (Suwannakudt 2013, 95–102),11 Womanifesto provided her with the much-needed outlet to achieve some degree of self-determination, as an artist, and as a feminist, when she was yet again forced out of her comfort zone. Like a vessel holding on to the stories of women’s pain, suffering and inequalities – both her own and others – she became her own source of inspiration for her art. Painting and then sending the triptych back to Bangkok in participation of Womanifesto I was an act of catharsis for her during a time when she was struggling to find her voice in her new home in a new country – a place where she subsequently established herself as a feminist artist, amassing an impressive oeuvre that explored women’s stories through capturing the brief and contingent connections between individuals (Veal 2016, 11–17). Akojorn marked a turning point for Phaptawan; it was her first attempt at communicating with her audience as an individual on her

232  Yvonne Low

Figure 14.3  Phaptawan Suwannakudt, Nariphon III b (second within the triptych), 1996, acrylic on silk, 90 × 90 cm, collection of Ken and Beverley Carruthers, Sydney. Source:  Photograph by John Clark.

own terms. Yet as I have shown in this brief essay, her practice was also irrevocably supported by a platform she had helped make possible for other women.

Conclusion As the first feminist exhibition of its kind in Bangkok, Tradisexion remained largely forgotten; it was remembered as the precursor to Womanifesto I and the founding of the Womanifesto network. Like Indonesia, feminism was deemed a “problematic issue in Thailand” as recounted by Phaptawan in her writings discussed through this essay, with women artists asserting that they had never been affected or treated badly as women in Thai society (Suwannakudt, 2013). In discussing the iconic status of Akojorn as a seminal feminist piece that emerged out of a proto women’s collective, this essay has shown the deeply personal nature of feminist art where meanings of feminism are derived from personal experiences of gender injustice. Not to be collected or re-staged in any other country, it was a site-specific installation that acted out the injustices that have been inflicted on women in traditional Thai systems. Kept alive in memory, it was the source that sparked an individual artist’s career and that inspired an art historian’s research project into women

Phaptawan Suwannakudt’s Akojorn (1995) 233 artists. Most significantly, Akojorn participated in an important moment in women’s history as the catalyst that enabled a woman artist to gain access into the public sphere as a professional artist. In this above account, there is no denying that the spirit of feminism was present in the way the women artists came together to contest certain restrictions and to reach out to other women artists as a collective. This essay has shown that tracing the historical development of feminist consciousness could be one other method to illuminate the subject of feminism in the context of Southeast Asian art where terms and meanings of feminism remain ambivalent and suspicious.12 Feminist consciousness, as defined by Gerda Lerner, referred to the awareness of women that they belong to a subordinate group, and suffered wrongs as a group due to conditions that were societally determined (Lerner 1993, 14). By joining with other women to remedy the “wrongs”, women who had developed feminist consciousness could then provide an “alternate vision of societal organization in which women as well as men will enjoy autonomy and self-determination”. Connecting women has been the explicit aim of Womanifesto. In its inaugural catalogue and later on its website, its objectives were clearly stated: “To promote a greater awareness of women in the society in which they exist by presenting their ways of thinking and doing things, which will ultimately [affect] among other things, the conservation of our environment as a whole” (Womanifesto, accessed 1 September 2019). To say that Akojorn played a part in this history of connecting women is to acknowledge its implicit status as a feminist icon. Its ripple effects as this essay has shown are evident not by influencing new art, but by influencing points of connections between women wherever they might be.

Acknowledgements The author would like to thank Phaptawan Suwannakudt, Varsha Nair and Nitaya Ue-areeworakul for sharing their memories, and Asia Art Archive for enabling access to the Womanifesto Archive.

Notes 1 For instance, two early seminal examples of Asian women artists might be Views from Jade Terrace: Chinese Women Artists 1300-1912 (Weidner 1988) and Japanese Women Artists 1600-1900 (Fista 1988). Both were published in 1988 and served primarily to correct the gender myopia within existing art historical discourses in the respective contexts, Chinese and Japanese. 2 An example of this might be Nuansa Indonesia which has been discussed at length in Wright (1998) and Low (2015b). This is also a subject that has been illuminated in Dirgantoro (2017). 3 This was how both Varsha Nair and Nitaya Ue-areeworakul conceived of their role and the objective of Womanifesto in the archive exhibition that was produced in collaboration with the project, Gender in Southeast Asian Art Histories 2019 which also involved the author as co-convenor; they entitled the exhibition of the archive, An International Art Exchange 1998-Present, in Bangkok and Sydney. 4 Sabapathy (2012) explores the conditions that led to the rise of contemporary art in the region, focusing on four archipelagic countries, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines. This comparative study warrant extension into mainland Southeast Asia, particularly when many artists from the archipelago gravitated to Bangkok and Chiang Mai during the nineties.

234  Yvonne Low 5 Among the most prolific include Varsha Nair and Phaptawan Suwannakudt who have both contributed numerous essays about Womanifesto from personal viewpoints. For a good list of primary sources, see Coman-Sargent (2019). 6 The Chiang Mai Social Installation was a series of artist-led festivals established in Thailand that exhibited contemporary art within everyday life as opposed to a museum or gallery. Art was exhibited in spaces such as temples, cemeteries and dental clinics. See the recent text, Teh et al. (2018). 7 Numerous sessions addressed related issues about Womanifesto’s role and history during the event, Gender in Southeast Asian Art Histories and Visual Cultures: Art, Design and Canon-making? (Chulalongkorn University, April 2019) and Gender in Southeast Asian Art Histories: Art, Digitality and Canon-making? (University of Sydney, October 2019). 8 This was translated for the first time into English. This and a number of essays published in the catalogue have been translated to enable greater research into this period. 9 Two yet to be identified sources recently compiled for the Womanifesto Archive by Asia Art Archive show a photograph of the work accompanying the articles, “Exhibition Silpa Pravenee Prapaenee (Tradisexion) Women(Thai)’s Rights and Their Choices” (1995, 40–41) and “Sexuality – Tradition’ Art which dominate Women” (1995), respectively. The author thanks Phaptawan Suwannakudt for sharing them. 10 See Nair (2019, 147–173) for full list of participants. 11 The artist recalled: “My relocation from Thailand to Australia meant breaking free from the nuanced but split ends of Thai contemporary art at the time; the notion of ‘Here and There’, ‘East and West’, ‘Now and Then’. But rather than feeling liberated, I found making art in this new location suffocating” (Suwannakudt 2013, 95–102). 12 For example, Wulan Dirgantoro (2017, 16–17) highlighted the problematic and ambivalent use of the terms, “feminist artist” and “feminist art”, which she argued, were generally avoided by the women artists themselves, “as it can create impediments to their career development”. Her work addresses the definition, understanding and adaptation of feminist techniques in Indonesian visual art discourse through the exploration of works by selected artists and art groups.

References Bianpoen, Carla, Wulan Dirgantoro and Farah Wardani. 2007. “Introduction”. In Indonesian Women Artists: The Curtain Opens, edited by Carla Bianpoen. Jakarta: Yayasan Senirupa. Butler, Cornelia. 2007. “Art and feminism: An ideology of shifting criteria”. In Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution, edited by Cornelia Butler and Lisa Gabrielle, 14–25. Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art. Coman-Sargent, Caitlyn. 2019. “The Women of Womanifesto: Making art and History”. University of Sydney, Hons Thesis. Datuin, Flaudette May. 2000. “Women imaging women: Feminine spaces, dissident voices”. In Text and Subtext: Contemporary Art and Asian Women, edited by Binghui Huangfu, 16–31. Singapore: Earl Lu Gallery. Datuin, Flaudette May. 2002. Home, Body, Memory: Filipina Artists in the Visual Arts, 19th Century to the Present. Diliman, Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press. Datuin, Flaudette May. 2019. “The wind in the Trees: From Tradisexion to Womanifesto”, Keynote lecture, Gender in Southeast Asian Art Histories: Art, Digitality and Canonmaking? University of Sydney, October 18. Unpublished. Dirgantoro, Wulan. 2017. Feminisms and Contemporary Art in Indonesia: Defining Experiences. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Fista, Patricia. 1988. Japanese Women Artists, 1600-1900. Lawrence: Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas. Goeltom, Miranda S. 2007. “Foreword”. In Indonesian Women Artists: The Curtain Opens, edited by Carla Bianpoen. Jakarta: Indonesian Arts Foundation. Low Yvonne. 2019. “Interview.” Interview with Varsha Nair, November 15, 2019, unpublished.

Phaptawan Suwannakudt’s Akojorn (1995) 235 Jayawardena, Kumari. 1986. Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World. London: Zed Books. Lerner, Gerda. 1993. The Creation of Feminist Consciousness from the Middle Ages to Eighteen-Seventy. New York: Oxford University Press. Low, Yvonne. 2015a. “Women Re-modelling Art Worlds: Exhibitions and Projects on Southeast Asian Women Artists (1990-2015)”. TAASA 24, no. 4 (December): 4–6. Low, Yvonne. 2015b. “Becoming Professional Artists: Feminisms and the Rise of WomenCentred Exhibitions in Indonesia”. Australian & New Zealand Journal of Art, Special Feminist Issue 15, no. 2: 210–224. Low, Yvonne, Clare Veal and Roger Nelson. 2020. “Gender in Southeast Asian Art Histories 2019 Report.” Accessed February 1. www.powerpublications.com.au/ gender-in-southeast-asian-art-histories-2019-report/. Meskimmon, Marsha. 2007. “Chronology through cartography: Mapping 1970s feminist art globally”. In Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution, edited by Cornelia Butler and Lisa Gabrielle, 322–335. Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art. Nair, Varsha. 2019. “Womanifesto: A Biennial Art Exchange in Thailand”. Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia 3, no. 1: 147–173. Ong, Aihwa and Michael G. Peletz, eds. 1995. Bewitching Women, Pious Men: Gender and Body Politics in Southeast Asia. Berkeley: University of California Press. Sabapathy, TK, ed. 2012. Intersecting Histories: Contemporary Turns in Southeast Asian Art. Singapore: NTU. Suwannakudt, Phaptawan. 2007. “Merpeople in a Man’s Land: The Comfort Zone of Awkwardness in Which We Dwell”. Crtl + Pdf Journal of Contemporary Art, no. 6 (May): 3–6. https://www.ctrlp--artjournal.org/issues.html. Suwannakudt, Phaptawan. 2013. “Catching the moment, one step at a time”. In Asia Through Art and Anthropology: Cultural Translation Across Borders, edited by Olivier Krischer, Fuyubi Nakamura and Morgan Perkins, 95–102. London: Bloomsbury. Suwannakudt, Phaptawan. 2019a. “Before Womanifesto, in My Recollection”. Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia 3, no. 1: 175–180. Suwannakudt, Phaptawan. 2019b. “Akojorn”. Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia 3, no. 1: 181. Teh, David et al. 2018. Artist-to-Artist Independent Art Festivals in Chiang Mai 1992–98, vol. 9. London: Afterall Books. Veal, Clare. 2016. “Telling (her) stories: gender and the work of Phaptawan Suwannkudt”. In Retold-Untold Stories [exhibition catalogue], edited by Yvonne Low and Clare Veal, 11–17. Sydney: University of Sydney. Weidner, Marsha. 1988. Views from Jade Terrace: Chinese Women Artists 1300-1913. Indianapolis: Indianapolis Museum of Art. Wright, Astri. 1998. “Nuansa Indonesia Moves towards Professionalism”. Jakarta Post, 30 Nov, 6. “Womanifesto”. Accessed 1 September 2019. http://www.womanifesto.com/events/ womanifesto-1-1997/.

15 Into the Grave and Back Psychosomatic Passage through Grief in Lindi Arbi’s Unearthed (2009) Irene Bronner Lindi Arbi was unexpectedly and suddenly widowed at the age of 39, when her husband Faizal died of a heart attack on 10 February 2000. Lindi, née Hobkirk, was born in Stellenbosch, South Africa, on 10 September 1960. With a Diploma in Education, she took her first job in the town of Orapa, in neighbouring Botswana. Having married Faizal Arbi at the age of 23, and with him built a number of businesses in the town of Palapye, she was then left widowed with three young children. Relocating for much of the year to Grahamstown1 in the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa, where her children attended school, Arbi registered at Rhodes University for her Bachelor of Fine Arts, which she obtained with distinction in 2005. This choice was prompted by a desire to make art, long sublimated in the running of their businesses and the raising of children, but brought urgently to her attention as a need following her bereavement. Unearthed represents the practical component of her Master in Fine Art Degree (MFA). 2 This transition in Arbi’s identity – from wife to widow to woman – finds its archetypal expression in the journey to and from the underworld. Her sculpture-objects (she herself calls them objects), either clay sculptures or life casts, enacted this journey in her decision to inter them in a cemetery. After 18 months, the sculptures were exhumed in materially transformed states. Here I discuss three iterations of her series of “selves”. Firstly, Self (2006; Fig. 15.1) is a fired clay double cast of the artist’s body. Secondly, Second Self (2007; Fig. 15.2) is a cast of the artist’s body, misshapenly enfolded over a 1960s shop mannequin, buried in a block of polyurethane, then partially chipped and burnt out (but never fully released), then buried in the cemetery and exhumed. Thirdly, five Selves are collapsed clay forms created as variations on the artist’s body that deliberately exceed it, folding in on themselves and gaping outward, expressing the ravages of grief (2007; Fig. 15.3).3 The trope of burial and exhumation, carried by Arbi’s doppelgänger life casts, centres the experience of a middle-aged woman’s grieving process and her excavations into her relationship with her identity, her body and her memories. This series of works as a “Mistress-Piece” exists intriguingly in a supplementary manner to what may be conventionally understood as the master’s canon. Proposed as appropriately iconic, this body of work no longer however even exists in any formal way. One work has been preserved and catalogued in a major South African private collection, mis-named.4 The other works were given away, recycled or dumped; Arbi has no interest or investment in the works as discrete art works, for her, they were ritual objects, part of a process, which she feels has been concluded (Lindi Arbi, email to author, 6 October 2018). This body of work is also not “professional” but “student” work (Arbi’s MFA submission). The artist has been, to date, an intermittent, not a

Lindi Arbi’s Unearthed (2009) 237

Figure 15.1  Lindi Arbi. Self (after exhumation), 2009, Plaster, approx. 150 × 100 cm. Destroyed. Photograph courtesy of the artist. Source:  Photograph courtesy of the artist.

238  Irene Bronner

Figure 15.2  Lindi Arbi. Second Self (after exhumation), 2009, Plaster, found object, polyurethane and soil, 200 × 100 × 65 cm, Spier Collection. Source: Photograph courtesy of the artist.

Lindi Arbi’s Unearthed (2009) 239

Figure 15.3  Lindi Arbi. Clay Self, 1 of 5 (before burial, detail of wet clay lustre), 2009, Clay, approx. 180 × 250 cm. Destroyed. Source:  Photograph courtesy of the artist.

prolific, producer. These works have also never received scholarly attention; there exist a few brief local print and online reviews of her exhibition. Arbi’s own eloquent writing on her work and process remains the most illuminating available resource, lodged in the Rhodes University Library thesis depository (Arbi 2009). These works could therefore so easily slip from knowledge and discourse. Plaster, clay and soil are the principal materials involved in the realisation of Arbi’s objects and focusing on each in turn is how my examination of this body of work thematises the stages of the works’ gestation – through casting, burial, exhumation and completion of the project. What this body of work offers is an opportunity to see enacted a process not of producing (or appearing to produce) a discrete and completed “masterpiece” but of intersecting elements, which slip in and out of temporality, narrativity and, even, their own existence. Cultural theories of the gaze and the field of vision situate the subject within the highly scopic imaginary that is dominated by an Oedipal, Foucauldian, mastering gaze (Pollock 2004, 32). In response, feminist interventions in the visual arts, particularly in the 1970s and 1980s, distrusted the visual image, spectacle and the iconicity of women to the extent sometimes that the corporeality of female bodies was downplayed, lest it open female subjectivities to the restrictions of a regressive

240  Irene Bronner essentialism (Pollock 1996, 285). Since the 1990s, feminist artists have reincorporated the physicality of the female body as an end for representation in itself, for the expression of localised, situated and intersecting identities. Arbi’s work here, I propose, provides passage through personal and historical polarities – as expressed viscerally in the uncanny doubles of her life-casting process – through to an engagement with clay and a surrender to soil – in the burial and exhumation process – that offers a practical elaboration of Bracha Ettinger’s matrixial subjectivities, as Griselda Pollock explains her theorising.

Casting: Uncanny Doubles in Plaster Even by the 1960s, life or body casting5 and plaster – the medium and material that the process used – was not fully accepted as a legitimate method of artmaking within a fine arts context (Schmahmann 1998, 27). As Honoré de Balzac’s character Frenhofer, in Le chef d’oeuvre inconnu, sneers “[T]ry to make a cast of your mistress’ hand, and set up the thing before you. You will see a monstrosity, a dead mass, bearing no resemblance to the living hand” (Balzac 1837 in Pointon 2014, 29). This had resulted principally because the historical use of life-casting and plaster was most prevalent in the fields of biology, natural history and anthropology, during the 19th and early 20th century, where likeness to living subjects was prized (Schmahmann 1998, 13). Consequently, perceptions formed of life casts being “impartial records” rather than representations of their subjects (Schmahmann 1998, 13). Because life-casting was so strongly identified with a so-called “objective” and apparently mechanical copying, they were often used in so-called scientific and museological settings to display body casts of peoples perceived to be “lower races”. Being able to satisfy a colonial fascination with racial typography has therefore linked life-casting to ethnographic display practices. Due to their employment in “scientific” settings, and to their supposed lack of artistic intervention and transformation – “servile copy[ing]” as Frenhofer derides – there was aversion to the incorporation and acceptance of this medium into “high art” aesthetic practices. Arbi chose this medium because, as she reflected, she appreciated its historical associations with a perceived “outsider” art as, at the time of making, she was still ambivalent about naming herself “an artist” (Lindi Arbi, email to author, 6 October 2018). She also wished to evoke for the viewer the medium’s connection to bandaging and binding in a surgical or healing sense, and to the “making” or “craft” traditions such as needlework that have historically been feminised and marginalised (Lindi Arbi, email to author, 6 October 2018). Primarily though, her need was to make it a requirement, not a liability, that the cast of her own body be as much of a likeness to herself as possible (Lindi Arbi, email to author, 6 October 2018). She sought explicitly to engage with the abject, indexical “monstrosity” of the uncanny double, to request of these vessel-objects that they enact on her behalf her grief struggles between experiencing herself as both “dead” and “living”, in her psychic uncertainty of the boundaries between her own “living” body and that of her lost love object, her husband. As she writes, she has had “to fight to survive against attempts to fuse with the lost love”. She quotes Michael Rowlands’ reading of Freud’s explication of the bereavement stage of mourning: “Bereavement is a period in which the subject identifies with the absent person, idealizes the person and attempts to become him or her, yet comes to realize the impossibility of this fusion” (Rowlands 1998, 55).

Lindi Arbi’s Unearthed (2009) 241 In Second Self, the mannequin is the ineffectual stand-in for the husband’s absent body, over whose idealised form Arbi’s cast cleaves but cannot fit. Arbi’s polyurethane cast depicts – even revels in – creases and folds of skin, flesh and fat. In this reading, the “double” may also express “all the unfulfilled but possible futures to which we still like to cling in phantasy, all the strivings of the ego which adverse circumstances have crushed” (Freud 1955, 236). At about the same time as the casting process was developed, the fascination with the double (doppelgänger) began in Europe, during the age of colonial empire, where encounters with other belief systems and exposure to and domination of other cultures led to more complex engagements and self-assessments on the part of the colonisers (Warner 2002,188). Marina Warner has written on how the excess and tension of the encounter for both colonisers and colonised peoples gives rise to differentiation and to the doubling of self. In his 1919 essay “The Uncanny”, Freud elaborates how the phenomenon of the double, together with “a compulsion to repeat” and “omnipotence of thoughts”, is the paradigm of the Freudian uncanny (unheimlich). For a subject, an experience of the uncanny is frightening because it is secretly and long familiar in that, after early trauma, and then latent repression, the experience seeps up through repression and partially returns to the conscious mind (Freud 1955, 245). Freud claims that the double emerged originally as an insurance against and denial of the inevitability of death (of the ego) and therefore the “immortal soul” was initially figured as a double of the material body (Freud 1955, 235). Yet, Freud continues, “[f]rom having been an assurance of immortality, it [the double] became an uncanny harbinger of death” (Freud 1955, 235). The death mask is an imprint taken of a recently deceased person, the making of which reached its peak during the 19th century, which Marcia Pointon (2014, 31) notes as the age of the mechanisation of the object; it also saw the flowering of the cult of mourning. When preserved or displayed, a death mask is aestheticised so as “to distance the cast face from the actual face, to rinse it clean of the touch of the corpse and therefore of its association with decaying matter” (Pointon 2014, 33). The need for such rinsing and dissociation is psychically necessary for the tending of bodily boundaries because as Julia Kristeva (1982, 4) notes “[t]he corpse, seen without God and outside of science, is the utmost of abjection. It is death infecting life”. However, that it is difficult to distinguish between life and death casts is, as Pointon (2014, 33) says, “axiomatic: both in the drama of their production and in their material characteristics, these masks epitomize the conundrum of the relation between life and death”.6 The “drama of their production” is real: to create a cast of a face, the model must breathe through, usually, straws inserted into the nostrils, enacting being buried alive. In their “material characteristics”, both life and death casts are dependent on a body imprint, which as Pointon (2014, 33) describes “is in itself deathly, regardless of the condition of the subject from which it is taken. The artefact invokes in the viewer the melancholy of an absence that is most definitively that of death”. It is reasonable therefore to assert that in casts and masks of this kind, “the connection between portraiture and mortality is here at its most vivid” (Pointon 2014, 25). Arbi’s own doubled face and blinded gaze look back at herself, asking the material question of where her memories are to be anchored, and how they are to be written. Second Self may also be interpreted as representing the non-rational, uncontainable grief that has no place or form, its excess breaking out of the armature of the body, sloughing off its skin. Arbi writes of trying to negotiate a deeply personal

242  Irene Bronner and unknown journey of processing grief, while simultaneously needing to “tidy up” memories of the deceased for the living, mothering children who are also bereaved and running a family business. Othered from her own body in its experience of loss, a woman grieving in her early 40s, with a body and stature not conventionally considered a contemporary feminine ideal, Arbi was also unable to find a mould of grieving into which she easily “fitted”. She did not conform to any conventional tropes, such as the sentimentalised tragic young widow, or the sexually knowing, moneyed, independent widow, or to the elderly matriarch whose life is given up on the preserved altar of her deceased husband’s memory. Her cast-object Self, therefore, embodies these losses, this othering, at the same time as it intimates the more generative possibilities of doubling. Self and Second Self carry the indexical traces of the artist’s imprinted body, but for Arbi, these casts gave her physical space from and perspective on her embodied experience of grieving. Non-pathological mourning, which Arbi’s artwork here exemplifies, is not a process of detachment to be achieved in finality, as Freud’s (1917) early prescription in his seminal Mourning and Melancholia appears to itemise. The dark double does not run amok, a monstrous liminal being severed from the intentions of its creator. Rather, such mourning is a process of the subject’s transformation, an integration of memories of the deceased love object, the acceptance of the mutability of those memories, in death as in life, and the creation of a sustaining internal relationship that allows the bereaved subject to maintain ties with the inner representation of the love object, but that also leaves room for investment in new relationships and activities.7 This is the model of grieving most recognised today, across psychotherapeutic and psychoanalytic fields, established by recognised researchers as diverse as Mardi Horowitz, John Bowlby and Melanie Klein. As Arbi (2009, 57) says, “Once separated from the role as material marker for mourning [the deceased husband], the widow is now free to re-embody herself”. Self and Second Self are also thus sent as witnesses, as emissaries, to encounter the death of a central aspect of her own identity. Arbi chose to bury, literally, her objects.

Burying: Time Underground Arbi followed what she describes as an unsettling, instinctual need to bury her sculptures (Lindi Arbi, email to author, 6 October 2018).8 “Descent” and “beneath”, in addition to burial, are established metaphors for activities associated with grief work; as Francis Weller describes, “Grief takes us below the surface of our ordinary lives […] we all take this journey downward into the belly of the earth. This is a sacred terrain filled with memories, the artifacts of a lifetime, ancestors, and spirits” (Weller 2015, 122). Arbi had decided to bury her objects while working with fired clay (Arbi 2009, 44). She was experimenting with ways to regain the lustre and corporeality of wet clay after it had been fired; she found that rubbing fat (butter) into the fired clay of the five collapsing Selves and infusing this with soil appeared to achieve this (Arbi 2009, 44). On a technical level, therefore, she wondered what would happen materially to the works if they were subsumed in earth for a period of time. She obtained permission from the Makana Municipality to buy the sculptures in the Waainek Cemetery as part of a temporary art project. She hired workers and a digger to make individual grave-cuts for each sculpture, sited at a respectful distance from existing graves, but still within the cemetery perimeters, thus situated within both

Lindi Arbi’s Unearthed (2009) 243 bureaucratic and consecrated demarcations. In seven separate graves over an area of approximately 80 m 2 , the sculptures remained buried for 18 months, from mid-2007 until 10 February 2009. The process of creating a body cast or a cast “from life”, it bears emphasising, involves a “burying” of the model or subject in alginate moulding material and plaster bandages in order to create the initial or exterior cast. As a ritualistic practice, therefore, the experience has an unexpected congruence with some healer and shamanistic traditions, where an initiate is literally buried alive. Called variations of the “burial of the warrior”, the initiate prepares him/herself, digs his or her own grave and spends the night in the grave, covered by earth with a hole roughly the size of a tennis ball to ensure sufficient oxygen supply. Through this kind of experience, connections to the spirit realm are established in support of the initiate, death is embraced as a teacher, fears are overcome and humanity’s closeness to the earth is affirmed. In African cosmology, the earth – below the surface of the ground – is frequently understood as home to the spirit world, rather than as the passage through the female body, as the feminine principle or as a gateway to hell. The spirit world does not thus exist in the sky realm, but below (phansi, in the Nguni languages). This is why the ancestors, the living-dead ancestral spirits, are often referred to simply as abaphansi (“those of the below”). The metaphysical and spiritual qualities of the land therefore are central in providing continuity between the unborn, the living and the deceased. Christine Dixie’s Even in the Long Descent I-V (2007; Fig. 15.4) speaks to this motif in a South African context. The five panels combine mezzotints of landscapes and etchings of figures embedded in those landscapes, modelled on the artist’s own naked body as well as her husband, her brother-in-law, a friend’s child and a pet dog. In the five panels, the normal scale of value in landscape is reversed: the top third of each is ordered around a gently recessional farm landscape, with brooding oncoming storm, while the lower two-thirds pull the viewer’s eye down into, as David Bunn (2002, n.p.) writes, the stratigraphy of the grave. Bunn (2002, n.p.) observes, “The implicitly narrative landscape elements at the top, are met and matched by an older, obverse universe of the body”. The huddled vulnerable bodies, covering eyes

Figure 15.4  Christine Dixie. Even in the Long Descent I-V, 2007. Etching and mezzotint on paper, each panel: 116.5 × 69.5 × 6.3 cm. Source:  Photograph courtesy of the artist.

244  Irene Bronner or genitals, appear either to be buried in a bank of earth (if the work depicts a cross-section) or else adrift in a dark pool of oxblood (if the perspective is horizontal). Because they are delicate and detailed etchings, the figures in their materiality are at odds with the broader swathes of the mezzotinted landscape. If these are burials, they are unquiet. Dixie states that the work is her response to the blood-red soil and the strata of sedimentation of the Eastern Cape, where her family has white settler ties dating back to the Frontier Wars of the 19th century, with all the layers and ambivalence that those histories bring. Dixie describes a visionary image that she worked from of “a family buried far beneath the ground, like a memory that sometimes wants to surface but the weight of the earth presses down” (Dixie 2007, n.p.). For Dixie, therefore, burial here has a strong association with repression, conscious or unconscious, of memories forgotten, deliberately or not. The charged, complex and ongoing contestations over rights to land in South Africa, in the aftermath of settler colonialism and apartheid, have created, among other things, a recognisable trope in South African literature of the resurfacing of a body from a shallow grave that testifies, in its unquiet unrest, to its violent end. In Nadine Gordimer’s (1974) Booker Prize-winning novel The Conservationist, for instance, the body of an unknown black man resurfaces after a storm on a white farm owner’s land. On this land, death, violence and collapse are ever present, just beneath the surface; disinterment, an eruption rather than a rebirth, symbolically heralds the end of black African dispossession. In this trope, burial must be followed by exhumation, or eruption. The subject, above ground, digs down deep to bring something back up, something that may or may not wish to rise or return to the surface. On the other hand, the spontaneous rising of the dead, of their own volition, speaks from the grave of injustice. Arbi’s burial and exhumation of her objects are of a different order, more akin to the “burial of the warrior” motif and grief as a descent that Weller describes. The hero’s descent down into the underworld is also a mytheme in many cultural narratives, the purpose of which, in the Greco-Roman tradition, is to confirm his quasi-divine status as a mediatory being between gods and people.9 For Arbi, gestation and transformation are fundamental to the time her objects spent in the dark, held by the earth, below ground. The casting process may give the illusion of an absolutely literal, immutable likeness captured. The very solidity of the various sculptural forms speaks paradoxically of the sudden and wrenching absence that called them forth. Their solidity is also an attempt at compensation for what Arbi describes as the non-representability of loss and grief. It bears emphasising that no representation of Faizal, her deceased husband, is buried or exhumed: this process is about the living. Here she gives the transformation process over to her doubles, so that they may do, beneath ground, beneath the conscious mind, what she felt, day by day, she could not. This corresponds symbolically with Arbi’s reflection that she habitually overworks her pieces, so literally burying them to get them out of her reach allowed her to not “destroy” them but rather to “allow” them to enact their own material gestation. Trying to keep the look and feel of wet clay before firing, still in its formless or not-yet-formed state, seems to be a metaphorical refusal to allow emotion to cohere into new forms.

Exhuming: Passage through Abjection Arbi’s attendance at the six-month process of the Burial Exhumation Project at the Botswana International University of Science and Technology (BIUST) Project Site in

Lindi Arbi’s Unearthed (2009) 245 Palapye, Botswana from June 2008 to January 2009 provided an important context for her to the burial and exhumation of her own artworks. An ambitious plan for a new university in Palapye required the identification of burial sites scattered across farmland earmarked for development. The development company, E.I.A. Projects, employed a team of forensic archaeologists to do this, whom Arbi got to know. She was invited unofficially to accompany the forensic team as an interested witness; her presence accepted due to her ties to the community and the place, and as a postgraduate researcher (Lindi Arbi, email to author, 6 October 2018). More than 15 graves were exhumed in consultation with family members and communities. Remains were relocated to the nearby municipal cemetery. These graves in Palapye were not violent but natural deaths. Nonetheless, they offer perspective on what forensic archaeologist Clea Koff, who worked on exhuming bodies of the Rwandan and Kosovo genocides, describes as crucial tasks: the necessity of proof of death for living family, to begin the mourning process, and also for the gathering of evidence (Koff 2004, 31). The bodies need to surface, so that they may be laid to rest; the duty is to the living as much as to the dead (Koff 2004, 313). It was principally through the memory of the living that these burial sites could be located, behind a tree perhaps, or beside the remains of a dwelling, as in many cases, no burial markers above ground remained. Arbi reflects poignantly on how memories must disintegrate as much as physical traces: I was privileged to closely observe the remains of those people exhumed. All that remained in some cases was dry soil flecked with bone fragment, and these were collected in zip-lock plastic bags to be re-buried in coffins. In other cases, as I examined bones, clothing and ritual objects of persons unknown, I was able to witness through traces of physical evidence the scant narratives of their lives. A green stain on a finger bone indicating a copper ring, layers of winter-clothing shoring up an empty space a body once filled, a tenderly crocheted cap on a small child’s toothless skull. (Arbi 2009, 46) As she drove back to Grahamstown from Palapye, following her experience with the Burial Exhumation Project, Arbi passed Waainek Cemetery. She knew then that she was ready to exhume her works. As she reflects, “If they were emblematic of myself, then I had no desire to remain in that space. Either decomposed or intact, the burial would have effected enough change to witness their altered state” (Arbi 2009, 47). The role that soil played in affecting the transformation of the sculpture-objects – the absorbing and neutralising of the emotional abjectness of the corpse-objects – is my focus in this section. Her objects’ time underground, their sojourn in the underworld as it were, had wrought material changes to them, as Arbi had hoped. The shards of bone from the archaeological sites in Botswana were evoked for her in the decayed wooden fragments and paint flecks of the woven basket in which she had buried some objects (Arbi 2009, 47). Vegetation had reclaimed the surface of the burial sites; soil had shifted and settled. One grave, without a marker, was for some time lost. During exhumation, one of the collapsed, contorted clay Selves shattered, appropriately fulfilling its purpose as a vessel of psychosomatic grief (Arbi 2009, 47). The surface lustre that recalled wet clay that Arbi had sought was ironically more effective on the polyurethane objects (such as the bandaged mannequin casts of the Three

246  Irene Bronner Muses representing her children) than on the clay (Arbi 2009, 47). The butter that impregnated the clay left a residual smell of decay on them. Roots had grown into the objects; soil had compacted into their crevices (Arbi 2009, 47). What struck Arbi most, on reflection, was how soil, and time, neutralised the Kristevan abjection of the corpse. As Arbi says: The alterations it [soil] makes to objects are a fitting metaphor for the excavations of memory-work, and for the processes of widowhood itself […] I propose that “soil” as the stuff of altered states metaphorically absorbs “bodily wastes”, thereby facilitating transition for the widow. (Arbi 2009, 53) Soil emphasises the porous boundaries of the objects’ surfaces, their ability to interact with other elements. The objects do not however leave the soil behind, once they are exhumed; they are not “cleaned” because the soil is not “defiling”. Arbi valued the contribution its presence, together with compaction, growing roots, and so on, gave to the objects once they were above ground, and in the exhibition space. Soil may here “absorb” yet it does not “retain”. This “absorptive” yet non-retentive quality is, arguably, another way in which the acquisitive, surveying gaze may be neutralised. Arbi’s work is not in the contemporary trend among a number of South African artists to produce glossy photographic editions of performances undertaken by the artist. Such works may be interpreted as dramatising the skin as impregnable, the performer “returning the gaze” in a hyperbolised, self-aware manner. Arbi’s objects, I suggest, manage to “neutralise” the gaze just as Arbi sees soil as symbolically neutralising abject emotions.10 Ettinger joins Freud’s passage on the uncanny aesthetic effect of womb phantasies (Mutterleibsphantasien) with Lacan’s re-theorising of the gaze in his 1964 seminar. Here he repositions the gaze as a phallic objet a, as “a non-optical psychic inscription of a trace of what came to be felt to be lost as the subject emerges through its successive severances from archaic unity with the m/Other” (Pollock 2004, 50). Ettinger’s proposal is for a matrixial gaze, theorised further as a matrixial objet a, that is not the psychic inscription of what is forever lost whose scar forms the incitement to desire, but as a borderlinking mechanism that is never totally lost as it is not phantasized in retrospect as being had or being submerged in. (Pollock 2004, 50) This is significant because the gaze proposed is not essentialising, nor utopian, nor based upon the creation and opposition of differences, but rather on the relationships that exist between even ambivalently connected individuating subjectivities. The opportunity offered by Pollock’s reading of Ettinger’s matrixial subjectivities, particularly relevant in Arbi’s body of work, is a way to think passage. To speak of passage by relying on binaries – burial/exhumation, life/death, before/ after, sky/earth, above/below, wife/widow, sterile/impregnated – is easy; as Pollock (2006, 38) cautions, “Under phallic logic, any oppositional move only reconfirms the logic, even in inversion”. As Pollock says: “The ambivalence of passage between life and death, between one stage and another, or the perverse

Lindi Arbi’s Unearthed (2009) 247 ‘contagion’ of contact across a boundary, such as the living with the dead are the stuff of phallically re-ordering rituals” (Pollock 2006, 38). Arbi, as discussed already, was compelled by the transformational properties of soil, and the passage to change offered by the abject processes of decomposition. Here I seek a move “beyond [the] theoretical pairing of castration (division and logic setting) and abjection (the repudiation of incest as the contamination of the maternal body’s porous boundaries)” (Pollock 2006, 38). What Ettinger offers is her theorising of the “screen” or “transferential, unconscious field” that spreads itself out between the shared thing and lost object that becomes “the transport for affects generated in this libindinized textile of connectivity and dissemination” (Pollock 2004, 50–51).11 In Arbi’s work, I suggest, this is facilitated by the immersive, non-differentiating qualities of soil.

Releasing: Conclusion Arbi sent her objects on a journey that she could not go herself. Her chthonic forms have had, for her, an avowed function and purpose of providing passage through what was the most undoing personal experience of her life. Her mourning was expressed through what Pollock (2006, 274) has termed “the relief of signification”, allowing time and distance from the “undigested” presence of overwhelming traumatic presence. Ettinger’s theorising of matrixial subjectivities, as Pollock describes them, explicitly makes way for signification and representation: “a passage into the temporality of narrative that encases but also mutes trauma’s perpetually haunting force by means of a structuration that is delivered by representation” (Pollock 2004, 40). Crucially, this “structuration” is not one built through polarities beginning with inclusion/exclusion but rather through the immersive, non-differentiating qualities of soil and its relation that Arbi establishes to memory. As much as Arbi created these objects, she was also (co)created with them and by what they facilitated. The investment of her life force in the objects gave them a certain agency. The doubles – the art works – sought release from their mother-maker. The ambiguous, uncanny doubling of Arbi’s life casts and sculptures, and the process they underwent, supplements the mytheme of the (male) protagonist’s descent into the earth and the return, materially altered. The works do this by contesting conventionalised representations of women in middle age, of body image and of bereavement. Although facilitating one woman’s journey of grief through an embodied process of mourning and witnessing, the sculpture-objects are rooted in socio-historical landscapes in South Africa and Botswana. Arbi photographed her process, but not in order to profit or to extend the life of the works through images; she gave or threw away the majority of the works, observing: I gave most of the works away […] They are not precious to me. I may have collaborated materially with my grief and conjured up objects, but beyond that they are not mine. If they exist still, they are for someone else. (Lindi Arbi, email to author, 6 October 2018) Her lack of investment in her works as discrete objects following their journey also indicates a relationship with her works that prioritises their ability to facilitate ritual transformation.

248  Irene Bronner

Acknowledgements I am grateful for the collegial feedback at the Mistress-Pieces conference, hosted by the SARChI Chair in South African Art and Visual Culture, where I first presented this research. My sincere thanks to Lindi Arbi for her willingness to be interviewed, and to both her and Christine Dixie for the images that they provided.

Notes 1 In October 2018, Grahamstown was renamed Makhanda. 2 Arbi’s MFA dissertation (Arbi 2009) examined representations of widows in Renaissance and early Cape paintings and contemporary works, and chronicled and theorised her own practical work, supervised by Prof. Brenda Schmahmann and Maureen de Jager. In 2010, Arbi received a Spier Contemporary residency in South Korea. In 2015, Arbi moved to France with her partner. On 8 March 2020, her current exhibition L’ésprit des lieux opened at La Cabane, Tayrac. 3 Other works that formed part of the Unearthed exhibition are not discussed here. As her Three Graces, Arbi’s three children are represented in bandaged casts of a child mannequin, as the prototypical “wounded child”, and the “eternal child”, in its sinister puer eternis incarnation, in arrested prepubescence at the time of their father’s death. In One More Night with You, 600 fired clay hot water bottles are unyielding and cold fetish objects, ineffectively standing in for the absent body of the loved one. These works are included with the Selves as Unearthed, the works that were buried and exhumed. The hot water bottles facilitated the transition to the second part of her exhibition Unearthed, titled Anon, where the same hot water bottle form was repeatedly cast in clear polyurethane and filled with soiled fragments of treasured images and mementoes of Arbi’s husband. In Anon, the loss of the body, that of both the loved object (the husband) and consequently the artist’s self (now redefined as a widow), becomes a painful meditation on issues relating to the re-presentation of memory, and to the failures of language, relating to the “packaging” of grief for others in the social or external life. 4 Second Self was acquired by the Spier Collection in 2009. At the time of writing, it has been catalogued under the title Unearthed. 5 Life/body casts are created by applying first grease and then wet plaster bandages to the body of a chosen model. The front and back halves are often done separately. When the cast is released from the model, which is a dangerous and delicate process, the inside of the hardened plaster body cast, which was in touch with the contours of the model’s body, becomes the outside of the fibreglass cast because the wetted fibreglass cloth and fibreglass resin are placed inside the plaster cast. The fibreglass is then separated from the plaster and the two halves are connected. 6 The most well-known plaster casts, arguably, are those first made of the victims of Pompeii (beginning in 1863 by Giuseppe Fiorelli). Buried in ash after the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in the year 79, the bodies decayed while the ash and debris that covered them hardened into pumice, enabling a plaster mix poured into the voids to reveal their emotive forms at the moment of their deaths. Arbi recalls a “vivid memory” of seeing photographs of the Pompeii casts, when she was three or four years old, looking at her parents’ National Geographic magazines (Lindi Arbi, email to author, 6 October 2018). 7 Both Penny Siopis and Steven Cohen, two significant South African artists, have lost their life partners relatively contemporaneously with Arbi – respectively in 2012 and 2016 – and have made bodies of work that expressed their grief and mourning. But Siopis’ works in the exhibition Still and Moving (2015) do not explicitly represent herself as widow, or refer directly to herself, but rather concentrate on trauma and loss through a body of work that is non-representational and rendered in glue and ink. Cohen’s work Put your heart under your feet … and walk! (2017) is shaped by his performance background and his experience as a gay man; he

Lindi Arbi’s Unearthed (2009) 249

8

9

10

11

screens a pre-recorded performance of a grief-burdened yet morbidly curious dance with death in an abattoir and ends the performance by ingesting a spoonful of his deceased partner’s ashes on stage. Cohen’s desire to fuse with his lost love is unlike Arbi’s, who acknowledges yet fears it and rather seeks differentiation through her works. Arbi is not the only South African artist to have worked with a form of burial ritual. Buhlebezwe Siwani, for example, produced a performance piece Inzilo; Ngoba ngihlala kwabafileyo (2015) where she lay in meditation in her symbolic grave. She describes how the work was created as a response to the deaths of several members of her extended family, whose funerals she was not able to attend. In the Greco-Roman tradition, katabasis (the descent) and anabasis (the return) frame the epic convention of the hero’s journey into the world of the dead. Herakles, Theseus, Orpheus, Odysseus and to an extent Psyche and Penelope all undertook this journey. This hero appears in other cultural narratives, including the Sumerian Gilgamesh and the Pacific Mãui. These examples refer to the trickster hero figure who “cheats” death rather than to the martyr god. There is also significant cross-over in these narratives with religious framings of the resurrection god. The “hero’s journey” of the descent into and return from the underworld, with stolen prize or boon in hand, may be read arguably as a male gestational narrative. Arbi also elaborates on how the textured, “rough”, “unfinished” exteriors of her polyurethane objects “trip” the “detached” gaze. She draws here on Brenda Schmahmann’s argument about how George Segal’s cast sculptures of women necessitate Bryson’s “glancing” viewing, thereby challenging a canonical representation of the female subject (Schmahmann 1998). I have theorised in a related manner about Siopis’ use of paints in blood reds and placental purples (Bronner 2019, 35–36).

References Arbi, L. 2009. “Unearthed: Personifications of widowhood and acts of memory”. MFA diss., Rhodes University. Balzac, H. de. 1837. “The Hidden Masterpiece”. Translated by K. Prescott Wormeley. Accessed 26 March 2021, https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1553. Bronner, I. 2019. “Penny Siopis: Tula Tula, (Re)membering the South African nanny-child relationship”. Woman’s Art Journal 40 (1):31–39. Bunn, D. 2002. “Opening speech for Dixie’s exhibition Hide”. Accessed 10 October 2018, www.christinedixie.com. Dixie, C. 2007. “Artist’s statement”. Accessed 10 October 2018, www.christinedixie.com. Freud, S. 1917. Mourning and melancholia. Standard Edition 14. London: Hogarth Press. Freud, S. 1955. “The Uncanny”. In The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XVII (1917-1919): An infantile neurosis and other works. Edited by S. Freud, J. Strachey, A. Freud, A. Strachey and A. Tyson, 217–252. London: The Hogarth Press and The Institute of Psycho-Analysis. Accessed 24 September 2018, http:// users.clas.ufl.edu/burt/uncanny.pdf. Gordimer, N. 1974. The Conservationist. London: Jonathon Cape. Kristeva, J. 1982. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Translated by L. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. Koff, C. 2004. The Bone Woman. Great Britain: Atlantic Books. Pointon, M. 2014. “Casts, imprints, and the deathliness of things: Artifacts at the edge”. Art Bulletin 96 (2):170–195. Pollock, G. 1996. “Gleaning in history, or coming after/behind the reapers”. In Generations and geographies in the visual arts: Feminist readings. Edited by G. Pollock, 266–288. London: Routledge.

250  Irene Bronner Pollock, G. 2004. “Thinking the feminine: Aesthetic practice as introduction to Bracha Ettinger and the concepts of matrix and metramorphosis”. Theory Culture Society 21 (5):5–64. Pollock, G. 2006. “The image in psychoanalysis and the archaeological metaphor”. In Psychoanalysis and the image: Transcultural perspectives. Edited by G. Pollock, 1–29. Massachusetts, Oxford and Victoria: Blackwell Publishing. Rowlands, M. 1998. “Trauma, memory and memorials”. British Journal of Psychotherapy 15 (1): 54–64. Schmahmann, B. 1998. “Casting a glance, diverting the gaze: George Segal’s representation of the female body”. American Art 12 (3):11–29. Warner, M. 2002. Fantastic metamorphoses, other worlds: Ways of telling the self. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Weller, F. 2015. The wild edge of sorrow: Rituals of renewal and the sacred work of grief. Berkeley, California: North Atlantic Books.

Index

Italicized pages refer to figures and page numbers followed by “n” refer to notes. abaphansi 243 “The abduction of the Sabine Women” (Giambologna) (1581–1588) 107 abjection 17, 110; politics of 72–74 Aboriginal Art 10, 44 Abreu, José Guilherme 165, 166, 174n6, 174n9 Abu-Hussein, Hannan 12, 15, 102; background 103 Adams, Renee B 64 aesthetics and feminist refusal 45–46 Affairs of the Home (Seejarim) 80, 81 Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape (Anon 1975) 215 aged naked body 16 Agüero, Eva Rodríguez 178 Ahmed, Sarah 45, 87, 99n1 A.I.R. Gallery 154 “Airing out” 87 Air Products facility 32 Akojorn (Phaptawan Suwannakudt) (1995) 223, 227, 229, 232; art after 230–232; feminist art as public act 225–230 Alfonsín, Raúl 179 Alkhateeb Shehada, Housni 102, 106 Allnutt, Gillian 30 Alternativa Zero exhibition 166–167 Altmann, Suzanne 65n2 Amanda Heng 231 A Menina Amélia que vive na Rua do Almada 166 Amer, Egyptian Ghada 111 America Is Not Ready for This (2013) 205 American beauties 97, 97 Amor de Mujeres 183 anabasis 249n9 Andre, Carl 148 Ankori, Ganit 111 anthropomorphism 72

anti-monumentalism 38 anti-nuclear activism 27, 28, 30 anti-nuclear pacifism 33 Antipodean Impressionism 44 Antivilo Peña, Julia 186 apocryphal 127n10 Arab feminisms 111 Arahmaiani 231 Arbi, L 236–248, 248–249n7, 248n2, 248n3, 248n6, 249n8, 249n10 Arendt, Hannah 64, 65 Argentina 178 Armageddon 30 Art History 52–53, 63, 64, 65n1 Artificial Photography (1975) 205 Art in America 155 “Artists Make Toys” (1975 exhibition) 91 “art-marriage” adventure 58 artWork 27 Atherstone Gallery in Grahamstown 68 “At Mona Lisa Gallery” (1967–1971) 198 audience 62 Augustine 120, 122 Aura (Joan Semmel) (2016) 217, 217 Ausländerbehörde 60 Axell, Evelyne 171 Babies Against the Bomb activists 29 baby boomers 218 baby-to-baby combat 33 Backlash (1991) 213 Backyard (2004) 48 Baker, Elizabeth Ann 152 Bal, Mieke 32 Balkan States 10 Balzac, H. de 240 bananas, consuming 193, 199, 202 Baraitser, Lisa 32 Barbican Art Gallery 99 Bataille, Georges 194 Bataille’s L’Erotisme (1957) 196 BBC 32 beauty mark 95

252  Index beauty spots 96 Beckett, Sandra L 135 Bell, Richard 39, 44 Bellini, Giovanni 29 Berman, Avis 94 Bernini’s sculpture “The Rape of Proserpina” (1621–1622) 107 Berry, Ellen 206 Bersani, Leo 29 Best, Susan 148, 152, 153, 159n7 between-men culture 97 Bey, Khalil 65n3 Bezalel Academy of Arts in Jerusalem 103 Bhabha, Homi K 90, 96, 100n11 Bianpoen, Carla 223, 224 Birmingham Museum of Art in Alabama 98, 99 Bjalkande, Owolabi 104 black-and-white photograph 183 Blasey Ford, Christine 98 Blocker, Jane 147, 172 Boedeker, Deborah 133, 134 Bohemian 6 Borzello, Frances 2 Bowlby, John 242 Box in a Valise (From or by Marcel Duchamp or Rrose Sélavy) (Duchamp, Marcel) 91 Boyce, Sonia 53 Bozhidar Chakalov 89 Braun, Verginia 110 Bredell, Majak 119 Breder, Hans 148 Breitmore, Roberta 63 Bringing them Home (1997) 50n4 Bronner, Irene 70, 249n11 Brookes, Andrew 24 Brooklyn Art Museum 1, 7 Broude, Norma 6 Brown faces 148 Brownmiller, Susan 215 Brush, Lisa D. 35n10 Brzywczy, Monika 195 Brígida Rubio’s workshops 180 Buenos Aires 179; second-wave feminism in 178–179 The Builder’s Wife (Usha Seejarim) 76, 77, 78 Bull’s Head (Picasso) (1942) 75, 76 Bunn, David 243 Burke, Tarana 11, 89–90 The Burlington House Cartoon (c.1499–1500) 29 Bush, George 55 Butler, Cornelia 223 Butler, Judith 46, 47, 140 Butler, Rex 44, 45, 47, 49

Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation 163, 169 Calvera, Leonor 178, 179 Cameron, Shirley 30 Camnitzer, Luis 147, 152 Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) 28 Campos, Mariana Camarate 164, 168, 170, 174 Candeias, Ana Filipa 165 Capital and Gender 57 capitalism 29 Care Collective 35n11 carelessness 96 Carlos Aires 55 Carneiro, Alberto 169 Carrig, Wendy 24 “Carry Greenham Home” 23 Cash Ticket, Ash Ticket (1999) 71 Castro, Laura 170, 173 Cavarero, Adriana 135, 138 Centro de Arte y Comunicación (CAyC) 205 Chaophraya, Baan 230 Chen, Karissa 87 Chiang Mai Social Installation (CMSI) 225, 234n6 Chicago 12, 15, 18n2, 38, 135; Female Rejection Drawing (1974) 6; The Dinner Party (1974–1979) 1–4 Chidgey, Red 27 Chirac, Jacques 55 Christian construction of women’s identity, problematising 119–121 Cincinnati Center for Contemporary Art 136 Cixous, Hélène 135 Clauss, James, J. 130 clay 239 The Clocktower in New York City 91 The Clothesline (Meyer) 11 Coca-Cola bottles 201 Cock, Jacklyn 82n5 Cohen, Steven 248n7 Coker, Gylbert 155 Cold War 23, 24 collective social reckoning 98 College, Grinnell 115 Colóquio Artes 168 Coman-Sargent, Caitlyn 234n5 The Coming of Age 221 Common Land Greenham 31 Common Reflections 31, 31, 32 complex and contradictory identity 162–163 concealment 96 Conceptual Art 147 Concrete House 227–228 Conde, Idalina 174n1 The Conservationist 244

Index 253 “constructivist” feminist 3 Consumer Art (1972–1975) 193, 195, 198–203, 199, 201, 203; Natalia LL and countercultural imagery in Poland 194–204; Natalia LL’s works, reception of 204–207 Contemporary Arts Centre 55 Cooper, J.C. 127, 127n13 Coppola, Horacio 177 Courbet’s Origin of the World 55, 59 Covered in Time and History: The Films of Ana Mendieta 154 COVID-19 pandemic 18, 35n11 Cow’s Head (Seejarim) 74, 75, 76 Creed, Barbara 110 Crenshaw, Kimberlé 90 Crimp, Douglas 16 Crossing Borders project 54–55, 65 Crossing Over (2001) 58, 58 Crowley, David 199, 201, 202, 203 Cruisewatch 34n1 Cultural Center at Wellesley College 7 cultural feminism 2 cunt art 12, 105 curator’s statements 103 Curry, Caledonia 12, 130, 131, 132, 133, 135, 139 Cusk, Rachel 219 Daily World 213 Daly, Mary 179 D’Amico, Alicia 179 Datuin, Flaudette May 225, 226, 228, 230 Da Vinci, Leonardo 29; The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne (c.1503–1519) 29 Davis Museum 7 death mask 241 de Balzac, Honoré 240 de Beauvoir, Simone 221 Deepwell, Katy 107 Deitch, Jeffrey 130 Dejan Andjelkovic 59, 65n1 Dekel, Tal 105, 110, 113n6 Deleuze, Gilles 34n3 Del Valle-Cordero, Alejandro J 148 Demoiselles D’Avignon (1907) 220 de Sousa, Ernesto 166 The Devouring section of Medea, imagery in 134, 135 Dialectics of Isolation: An Exhibition of Third World Women of the United States 155 Didi-Huberman, Georges 27 Dimitrakaki, Angela 27 Dimonsteen, Barbara Lee 213 Dinner Party (Chicago, Judy), 1974–1979 135

The Dinner Party (Judy Chicago) (1974–1979) 1–4, 2, 3, 15, 18n2, 38, 49, 52 dinosaur 210 Dirgantoro, Wulan 224, 234n12 Disgust Aesthetics 110 “distinctive role” of women 28 diverse documentation, virtual archive of 23 Divorce Party 60 Dixie, Christine (Even in the Long Descent I-V) (2007) 243, 243, 244, 248 Dizdar, Ivana 57, 65n2 docile bodies 119, 120, 126 Domestic 115 domestic beautification 4 domestic difficulties 78–82 domestic responsibilities 18 domestic spheres 135 domestic violence 124 doppelgänger 236 Double Check: Reframing Space in Photography 55 Douglas, Mary 15, 16, 72–73, 80, 127n6 #DrFordLoveLetter 98 drip paintings 6 Druker, Ali 218 Duchamp, Marcel 91 Duncan, Pearl 47 Dwyer, Joseph de la Torre 159n15 Dysfunctional Relationship 83 Eastern Cape 244 Ebertshauser, Caroline H. 127n10, 127n11 eco-feminist 152 Elegy (Goliath, Gabrielle) 11 Elizabeth, Queen 55 Elizabeth Sackler Center for Feminist Art 7 El lesbianismo en la Argentina hoy 183 El-Saadawi, Nawal 103 El Zapallo (Ilse Fusková) (1982) series 177, 182, 183, 184, 184, 185; building other body images 179–186; and Goddess imagery 186–188; second-wave feminism in Buenos Aires 178–179 embroidered scarred vaginas 109 Empower 227 end-of-the-bookmarks, using 30 The Equality Effect 140 Eretz Israel Museum in Tel Aviv 112 Esquível, Patrícia 174n1 Esse 55 essentialism in process 156 estate prints 154 eternal child 248n3 Ethel Ashton (1930) 214 Ettinger, Bracha 10, 33, 46, 47, 48, 49 euroPART 55

254  Index Evening Standard article 99 Even in the Long Descent I-V (Christine Dixie) (2007) 243, 243 exchange values 97 Fairhall, David 24, 25, 34n4 Faludi, Susan 213 fascist feminism 93 Faulconer Gallery, Grinnell, Iowa 115 female body 73; presence of 109 female empowerment 135 female fertility 180 female fluidity 204 female genitalia 110 female genital mutilation (FGM) 103, 105 Female Rejection Drawing (Chicago) (1974) 6 female sex organs, representing 105 The Feminine Mystique (Betty Friedan) 9 Feminisms and Contemporary Art in Indonesia: Defining Experiences (Dirgantoro feminist activism 46 Feminist Art Program at Cal Arts 141 Feminist Art Union of Argentina (UFA) 177 Feminist consciousness 233 feminist essentialism 147 Feminist Liberation Movement (MLF) 189n3 feminist “minor mode” 24 Feministo project 69, 70 feminist solidarity/comparative studies model 7 Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center 9 feminist uncanny 135, 136 Fence and Shadow, Invisible Woman and the Telephonic Tree (Payen, Sally) (2017) 25, 26 Ferguson, Asher 124 Fernandes, João 170 Fessler, Leah 90 Fetish Series 153 Financial hardship 18 Fista, Patricia 233n1 Fitzpatrick, Tracy 91, 100n2 “Five American Women in Paris” (exhibition) 91 Flor, Susana Varela 174n1 Fogiel-Bijaoui, Sylvia 111 Fornari, Franco 33 Foucault, Michel 119, 120, 121, 126 The Fourteen Stations 123 Framing Feminism: Art and the Women’s Movement 1970-1985 6 Francesca Woodman’s haunting photographic self-portraits (1972–1980) 136 França, José-Augusto 168, 174n11 Fraser, Nancy 29

Frazier, Susan 69 Fredrickson, Laurel 197 Freud, S 29, 240–241, 242, 246 Friedan, Betty 9; The Feminine Mystique 9 From the Center: Feminist Essays on Women’s Art (Lippard) 6 Frontier Wars 244 Frueh, Joanna 94, 100n2, 100n8, 105 Fryd, Vivian Green 100n3, 107 full-frontal posture, of Wilke 94 Fusková, Ilse 14, 179, 180, 184, 188 Gade, Rune 57, 63, 65n2 Gadon, Elinor 187 Galerie Gerald Piltzer in Paris 91 Galligan, Gregory 147 Garrard, Mary D. 6 Gaspar de Alba, Alicia 140 Gavey, Nicola 108 gender emancipation 206 gender violence 11 Generations and Geographies in the Visual Arts: Feminist Readings (Pollock) 7 Georgina Guzmán 140 Gerhard, Jane F 1 German Expressionism 214 Geter, Hafizah 87, 88 Giambologna’s “The abduction of the Sabine Women” (1581–1588) 107 Gibson, Eric 76 The Gift (1921) 78 gilded mandorla 123 Gimbutas, Marija 13, 187, 188 Global Feminisms: New Directions in Contemporary Art (2007) 7 Gluckstein, Chanie 28 The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe (1982) 188 Godfrey, Tony 147 Goeltom, Miranda S 223 Golf, Klemens 58, 59, 60 Goliath, Gabrielle 11 Gordimer, Nadine 244 Gqola, Pumla Dineo 124, 125 Graham, Sarah 31 Graham-Harrison, Emma 18n7 Greco-Roman tradition 244 Greenberg, Clement 18n2 Greenham Common in Berkshire, England 23 Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp 23, 34n6, 35n7 The Greenham Factor 34n6 Greenham Women Everywhere 24, 34n5 Griffin, Roberta 147 Griselda Pollock 6, 8 Grosz, Elizabeth 4, 49

Index 255 grotesque distortion 214 Group Areas Act of 1950 82n6 Groves, Leslie 33 Gržinic, Marina 54, 57, 60, 65n2, 65n4 Guacar (Ana Mendieta) 157 Guardian newspaper 24 Guattari, Félix 34n3 Guerrilla Girls 99 gum sculptures 96 Guttero, Juan José 177 Hadid, Zaha 136 hair 72–74, 109, 110 Hairstyles (Usha Seejarim) 70, 72, 73, 74, 80 hairy stitched vaginas, adding razor blades to 110 Halberstam, Jack 24 Hannah Wilke 93 Hardman, Pam 24 Harel, Yona 102, 112 Hariman, Robert 50n1 Harper, Paula 112 Harrison, Margaret 27, 31–32, 35n13 Heart Attack (Tracey Moffatt) (1970) 47 Heaven (1997) 42 Heavenly Queen 123 He Chengyao 15 Heit, Janet 147 Hemmings, Claire 46 Herding, Klaus 29 Heseltine, Michael 33 Hibbard, Liz 30 Higham, Nick 35n14 Himid, Lubaina 53 Hlavajova, Maria 65n2 Hock, Beata 58, 61, 62, 65n2 Hodgens, Vicki 69 Home, body, memory: Filipina artists in the visual arts, 19th century to the present (Datuin 2002) 226 home as a topic in feminist art practice 69–71 hooks, bell 9 Horowitz, Mardi 242 horrorism 138 Hunt, Steven 125 Hutcheon, Linda 76, 83n9 Huyssen, Andreas 201 Hyacinthe, Genevieve 148 hymens in spiral oppression 103–105 I am a Work of Art (1979–1984) 61 Ibroscheva, Elza 206 iconic iconoclasm 39 Iconic Works of Art by Feminists and Gender Activists: Mistress-Pieces 3, 6, 7, 8, 9

“iconic” artwork 40 Illegal Border Crossing 54 Imagen de Yagul (Ana Mendieta) 150 immortal soul 241 Indelible in the Hippocampus: Writings from the Me Too Movement (Hafizah Geter) 87 index, defined 18n1 indigenous iconicity, against 43–44 Indigenous identity politics 39 Indonesian Women Artists: The Curtains Open 223 Indonesia’s patriarchal art world 224 infrastructure 46 Ingham, Bernard 33 Inmaculada Concepción (Gregorio Fernandez) 123 Institute for Contemporary Arts (London) 1, 69 Institutional choices 98 Integration Project Office 60 International Criminal Tribunal 53 International Pop 207 Intimate distance: Exploring traces of feminism in Indonesian Contemporary Art 223 Intimate partner violence 127n17 Intimate Photography 194 Irigaray, Luce 96, 97, 204 ironic irons 74–78 Ironing 69 isiXhosa-speaking peoples 74 Iversen, Margaret 2, 3 Iverson 3 Ives, Kelly 204 Jacob, Mary Jane 147, 149 Jaffa Theatre hall 104 Jagielski, Piotr 193 Jakubowska, Agata 193, 205, 206, 207 January day in Belgrade 59 Jarecki, Krzysztof 196, 198 Jaruco National Park in Cuba 14 Jataka tales 226 Jayawardena, Kumari 224 Jewishness 90 jigsaw puzzle 137 Job Hunt (Tracey Moffatt) (1976) 39 job losses 18 Jodidio, Philip 136 Johannesburg Art Gallery 68, 72 Johnson & Johnson 96 Johnson, Clare 97, 100n2, 100n9 Johnson, Rebecca 30, 31 Jones, Amelia 18n2, 159n10, 162, 213 Jornadas de la Creatividad Femenina 179 Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party (1974–1979) 52

256  Index Kafka, Franz 34n3 Kali (Hindu goddess) 135 Kantor, Tadeusz 62, 197 Kaprow, Allan 62, 63 Karadžic, Radovan 54 Karen von Veh 126n1 Kastner, Jeffrey 147 katabasis 249n9 Kate Kerrow 24 Katz, Robert 159n4 Katz-Freiman, Tami 106 Kavanaugh, Brett 98 Kearney, Alison 69, 74, 80 Keating, Paul 43 Kele, Judit 61, 63 Kelly, Mary 16, 93 Kelly’s Post-Partum Document 6 Kemp-Welch, Klara 197 Kenyan-based Ripples International 140 Khaleeli, Homa 103 Khurana, Sonia 50n6 Khurana, Sonya 46 Klein, Melanie 242 Koff, C 245 Kofman, Sarah 29 Kokoli, Alexandra 27, 32, 34, 135, 136, 142 Kosciuszko Foundation Fellowship 205 Kowalczyk, Izabela 207 Kozieradzki, Mateusz 205 Kramer, Hilton 18n2 Krasner, Lee 99 Krause, Molly Communications 136 Kristeva, Julia 15, 29, 33, 80, 82n7, 110, 113n13, 241, 246, 127n7, 127n12; Power of Horror: An Essay on Abjection 73 Krystal, Arthur 218 Kubik, Jan 202 Kwon, Miwon 147 LaDuke, Betty 155 La Ferla, Ruth 100n4 Lambert, Fátima 165 La Messie in Lucie’s Fur Version 1:1:1 – la Messie (2003) 119 La Mujer en el Mundo de Hoy 179 Land Art 147 Large Spiral 165 Last Supper 1 Latin culture 148 Leandro, Sandra 174n1 Lee, Vered 112, 113n3 Leeson, Hershman 63 Leeson, Lynn Hershman (The Roberta Breitmore Series) (1975–1978) 63 Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood 29

Le Petit Espace Vert and Petite fourrure verte (1970) 171 Lerner, Gerda 231, 233 L’Erotisme (Bataille) (1957) 196 Lesbianism in Argentina Today 183 Leszkowicz, Pawel 193, 196, 198 Le Val Vert (1971) 171 Lewison, Jeremy 213, 213–214, 214, 218 Leye, Els 105 Liberation of Aunt Jemima (Betye Saar) 70 libido 165–166 Libération 62 Liddington, Jill 35n10 Life/body casts 248n5 Life magazine 10 lifetime prints 154 Limpopo 80 Linda Nochlin 112 Linda Nochlin and Daisy (1973) 212 Linen Closet (Sandra Orgel) 69 Lip (1999) 42 Lippard, Lucy 6, 15, 16, 147, 148, 154, 155, 158, 158n1, 188, 212; From the Center: Feminist Essays on Women’s Art 6 Little Red Riding Hood 135 Livne, Neri 102, 107, 109 Lonzi, Carla 179 Looking for a Husband with EU Passport (Tanja Ostojić) (2000–2005) 10, 52, 56, 59, 60; context and processes of 53–60; contrasting with other works 60–63; as a feminist activist mistress-piece 63–65 Lopez, Iraida H 153 Louise Bourgeois’ Femme Maison (1946–1947) 136 Love (2003) 42 Low, Yvonne 223, 225, 233n2 Lucaites, John Louis 50n1 Lucia Pesapane 136 Ludwig Museum 65n7 Lugar de Mujer 177, 179 Lugones, María 26, 27 Lusheck, Catherine H 133 Lutz, Helma 52 Lying with the Wolf (2001) 135 Lyric Ferguson 124 Mabo decision of 1992 43, 50n3 MacLennan, Alastair 62, 63 Madonna 29 Magnusson, Jonas J 174n10 Mahon, Alyce 194, 196, 197 Majewska, Ewa 193 Makalintal, Bettina 193 Makana Municipality 242 Makeng, Zintle 82n3 Makhanya, Siphiliselwe 82n3

Index 257 Malhi Sherwell, Tina 111 Mandy Fowler 25 Mann, Ted 43 Marcin Wawrzynczak 207 Marek, Claudia 183 Marek, Claudina 184, 188 Maria Ramos 170 Marilyn Monroe (MM) 200 Mario Banana films of 1964 200 Markowska, Anna 198 Marks-ism 94 marriageable qualities 121 Martial Law in Poland (1981–1983) 201 Marxism and Art: Beware of Fascist Feminism (Wilke) 93–94 Mary, Virgin 115 Mary D. Garrard 6 Mary Douglas’s Purity and Danger 72 Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document (1973–1979) 1–4, 52 masquerading 96 Master in Fine Art Degree (MFA) 236 “Masterpiece” 4, 6 maternalism 33 maternalist peace activism 28 Matos, Lúcia Almeida 165 matrilineal images 136 Maté, Gabor 132 May Datuin, Flaudette 225–226, 230 Mayer, Mónica 11 Mboweni, Melissa 115, 124 McInnes, Jacki 115, 124, 127n16 McLaughlin, Laurel 53, 59, 62, 63, 65n2 McMahon, Marie 45 Mdluli, Same 82n3 Meat Joy (1964) 196 Medea (Swoon) (2017) 12, 130, 131, 133, 134, 137; community-based projects 140–141; feminist 138–139; feminist art and #MeToo movement 141–142; promoting empathy and community 139–140; unpacking the Medea 131–138 Melissa Mboweni 115, 124, 127n16 Melo e Castro, E. M. de 170 Memento Mori 138 Mendieta, Ana 14, 147–158, 158n1, 158n2, 159n5, 159n6, 159n7, 159n8 Mendieta, Raquelin 152 Menéres, Clara 14, 162, 162–172, 162–174 Merewether, Charles 147, 149 Merlin, Monica 13, 15 Meskimmon, Marsha (Wack: Art and the Feminist Revolution) 7, 108, 111, 112, 224 #MeToo movement 4, 11, 12, 89–91, 98–99, 102, 142n1, 213; feminist art and 141–142

Michaels, Mary 30 Michelene Wandor 1 micro-power politics 49 Middleman, Rachel 196 Mignolo, Walter 54, 65n2 Migueles, Marta 178 Milano, Alyssa 89 Milevska, Suzanna 58 militarism 28 Millet, Kate 178, 186, 214 Millner, Jacqueline 47 Minicová, Danica 62, 65n2 Minioudaki, Kalliopi 201 “Mistress-Piece” 6, 27, 31, 69, 119, 126, 236 Mitchell, Joan 98 Mladic, Ratko 53 modernism 18n2 Modrek, Sepideh 89 Moffatt, Tracey 38, 39, 39, 41–43, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 47, 48, 49; Doll Birth (1972) 41; Job Hunt (1976) 39; Scarred for Life (1994) 10; Useless (1974) 40 Mohanty, Chandra Talpade 7, 8 Møller, Sigrid 34n7 Molyneux, Maxine 155 Monnakgotla, Mamodima 82n3 Monroe, Marilyn 94, 95 Montenegro 53 Moore, Catriona 47 mops 72–74 Mordan, Rebecca 24 Morgan, Ethel 187 Morgan, Tom 121, 121–122 Morineau, Camille 136 Morse Code 97 Mortenson, Norma Jeane 94 Mother and baby anti-nuclear group. 28 mother-and-child iconography 28, 29 motherhood 1 Mourning and Melancholia 242 Movimiento de Liberación Femenina (MLF) 178, 179 Mulvey, Laura 16, 95 Munich, Volkshochschule 183 Munson, Kim 35n13 Murray, Scott 44 museum 98 Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles 7 Museum of Modern Art in Mexico City 11 Mutterleibsphantasien 246 Nabakowski, Gislind 200, 201, 202, 204 Nair, Varsha 225, 230, 231, 233, 233n3, 233n5, 233n10 naked body, aged 16

258  Index naked man 47 naked pose 14 naked women 103, 184, 185, 197, 219 narcissism 96 Nari, Marcela 178 Nariphon 231 Nassralla, Aida 102, 103, 107, 110 Natalia LL 11, 16; reception of Natalia LL’s works 204–207 Natalia LL and countercultural imagery in Poland 194–198; Post-Consumer Art (1975) 203–204 National Arts Festival 68 National Society of Fine Arts, in Lisbon (1977) 163 Nazi concentration camp 9 Nead, Lynda 15, 16, 17, 73, 120–121, 122, 127n7, 186 Neary, Lynn 100n4 Neel, Alice 16, 210–221; and portrait nude 214–221 Neel, Ginny 213 New York Public Library, New York (1975) 94 Night Cries 42 The Night Porter 57 Nochlin, Linda 7, 212, 215 Non-pathological mourning 242 Northern Art Prize 31 Noys, Benjamin 194 nudity 15, 180 Nurturant Kitchen 69 Ocampo, Estela 148 Oddone, María Elena 179 Of Fables and Folly: Diane Victor Recent Work (McInnes 2011) 115 Oguibe, Olu 111 O’Hagen, Sean 159n4 “Old Master” 6 Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology 6, 8 “Old Mistresses” 6 Oliveira, Márcia 163, 171, 174n3, 174n4 Olson, Kristina 137 120 Minutes Dedicated to the Divine Marquis 197 Ong, Aihwa 224 Oppenheim, Maya 19n8 Orenstein, Gloria 147, 154 Orenstein, Gloria Feman 12, 13–14, 186, 187 orgasmic delight 203 Orgel, Sandra (Linen Closet) 69 Origin of the World (Courbet) 55, 59 Ortner, Sherry B. 172 Osborne, Peter 147

Ostojic, Tanja 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65 ostracisation 15 Pachmanová, Martina 206 pahtung 17 Palant, Pablo 178 Palestinian female body 106 Palestinian men 111 Palestinian women 102, 111 Panoramic Sea Happening (1967) 197 Paris Commune 55 Parker, Rozsika 6, 8, 38, 69, 112 Partum, Ewa 207 patriarchy 96 Payen, Sally 25, 26 Pedro Flor 174n1 Peirce, Charles 3, 18n1 Peires, Jeff 74 Pejic, Bojana 206 Peletz, Michael 224 Pere, Adamit 102, 103 Pereira, José Fernandes 173 performalist self-portraits 91 PERMAFO Gallery 194, 198 Perrault, Charles 135 personal symbolism 139 Persona magazine 179 Perspectiva: Alternativa Zero 170 Pettitt, Ann 24, 34n1 Peyton, Katie 131, 139, 140 Peña, Julia Antivilo 186 Philip Golub Reclining (Sylvia Sleigh) (1971) 6 Phoenix, Frances 45 Picasso’s Bull’s Head (1942) 75, 76 Piltzer, Galerie 93 Pininska-Beres, Maria 207 Piteira, Susana 165 plaster 239, 240 Pogliano, Andrea 38, 50n1 Pointon, M 240, 241 political conservativism 4 Pollock, Griselda 6, 7, 8, 18n4, 25, 27, 38, 41, 45, 46, 48, 49, 50n6, 52, 53, 63, 64, 239–240, 246, 247 Pollock, Jackson 6, 18n4 Pop Art-like persona 200 pop culture styled personas 96–97 “pornographic” artist 193 Poroner, Palmer 147 portrait nude, Neel and 214–216; aged body, representing 217–219; female artist, representing 219–220; women artists, relevance to 220–221 Portuguese revolution 164 Portuguese Women Artists 163

Index 259 Postcolonial thought 7 Post-Consumer Art (1975) 203–204 post-feminism 126–127n2 Post-Partum Document (Mary Kelly) (1973–1979) 1–4, 4, 5, 6, 16, 52 The Power of Feminist Art: The American Movement of the 1970s, History and Impact (Broude and Garrard) 6 Power of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (Julia Kristeva) 73, 110 Pregnancy 216 Pregnant Woman (Alice Neel) 215, 216 Premature Endings in Huddersfield 30 Premdev, Doreen 82n3 Preoccupy at Silberkuppe, Berlin (2012) 31 Princenthal, Nancy 91, 100n2, 100n3 Pristash, Heather 112 Privatizations: Contemporary Art from Eastern Europe 55 The Psychoanalysis of Wari (Franco Fornari) 33 psychoanalytic theory, drawing on 1 pubic hair 109, 110 pumpkin 181, 185 Purity and Danger (Mary Douglas) 15, 72 Queensland Gold Coast 48 Quesada, Josefina 179 Quintianus 121 Rabbinical courts 111 Racz, Imogen 69 “Radical Feminism in Retreat” 213 Radovanovic, Jelica 59, 65n1 Raine, Anne 147 Rais, Hilda 178 Rankin, Elizabeth 126n1 rape culture 108 “Rape of Lucretia”, Titian’s paintings of (1571) 107 “The Rape of Proserpina” (Bernini’s sculpture) (1621–1622) 107 Ray, Man 78 re-activations 25 “Readymades” 78 Reed, Evelyn 179 Reeves, Keanu 218 Regev, Dana 102, 107 Reilly, Maura 7, 112 Rekdal, Paisley 89 Relicário 166 Religious iconography 122 Remont 55 Remédios, Maria José 174 Renoir (Pierre-August) 18n3 Renoir, Jean 6, 18n3

resonating trauma 107–108 Rich, Adreinne 215, 216 Riley, Charles A. II 218 Ringgold, Faith 53 ripple effect 224 Risch, William Jay 198 The Roberta Breitmore Series (Lynn Hershman Leeson) (1975–1978) 63 Robinson, Hilary 63 Rodríguez Agüero, Eva 178 Rogoff, Irit 147 Ronald Feldman Gallery 93 Rosa, María Laura 189n2, 189n4 Rose, Tracey 119 Roseneil, Sasha 24, 27, 28, 32, 34n1 Rosenthal, Stephanie 149, 152, 153 Rosler, Martha 93 Ross, Monica 30 Rosser, Phyllis 11 Roth, Moira 63 Rought-Brooks, Hannah 111 Rowlands, M 240 Royal Air Force (RAF) 23 Ruivo, Ana 165 Rupestrian Sculptures 14, 156 Rush, Chris (Scrubbing) 69 Rutherford, Ann 44 Saar, Betye (Liberation of Aunt Jemima) 70 Sabapathy, TK 233n4 s’accrocher 32 Sacred Marriage I and II (1997) 119 Sangha community 227 Sarah Iles Johnson 130 Sau, Victoria 179 Saville, Jenny 53 Scarred for Life (Tracey Moffatt) (1994) 10, 38–48; aesthetics and feminist refusal 45–46; against indigenous iconicity 43–44; series 41–43; vulnerability and self-fragilisation 46–48 scars 94–98 Scher, Paula 11, 72, 82 Schmahmann, Brenda 34, 112, 113n13, 219, 219–220, 240, 248n2, 249n10 Schmidt, Silvia 180 Schor, Mira 162 Scrubbing (Chris Rush) 69 sculpture and political conflict 163–165 Second Self (2007) 236, 239, 241, 242, 248n4 The Second Sex (Simone de Beauvoir) 178 second wave feminism 3, 24, 107, 178–179 Seda-Reeder, Maria 137 Seejarim, Usha 68, 69, 76 Self (2006) 236, 237, 242

260  Index Self Auction 61, 62 self-expression 107 self-fragilisation 10, 46, 46–48 self-hatred 218 Self-Portrait (Alice Neel) (1980) 16, 210, 211; Neel and the portrait nude 214–221; Neel’s Self-Portrait in context 210–214 self-portraits 152, 218 self-representation 57, 210 self-satisfaction 107 self-victimisation 62 Selinger-Morris, Samantha 48 Semmel, Joan 217 Serbia 53 serious play 71–72, 82 sexual harassment 87, 89, 98 sexual liberalisation 206 Sexual Politics 214 sexual politics 64 sexual violence against women 111–112 Sharia courts 111 Sherman, Cindy 93 Sibanda-Moyo, Nonhlanhla 124, 125, 128n17, 128n18 Sibande, Mary 70 Silueta Series (Ana Mendieta) (1973–1980) 14, 147; brief biography 148–149; defining 149–153; diversity in 153–154; life, politics and art 154–158 Silver, Evelyn 30 Simmons, Gene 135 Simone de Beauvoir; The Second Sex 178 Simon Sheikh 65n2 Sinason, Valerie 179 Siopis, Penny 70, 248n7 Sister Seven 30 Skopje 55 Sliwinska, Basia 107 Smilan, Mimi 103, 109, 110 Social distinctions 76 SoHo 91, 94 soil 239 Solomon-Godeau, Abigail 34n3 Something More, Up in the Sky, Laudanum and Plantation–Scarred for Life 42, 44 Sontag, Susan 179, 210 S.O.S. Starification Object Series (Hannah Wilke) (1974–1982) 12, 87, 88; #MeToo 89–91; in the midst of Me Too movement 98–99; performative variation 91–94; stars, scars and stigmata 94–98 Sousa, Ernesto 165, 166, 167 spade work 226 Spare Rib 1 Spero, Nancy 158–159n2 spiral oppression, hymens in 103–105

spirituality, female body and 177–188 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 112, 153, 159n10 Squeeze 82 St. Agatha (Diane Victor) 115, 117, 121, 122 St. Catherine (Diane Victor) (c. 287–305 AD) 115, 116, 121–122, 127n8 St. Mary (Diane Victor) 118 Stal, Sulaiman 107 Starification 94 stars 94–98 Stickiness 32 stigmata 94–98 stitched forms, vaginas in 105–107 Stone, Merlin 13 Sung, Doris Ha-lin 18n6 Suwannakudt, Paiboon 226 Suwannakudt, Phaptawan 223–232, 225, 226, 227, 227, 228, 229, 229, 230, 231, 232, 232, 233, 234n5, 234n9, 234n11 Swade, Dario 28 Swade, Tamar 28, 35n9 Swoon Studio 12–13, 132, 134, 135, 136, 138, 139 Syfers, Judy 9 Sylvia Sleigh’s Philip Golub Reclining (1971) 6 symbolic communication 97 Szczuka, Kazimiera 204 Tanja Ostojic 54, 57, 60, 65n2, 65n4 tarantula legs 136 Tarantula Mother 133, 134, 135, 136 Tavares, Cristina Azevedo 166, 174n3 Tavares, Manuela 165, 174n7 Teh, David 234n6 Tenney, James 196 Terp, Holger 34n7 Thai culture 228 Thatcher, Margaret 33 “third space” 90–91, 96 This Sex Which Is Not One (1974) 204 Thomas, Clarence 98 Thomas, Kylie 125, 128n20 Thomas, Morgan 44, 45 Three Guineas (Virginia Woolf) 31 Three Muses 246 Three Sisters in Law (Usha Seejarim) 78, 79, 80 3 Ways to Write a Museum Wall Label When the Artist is a Sexual Predator 99 Tibbets, Paul 33 Tickner, Lisa 185 Timberlake, John 30 Titian’s paintings of “Rape of Lucretia” (1571) 107

Index 261 Toniak, Ewa 207 topless, walking 15 toxic masculinity 25 Toynbee, Polly 24 Tracz, Boguslaw 198, 207n4 Tradisexion 17, 228, 230 trail-blazing images 112 transcendental signifier 204 Transgressing Power (Seejarim) 82 transgressive martyrs 115–126 Trebisacce, Catalina 178 Tree of Life Series 153, 154 Truman, Jill 33, 34n2 Tucker, Marcia 70 Tufnell, Ben 147 Tula Tula (1994) 70 Tull, Herman 135 Twigg, J 217 Unearthed (Lindi Arbi) (2009) 236; burying 242–244; casting 240–242; exhuming 244–247 United States Air Force (USAF) Greenham Common 23 Unión Feminista Argentina (UFA) 178 Untitled (Ana Mendieta) (Silueta Series, Mexico) 151, 152 “urban carpet” design concept 137 Vagina Blankets 108–110, 109 vaginal iconography 135 vaginal imagery 12, 15 vaginal rejuvenation 110 The Vagina Series (Hannan Abu-Hussein) 102, 104; Abu-Hussein’s background 103; blanket and the horrors beneath it 108–110; hymens in spiral oppression 103–105; local-global – sexual violence against women 111–112; resonating trauma 107–108; vaginas in stitched forms 105–107 vaginas in stitched forms 105–107 Van Zyl Smit, Betine 138 Vaquinhas, Irene 174n1 Veal, Clare 231 Velvet Terror 197 The Velvet Underground 200 Venus at Home (Usha Seejarim) (2012) 68; domestic difficulties 78–82; home as a topic in feminist art practice 69–71; ironic irons 74–78; mops, hair and the politics of abjection 72–74; serious play 71–72 Věra Chytilová’s Czechoslovak New Wave film Daisies (1966) 199 verboten 217 Vicente, Filipa Lowndes 162, 173–174 Victor, Diane 12–13

violence against women (VAW) 115, 125 Violence Against Women in South Africa 124–126, 128n18 The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne (Da Vinci) (c.1503–1519) 29 Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas 31 Virgin Mary 119, 120, 122 virtual archive of diverse documentation 23 Viso, Olga M. 148, 154, 172 visual culture 25 Volco, Teresa 179 Volumen Uno 155 von Veh, K 115, 124, 126n1, 127n4, 127n14 vulnerability 46–48 Waainek Cemetery 242 Wack: Art and the Feminist Revolution (Marsha Meskimmon) 7 Waddell, Margot 1 Wait Behind the Line (2004) 55 Wakeford, Nina 24 Walker, Kara 53 Walker Art Center (2015) 207 Wandor, Michelene 1 Warhol, Andy 94, 199 Warner, Marina 120–122, 123, 241 Watson, Tennessee 140 Weber, Cynthia 138 Weidner, Marsha 233n1 Weintraub, Linda 147 Weiss, Rachel 148, 158 Weller, Francis 242, 244 Welsch, Robin 69 Western Art 50n1 Western capitalism 224 Western feminist art developments and movements 224 Western ideology 224 Whyte, Alison 28 Wilke, Hannah 11, 88–99, 100n2, 100n5, 100n7, 100n8, 100n10 William, Prince 33 Willy Brandt (1993) 165 Wilson, Judith 155, 159n9 wise and foolish virgins 121–123 Wise and Foolish Virgins (Diane Victor) (2008) 115; Christian construction of women’s identity, problematising 119–121; Violence Against Women in South Africa 124–126, 128n18; wise and foolish virgins 121–123 Withers, Josephine 141 Wolf, Naomi 110 Wolff, Janet 184, 184–185 Wollam, Les 91 “woman artist” 6

262  Index Woman-Earth-Life (Clara Menéres) (1977) 14, 162; complex and contradictory identity 162–163; as a feminist work in Portugal 166–172; sculpture and/as female and feminist libido 165–166; sculpture and political conflict 163–165 Womanhouse 69, 70, 78 Womanifesto 223, 225, 226, 230, 231, 232, 233, 233n3, 234n5, 234n7, 234n9 Woman Seated on a Mound (1631) 219 woman-to-woman sociality 29 Woman’s Art Journal 155 Women of Corinth 138

Women Photograph Women 183 Women’s Danger Index 124 Women’s Peace Camp activism 10 Women’s Peace Camp at Greenham Common 23–27; artistic and activist strategies 27–32; baby-to-baby combat 33 Wooster, Ann-Sargent 93 wounded child 248n3ÿ Wright, Astri 233n2 Wrocław 198 “Wrocław’70” 198 Yugoslav 53