Twenty Years of MAKE Magazine: Back to the Future of Women’s Art 9780755603626, 9781780767574

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LIST OF ILLUSTR ATIONS

1 Mouse Katz, Spring Heiress, 1987. Textile, beads, embroidery, seven ft. including plinth. Courtesy WAL archive. 2 Mona Hatoum, Over My Dead Body, 1988. Billboard (200 x300 cm). Courtesy of White Cube. 3 Catherine Elwes, Menstruation 2, 1979. Courtesy of the artist. 4 Kiki Smith, Scaffold Body (detail), 1995. White bronze, mild steel, 259 × 239 × 91cm. Courtesy of Pace Gallery and WAL archive. 5 Christine & Irene Hohenbüchler with Heidemarie Hohenbüchler, We Knitted Braids for Her, exhibition view, ICA London, 1995. Including the works: Christine & Irene Hohenbüchler, Glasvitrinen, 1994, Lacquer-coated steel hollow section, glass, aluminium discs, various sizes; Christine & Irene Hohenbüchler, Untitled, 1995, Knittings, each ca. 300 × 50 cm. Courtesy Galerie Martin Jarda. 6 Helen Chadwick, Piss Flowers, 1991–2. Photo: Kippa Matthews. Courtesy Richard Saltoun Gallery & Kippa Matthews. 7 Jo Spence, Narratives of Dis-ease: Exiled, 1990. C-type print 64 × 40 cm, Copyright the Estate of Jo Spence. Courtesy Richard Saltoun Gallery, London. 8 Cosey Fanni Tutti, Fiesta, Vol. 10, No. 7, 1975. Courtesy of the artist and Cabinet, London. 9 Jenny Saville, Closed Contact No.9, 1995–96. Photo: Glen Luchford. C-print mounted on plexiglass 72 × 72 × 6 inches/ 182.9 × 182.9 × 15.2cm. Edition of 6. © Jenny Saville and Glen Luchford. Image courtesy of Gagosian Gallery. 10 Brian Dawn Chalkley, I Probably Want Perfection in Everything ... , (video still), 1998–9. Courtesy of the artist. 11 Mary Kelly, Interim: Part 1: Corpus, detail Supplication, 1985. Courtesy of the artist.

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12 Susan Hiller, Monument, 1981. Courtesy of the artist. 13 Rosa Lee, Knots, 1987. Estate of Rosa Lee. Courtesy of the Eagle Gallery, London. 14 Laura Godfrey-Isaacs, Alien Blob, 1993. Courtesy of the artist and WAL archive. 15 Dorothy Cross, Amazon, 1992. Courtesy Frith Street Gallery, London & Kerlin Gallery, Dublin. 16 Guerrilla Girls Outside the ICA in 1995, Snapshot. Courtesy of Guerrilla Girls and WAL archive. 17 Guerrilla Girls, Dearest Art Collector, 1986. Copyright © Guerrilla Girls, Courtesy www.guerrillagirls.com. 18 Lubaina Himid, Freedom and Change, 1984. Courtesy of the artist. 19 Permindar Kaur, Cot, 1993, Fabric, steel and foam, 150 × 105 × 62 cms, Photo: Peter Lundh. Courtesy of the artist. 20 Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger, Mama Langue Borderline Conditions & Pathological Narcissism, n. 5, 1989–90, Indian ink, charcoal, Xerox, photocopic dust on paper; plexiglass, 122 × 40 cm. Courtesy of the artist. 21 Sarah Lucas, two fried eggs and a kebab, 1992. table, fried eggs, kebab, photo. Copyright the artist, courtesy of Sadie Coles HQ, London. 22 Linda Wilson Green, Male Photographer with Signifiers. Courtesy of WAL archive. 23 Jane Prophet, TechnoSphere, 1995. Courtesy of the artist. 24 Rosy Martin, The Site of Death; In Loving Memory of James John Martin. © Rosy Martin. Courtesy of the artist. 25 Katharina Sieverding, Transformer, 1973/74, multi channel slide show, installation Just Different at the Cobra Museum of Modern Art, 2008 © Katharina Sieverding, VG Bild-Kunst. 26 Jo Spence, How Do I Begin To Take Responsibility For My Body, 1985. Copyright the Estate of Jo Spence. Courtesy of the Richard Saltoun Gallery, London. 27 Susan Trangmar, Amidst, 1994, black and white installation shot. Courtesy of the artist. 28 Nancy Honey, The Apple of My Eye, 1991. © Nancy Honey. Courtesy of the artist. 29 Anna Fox, Weekend War Games in Britain in the 1990s, From the Friendly Fire series, © Anna Fox. Courtesy of the artist. 30 Linda Dement, Scar and Cloth, (from ‘Typhoid Mary’ interactive digital work, 1991). Courtesy of the artist. 31 ORLAN, Woman with Head ... Woman without Head, 1996. (Still from). Photo: N. Sinclair. Courtesy of ORLAN and WAL archive. 32 Georgina Starr, Crying, (video still) 1993. Courtesy of the artist. 33 Smith/Stewart, Mouth To Mouth, 1995. Courtesy of the artist. 34 Ursula Biemann, Writing Desire, 2000. Courtesy of the artist. 35 Ursula Biemann, Remote Sensing, 2001. Courtesy of the artist.

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

36 Rita Keegan in her Studio, 1980. Courtesy of the artist and the WAL archive. 37 Ingrid Pollard, Oceans Apart, 1989. Courtesy of the artist. 38 Mona Hatoum, Roadworks, 1985. Performance, Brixton, London. Photo: Patrick Gilbert. Courtesy of White Cube. 39 Alice Maher, Thicket 3, 1991. 112 × 140 cm. mixed media on paper (Private Collection). Courtesy of the Purdy Hicks Gallery. 40 Chila Kumari Burman, Fly Girl Watching the World, 1993. Courtesy of the artist. 41 Laura Aquilar, Nature, Self Portrait, 1996. Courtesy of the artist. 42 Katarzyna Kozyra, Bathhouse, 1997, video installation, video still. Courtesy of Katarzyna Kozyra Foundation. 43 Alexis Hunter, Approach to Fear X1 – Effeminacy Productive Action, 1977, 6 photographs with green paint, each 32 × 37.5 cms. Donated to the New Hall Collection by the artist 1991. Courtesy of the artist. 44 Sutapa Biswas, Synapse 1V, 1990–2. Black and white photograph (hand printed). 1112.2 cm × 132.5 cm. Courtesy of the artist. 45 Gillian Wearing, Dancing in Peckham, (video still), © the artist. Courtesy of Maureen Paley, London. 46 The Hackney Flashers, Who’s Holding The Baby series No. 19: ‘Stand Up For Your Rights’. 1978. Courtesy Michaelann Mullen & The Hackney Flashers Collective.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We would like to thank Althea Greenan, the curator of the Women’s Art Library at Goldsmiths College Special Collections, for her invaluable support for this anthology. Thanks too to the other librarians at WAL for their assistance. A special thanks to Philippa Brewster, who was editor of Visual Culture at the time of our proposal submission, for her enthusiasm for the project, which was duly continued by her successor, Anna Coatman. We would also like to acknowledge the CCW Graduate School Fund and WAL for their contributions towards publication costs. We are very grateful to the artists and galleries who supplied images gratis. Our anthology would not be the same without them. The editors and publisher gratefully acknowledge the permission granted by WAL and the authors of the selected texts to reproduce the copyright material in this book. Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and to obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologizes for any errors or omissions in the above list and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book.

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FOREWORD

The Women’s Art Library’s serial publication appeared over two decades under different titles, but in the office it was always known as The Magazine. Within the organization’s project of raising the visibility of women’s art, it opened a unique space, where the likes of me could be handed texts written by eminent feminist art historians to subedit with impunity. The pleasurable authority The Magazine lent us was nevertheless fleeting, as every ‘last word’ drew its strength from the possibility of being challenged. Between writers, editors and readers, the leading impulse was to provoke as well as persuade. The pressure to expand the readership stretched each editor, but no one working in the office was easily pleased. Every new issue reeking of fresh ink was an attempt at perfection: an issue free of typos, under budget, dead on time, with brilliant images in a faultless design. Stacks of mail arrived daily delivering random objects from galleries, artists and institutions all vying for some critical space in The Magazine. From balloons to sweets, these became rich material for the artist files kept in the Women’s Art Library at Goldsmiths today. Two candy fried-eggs from Tate Publishing announcing their Sarah Lucas monograph are stored with a hand-shaped lollypop invitation to cmchevalier’s show Hands On. My favourite is the large pizza box full of hay titled ‘free art’. The pressure to perfect was intensified by limited funding. The elaborate press-packs from institutions and commercial galleries were rarely followed up by any purchasing of advertising space. Even issue no. 90’s back cover advertisement for Vivienne Westwood showing Tracey Emin sprawled on various pavements in a green dress was given away for free. I like to imagine that in this competition between publicity specialists and artists, we favoured the artists. What was never in doubt was that we unreservedly promoted women’s work. No other women’s art organization/library reminded the world of its existence through such a lively publication. Art educational institutions became regular subscribers despite it never developing into a peer-reviewed journal. Indeed, The Magazine maintained a more permissive platform for academics, joined by artists and arts professionals to critically engage through the work of women. Who would our peers be at this point anyway? There was no role model publication. We challenged the art press on all

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sides every time those 60-odd grey Royal Mail bags of magazines went off to be distributed all over the world. Although the last issue appeared in 2002, it is fitting that the online version of The Magazine continues to encourage artists today by funding bursaries giving practitioners creative time with the unique artists’ documentation housed in the Women’s Art Library. As in any archive, the unfamiliar – upon discovery – becomes something new and between every artist and researcher the collection renews itself. This excellent anthology is an example, shaping a new context to experience The Magazine and is genuine proof that indeed, there is no last word. Althea Greenan, Curator, Women’s Art Library, London 2014.

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INTRODUCTION

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hy return to the MAKE (Women’s Art Library) ‘magazine’ archive now; why the desire to activate the contents of a ‘magazine’ from the time period 1983 to 2002, a period in which the 1970s legacy of conjoining ‘women’ to art still had a political urgency it would no longer seem to have? Initially published in 1983 as a newsletter by the Women Artists Slide Library,1 which was founded in 1978 by Annie Wright, Pauline Barrie, and Felicity Allen, what shall heretofore be referred to as The Magazine, was developed throughout the 1980s and early 1990s as a journal, The Women Artists Slide Library Journal (1986–1990). It was renamed as the Women’s Art Magazine in 1990, acquiring the title make: the magazine of women’s art in 1996. Over the course of its run, The Magazine had a number of different editors,2 the complete set of issues being currently housed in the MAKE (Women’s Art Library) Archive at Goldsmiths University London where it forms part of the library’s Special Collections. As editors of this anthology, we return now to this archive of The Magazine for some of the same reasons that drive anyone to turn to the archive, i.e. to defend against the danger of forgetting, in this case the forgetting of feminist pasts of art practice and criticism. We also turn to the archive with a desire to excavate a narrative or narratives that resonate with our time of writing in the twenty-first century in which there is a reactivation of interest in feminism following its dormancy in the West after the achievements of second-wave feminism in the spheres of work and reproductive rights. We locate our excavation at a number of junctures. There is our localised experience of being teachers of fine art practice and theory for over 20 years in a London based art college, a university since 2004, which, conjoined with our prior experience of being students of fine art practice and theory in both Britain and Ireland, parallels the timeline of The Magazine. Although we intersect with this timeline at different temporal points, our practices of teaching and making either artworks or texts is informed by this period, whether in a disjunctive tandem with it or retrospectively in relation to it. We felt an urgent need to revisit how this time period was documented in The Magazine, which was a unique voice in publishing in Britain at the time, our guiding principle being our identification of issues that continue to be voiced by students in our encounters with them in the 12 years since The Magazine’s

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demise.3 The contexts in which issues of female sexuality and representation are currently finding themselves addressed have undoubtedly changed – technological and mediatised forms have encroached on everyday life to an unprecedented level, the fervour of identity politics in the 1990s which included all minority identities and sexualities has decreased and become somewhat incorporated into the mainstream. However, (mainly) female students today have a keen interest in feminist art practices as possible models and precedents of resistance. This keen interest is a marked shift from 6 years ago when female students would admit that they were interested in issues to do with female sexuality and representation but they definitely were not feminists. Students are now overtly engaging with feminist art histories in order to stage their own interventions in art discourses that still function as if feminist art history and feminist-inspired practices were/are specialist terrains or short lived movements/moments rather than being integral to reframing the terms of debate and methods of teaching. But perhaps this too is also changing. Our return to The Magazine takes place in the wake of recent large scale exhibitions of feminist art in the US nearly 40 years after the impact of second-wave feminism, e.g. WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, P.S.1, New York, 2008; Global Feminisms, Brooklyn Museum, New York, 2007, as well as the opening of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art in Brooklyn in 2007. Amongst the many other art world initiatives, there is also the project re.act.feminism which, since 2008, has been considering feminist and gendercritical performance art from the 1960s to the early 1980s as well as the ‘return’ of this artistic practice in the form of re-enactments, re-formulations and archival projects with exhibitions occurring in institutions in six European countries: Spain, Croatia, Poland, Estonia, Denmark and Germany. However, at this time of writing, there has been no extensive survey of feminist inspired art in a British public museum or gallery. It is telling that in the UK it is commercial galleries that have begun to mount a number of small exhibitions of British or British-based feminist artists from this period, notably the Richard Saltoun Gallery in London, which has put on exhibitions of Alexis Hunter, Jo Spence, and Helen Chadwick, as well as collaborating with the Karsten Schubert Gallery on the group exhibition ‘Taking Matters Into Our Own Hands’.4 In 2012, Jo Spence was also given a split venue retrospective at Studio Voltaire and Space, both in London. In 2011–12, Tate Britain dedicated a one room temporary display to ‘Thin Black Line(s)’, an exhibition curated by Lubaina Himid of seven of the artists who had exhibited in Himid’s curatorial venture ‘The Thin Black Line’ at the ICA, London in 1985.5 This is just a brief survey of some of the recent attention being brought to bear on this significant period in British-based feminist art history and practice, which ought to be on a larger, publicly funded scale. While it is the case that Jo Spence and some of the artists in ‘The Thin Black Line’ deliberately directed their work towards other audiences and communities, the gathering of British-based feminist or feminist-inspired art practices in one place rather than in piecemeal fashion would enable an opening up of how different generations, audiences, and experiences might tussle agonistically with each other in public forums that include everyone who was working in this period across race, class and gender issues. This is something that The Magazine archive enabled us to begin to do.

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We decided nonetheless that we would use the sequential chronology of The Magazine as an ordering device to structure our anthology’s themed sections.6 This may not appear very radical or revisionist, but what we wanted to do in tracing themes through The Magazine’s chronological sequence was to chart the crossovers and overlaps between categories that are often used to separate decades in feminist histories for the sake of a coherent narrative of progress, loss, and the necessity of or desire for return.7 The themes that emerged from our re- engagement with the archive, e.g. ‘Representation’, ‘Sexuality and the Body’, ‘Discourse’ etc. are often used in art historical accounts as categories that divide feminist history into separate decades. As Clare Hemmings summarises: ‘reference to identity and difference denotes the 1980s’, an ‘essentialist radical feminism’ occupies the 1970s, while ‘post-structuralism moves forward into the 1990s and sometimes beyond, free of both essentialism and identity restrictions’.8 We hoped to slightly revise this separation into decades by paradoxically running our chosen themes through the magazine’s chronology. For example, the false opposition in the 1980s between socalled scripto-visual practices and experiential materialist practices such as painting is not only debated, albeit differently, in both ‘Sexuality and the Body’ and ‘Discourse’, but can also be traced as a continuous oscillation over time rather than an outright opposition if one follows the chronological sequence of issues from the 1980s to the noughties. Recently in a US context, feminist art historian Amelia Jones has revised the supposed split between what are deemed to be the ‘essentialist’ 1970s and ‘anti-essentialist’ 1980s stating that, while both ‘sides’ of the debate may argue about what the female subject might be, both ‘sides’ operate from positions that attempt to critique patriarchal power as masculine and dominant and as that which structures woman as object rather than subject.9 The false antinomy between essentialism and anti-essentialism, i.e. constructed contingent femininity, transmogrifies in the UK into a fraught debate between theory and practice which is rehearsed throughout The Magazine’s run and which we include in our selections here. But, what emerges through our editorial narrative in this anthology is the intertextuality of theory and practice as mutually informing one another, as well as a multiplicity of practices and struggles. The Magazine archive ends just at the point when the discourses of performativity, queer studies and globalisation were making transformative incursions into the fields of art criticism. The multiple temporalities and spatialities of global feminisms are currently changing how we think about feminist identity, but our aim here is to bring forgotten or discredited pasts to the fore in order to make them available for new alliances and negotiations that might challenge dominant ‘patterns of organisation’ wherever and however these are perceived to operate.10 One of the most difficult editorial decisions was whether to have a separate section called ‘Race & Ethnicity’. While the issues in the articles and practices that comprise it relate to other thematic sections, in the end we decided that we could not overlook the specificity of the histories of black and Asian artists working in Britain during this time period, although, as testament to the concerns and scope of The Magazine, this section also includes texts on Irish and Eastern European artists. While in US based standardised histories, it may seem as if ‘black feminism frequently acts as catalyst for a more general, later, move to difference as proliferation’,11 in Britain the presence in the 1980s of

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artists from the Black Diaspora, British-born artists whose parents had migrated to the UK from the Britain’s former colonies or who themselves had migrated to the UK at a very young age, provides a very different history. On the one hand, this history is documented in The Magazine as separatist, an ethos partly reinforced by all black women exhibitions which parallels the ghettoisation of women’s art practice in the all women exhibition. While these initiatives were politically important in order to establish the presence of black women artists in a racially prejudiced art world, they also risk preventing a more expansive examination of the proliferation of different modes of practice at any given time. American artist Adrian Piper recently pulled her work The Mythic Being, 1973, from the exhibition ‘Radical Presence Black Performance in Contemporary Art’ at New York University’s Grey Art Gallery, saying that what is required are ‘revisionist histories that include such work within the “mainstream” canon [...] that give American audiences the rare opportunity to measure directly the groundbreaking achievements of African-American artists against those of their peers in “the art world at large”’.12 While this ambition is beyond the scope of this anthology, we hope that the parallel running of different histories throughout the time period of The Magazine might at least bring this issue into view. We had to leave out so much material. Every time we went through the archive, we had to revise our decisions but we were guided by what we thought fit together in relation to themes that speak to us today. Any excavation will have its biases and ours have been to include as many substantial pieces of art criticism as possible as well as to chart productive tensions through the chronology of the publication’s run. We have limited our selection of the different kinds of content The Magazine included to reviews, interviews and features. In the spirit of The Magazine, we have attempted to include lesser known writers with better known ones, but we were guided by how we wanted this anthology to be a pedagogical tool rather than to give an ‘authentic’ picture of The Magazine as a thing-in-itself. There is no doubt that in its days as a newsletter, i.e. from 1983 to 1987, the Women Artists Slide Library Newsletter was crucial in establishing networks of women artists at a time when there was a dearth of information and sites of exhibition. It was an indispensible resource for the dissemination of information about collectives such as the Brixton Artists Collective and its sister group, Women’s Work, founded in 1983 at the Brixton Art Gallery,13 as well as about key exhibitions put on by the Women Artists’ Slide Library such as ‘Irish Women Artists: Eye to Eye’, Battersea Arts Centre, London, 1986. We acknowledge that our narrative here may be perceived as an act of violence to what some may perceive as their historical intersection with this Magazine archive, but we do not pertain to speak for everyone. We are not aiming to be definitive but to make situated readings, ‘to create a virtual exhibition where we can track the movement of questions about sexuality, sexual difference and the representation of the body’14 in what for us has been a traumatic encounter with the multifarious pasts and broken threads in the archive, our own included. Ultimately, our aim in this anthology follows Hemmings’ approach in Why Stories Matter to create a context for the re-narration of Western feminist history from the perspective of historiographical imagination in the present rather than truth of the past. The historicity of the present that we have imagined

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in The Magazine archive is generative of future retellings, but in order for that to happen, multiple feminist stories need to be retold.

Notes 1. The Women Artists Slide Library began its collection of slides in 1978 with the ethos to include ‘any women artists who had made a significant impact on our experience of British contemporary art’ (Felicity Allen, make: the magazine of women’s art, no. 81, Sep/Oct/Nov (1998)). 2. These editors include Pauline Barrie, Clare Rendell, Caryn Faure-Walker, Genevieve Fox, Sally Townsend, Leah Kharibian, Heidi Reitmaier, Nicky Coutts, Rebecca Gordon-Nesbitt (guest), Felicity Allen (guest), Althea Greenan (guest), Rebecca Gordon-Nesbitt (4 issues), Patricia Ellis (1 issue). 3. This demise was precipitated by a lack of funding and a perceived lack of necessity for a magazine dedicated to women’s art practice. 4. ‘Taking Matters into Our Own Hands’ included Alexis Hunter, Rose Finn-Kelcey, Rose English and Carolee Schneemann, the latter of whom lived in London in the early 1970s. Hunter and English, along with Cosey Fanni Tutti, were included in WACK!. 5. Artists in the Tate Britain display included: Sutapa Biswas, Sonia Boyce, Lubaina Himid, Claudette Johnson, Ingrid Pollard, Veronica Ryan, and Maud Sulter. 6. From 1986, The Magazine came out once every 2 months, from 1997 to its demise in 2002, coming out quarterly. 7. While these tropes operate in much classical Western narratology, our specific reference here is Clare Hemmings, Why Stories Matter: The Political Grammar of Feminist Theory (Durham and London, 2011). 8. Hemmings: Why Stories Matter, p.5, 6. 9. Amelia Jones, ‘1970/2007: The Return of Feminist Art’, X-TRA Contemporary Art Quarterly, vol. 10, no. 1 (Summer 2008), http://x-traonline.org/issues/volume-10/number-4/19702007the-return-of-feminist-art/, accessed 26/10/2012. 10. The term ‘patterns of organisation’ is borrowed from Peggy Phelan’s distinction between feminist inspired art and women’s art practice, a temporally specific distinction that is less valid in the twenty-first century. See Peggy Phelan, ‘Survey’, in Helena Reckitt (ed), Art and Feminism (London and New York, 2001), pp.14–49, p.18. 11. Hemmings: Why Stories Matter, p.6. 12. ‘Artnotes’, Art Monthly, no. 372, Dec/Jan (2013/14), p.17. 13. See the website http://brixton50.co.uk/francoise-dupre/ for an account of this history by artist and co-founder of the Brixton Artists Collective, Françoise Dupré (accessed 26 January 2014). 14. Griselda Pollock, Encounters in the Virtual Feminist Museum: Time, Space and the Archive (London and New York, 2007), p.11.

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major concern of second wave feminism was that any representation of the female body would inevitably be read as passive object of a dominant male gaze and therefore should be avoided in an attempt to distance the male viewer, thereby refusing (fetishistic) visual pleasure. The naked female body, encoded into Western art as both elevated nude and pornographic image, became embattled territory for women artists attempting to reclaim their bodies for themselves. There was a particular strand of feminist practice at the time which sought to explore goddess imagery, spirituality and the cycles of a woman’s body as empowering. In a review of Monika Sjöö’s and Barbara Mor’s book, The Great Cosmic Mother: rediscovering the religion of the earth, published in the Women Artists Slide Library Journal (issue no. 23, 1988), Urve Opik was supportive of their view that the overthrow of previous matrifocal communities was unjust and oppressive; Sjöö, in her painting God Giving Birth, 1961, had described the possibilities for powerful self-imaging that traced its lineage back to archetypal conceptions of Woman. Nancy Spero’s work was also celebrated1 for her depiction of the female body with mythological female archetypes – as empowering positive protagonists – successfully avoiding the patriarchal constructions of female sexuality. In the letters pages of The Magazine, a heated debate on this issue of female essentialism took place around Mouse Katz’s exhibition, In Search of the Femorphic Woman, which was at Art Space, London, in 1988. Sparking off the debate, Carol Drake’s review of the exhibition dismissed Katz’s claims that her work was productive of a new ‘femorphic’ (a coined, hybrid word for the essential in woman) image; far from challenging the cultural stereotypes of women Drake claimed that the images merely perpetuated them. The political climate of the late 1970s and early 1980s had made it hard for women artists to deal with the more contentious areas of desire and the erotic. Exploring this minefield of embodiment, Pennina Barnett reviews the work of 3 women artists who explore female sexuality using their own naked bodies in the exhibition In An Unsafe Light. In doing so, she questions how feminist theory has had a censoring effect on the subject of the naked female body, but finds that the traditional power relationship between male artist and female model has been subverted in the work featured; the viewer here becoming aware of her/his own gaze. There had been a shift away from the hierarchy of looking to a

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Figure 1 Mouse Katz, Spring Heiress, 1987. Textile, beads, embroidery, seven ft. including plinth. Courtesy WAL archive.

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new power relation which insists on the embodiment of both the object and subject of the work. Barnett applauds the artists in the exhibition for challenging the representation of woman as passive object of male desire and for representing their own sexuality and sensual pleasure. This was happening at a time when London-based artist Françoise Dupré was leading an interesting project of life drawing by women, Liberating Life Drawing, in which the female nude model was active in the class in an attempt to transform the traditional hierarchical relationship of artist and model. Susan Croft & Claire MacDonald also begin their article by noting the negative effect of pro-censorship feminist discourse around the use of the female body since the 1970s; they note how later debates in cultural theory moved the concern towards a politics of representation which could accommodate sexually transgressive and explicit art practice particularly through photographic and performance art. They explore performance practices as offering more positive and productive spaces in which to voice their personal, authentic experiences as women.2 A newer generation of women artists turned to the body empowered by discourses of the abject body, particularly psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva’s theorizing, to explore inside/ outside boundaries and flow. Although Kathy Kubicki situates Kiki Smith’s practice within the paradigm of ‘writing the body’ (Hélène Cixous’ l’écriture féminine) as an exploration of the artist’s own experience of her female body in a collapsing of inside/outside dualism, she actually finds Smith’s work fails to do this successfully. Following a more positive review of the same exhibition by Althea Greenan in issue no. 63 which considered strategies of how to overcome the usual representations of the female body as passive victims, Kubicki claims that Smith’s work seems to take no account of the discourses of the body by 1970s feminist artists. She describes how the work ends up actually reinforcing essentialist discourses and in so doing reverts to a more regressive stance, collapsing back into a negative position of the female body as victim. We have a more positive outcome for these concerns when Janis Jefferies, in her article on fibre art and the struggle for female subjectivities, explores the possibilities for women artists’ auto-erotic desire in her discussion around the work of the Hohenbüchler sisters exhibition We Knitted Braids for Her. Evoking particularly French feminist thinkers she describes the work as privileging the sensual over the symbolic and disrupting notions of self and other. Here, for Jefferies, woman becomes the subject of her own discourse to produce a woman’s language as transgressive and auto-erotic, displacing any masculinist notion of a unified subjectivity. Reinstating the feminine by means of a liberatory strategy by which female sexuality is explored in a non-oppositional manner is the main concern in the interview with Helen Chadwick by Emma Cocker. Chadwick, who was well versed in French feminist thought, describes a disrupting of the dualist binary oppositional struggle for sexuality in her practice. Chadwick was one of the first women artists in this country to defy the call to avoid the representation of the female body by actually using her own body in her work, claiming that her intention was to situate oppositional categories in a relation which celebrated difference rather than seeking to eradicate it or merely reversing the dominant binary (female as passive, male as active). She describes the success of this strategy in the joint production of Piss Flowers, an artwork made with the collaboration of her male partner.

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The issue of passive (female) model and active (male) artist is again examined by Simon Ford as he argues that the work of Cosey Fanni Tutti and her collaboration with P-Orridge and the COUM group reverses these power relations. Tutti, Ford claims, aims to do this by taking the images she made for the porn industry out of their commercial market (for private contemplation) and placing them, as framed and signed images, in the art gallery. In so doing, these (pornographic) images became difficult for both male and female spectators to consume as pornography – though they make ‘uncomfortable’ viewing. As the excess of pornographic imagery, he argues, they de-eroticize the gaze exactly because of its dislocation from its original context: individual titillation, the porn magazine. Ford acknowledges the difficulty of situating Tutti’s practice within the theoretical contexts and discourses of feminism and performance art especially as she herself remained unwilling to enter these debates, seeing feminism perhaps (again) as a censoring discourse. Theories of the monstrous and the grotesque also offer enabling strategies in contemporary representations of the body for Marsha Meskimmon. She explores Jo Spence’s work Exiled (as well as other artists using their own image) as a model for the articulation of female subjectivity. Notions of the monstrous and the grotesque become particularly pertinent for women’s self-portraiture as a strategy for disrupting traditional Western knowledge systems which operate through binary divisions of ‘self’ and ‘other’. Particularly important in the shift of emphasis from sexuality to debates around gender was the work of Judith Butler. Butler argues that gender itself is a role that is performed; it is constructed through culture and difference whereas sexuality is biologically determined. Her influential thesis Gender Trouble (1990) was to explore how performative strategies and queer theorising has elaborated more enabling possibilities for feminist art practices. Judith Halberstam, in the article included here, explores the transgendered body as an unstable space where, morphing between male and female, any notions of boundaries become undone. She proposes that the painting of Del LaGrace Volcano by Jenny Saville works by emphasising the exaggerated quality of all gender identifications. Saville, she claims, in her paintings of women’s flesh, usually renders femaleness as excessive and ‘hyper-natural’ while the self-portraits of LaGrace Volcano, as the transgendered body, successfully disrupt any suggestions of distinct gender identities. Halberstam argues (following Butler) that it is necessary to contest the reproduction of gender identities as they are actually fictions; gender is in no way fixed and stable but is in a continuous process of being ‘performed’ and therefore open to transformations when repeated differently to an expected ‘naturalised’ iteration.

Notes 1. Marilyn Crabtree, ‘A Feminine Vision’, Women Artists Slide Library Journal, no. 19 (Oct/Nov ‘87), p.19. 2. For further discussion see: Kathy Battista, Renegotiating the Body: Feminist Art in the 1970s (London: I.B.Tauris, 2013).

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ona Hatoum, Gabrielle Georgopoulos, and Clare Charnley all make use of photographic images, though I doubt that they would call themselves photographers. Photography, more than other visual media, claims a truth to nature. Their work, however, crosses boundaries into other areas (installation, video, and mixed media) to produce images in which the artificiality or construction of the image is apparent. Between these artists there are similarities, but also differences. They share a concern with human struggles: desires, hopes and aspirations; a search for identity; and at times fragmented imagery which suggests a range of associations, but leaves the viewer to decide. More obviously their work explores female sexuality and takes the risk of representing the naked female figure, using themselves as model. Although this doesn’t feature in all the work, it is perhaps the most ‘loaded’ aspect of the show. In one hundred years, discussions around women’s sexuality and the representation of the female body may not be so difficult or urgent. But the weight of the Western tradition of erotic art is still with us today: the male: artist and spectator; the female: model and passive object of his desire.1 When women artists move into this territory, a number of questions are posed. Do women ‘see’ differently from men? Are women’s images of women introverted and narcissistic, or have we internalised ‘the male gaze’? Can ‘intention’ be safeguarded once the work is on public view?2 These have long been the concerns of feminist art theory. Yet has feminism turned censor and defined certain ‘no go’ areas (‘naked bodies, sisters, are out’)? If so, it comes close to a Mary Whitehouse puritanism. More recently, other questions have been raised. What kinds of images are women ‘allowed’ to find appealing within feminism? Is there a space for visual, even sensual pleasure?3 Inevitably, there is a gap between theory and practice. The ‘smashed sculpture affair’ at Leeds Polytechnic, in which a student of Algerian, Muslim and Jewish background found her sculpture of a naked dancer destroyed,4 reminds us that the boundaries of acceptable imagery are culturally determined, even amongst women. We are not

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a homogenous group and do not all see images in the same light. So how safe is it out there, and what kind of risks dare we take? Mona Hatoum is Palestinian. She was born in Beirut but has been living in London since 1975 when the outbreak of civil war in Lebanon prevented her returning from her first visit to Europe. Her video work is autobiographical and draws on her experience of exile. Although it focuses on Beirut, she intends it to make analogies with similar situations elsewhere in the world. Unlike the fast, on-the-spot news reports we are used to seeing, her videos are lingering and minimalist, sometimes using a single image. Changing Parts, made in 1984, begins with a series of austere black and white stills: geometric floor tiles, the corner of a sink, sunlight on a windowsill. Interrupted by an abrupt noise, the scene switches to a naked figure struggling behind a transparent screen. The image is grainy and the figure becomes obscured as it pushes against the screen, smearing it, as if with blood. Within the soundtrack, which has been distorted to sound like shortwave radio, we catch key words: ‘UN Forces, Beirut, Israelis, massacre’. On a visit ‘home’ in 1981 Mona Hatoum noticed that despite damage to other rooms in her parents’ flat, the bathroom was intact. Changing Parts explores the tension between the order and intimacy of this private space and the chaos and danger outside. The line between them is tenuous: there is an underlying menace in the meditative stills, and the writhing figure is both frightening and sensuous. Measures of Distance is more personal. We hear two women talking in Arabic; – relaxed and laughing. A grainy colour still is overlaid with a curtain of Arabic script, and the sound with a single voice, that of the artist reading a series of letters. Through both structure and content it explores themes of closeness and distance: the closeness of mother and

Figure 2 Mona Hatoum, Over My Dead Body, 1988. Billboard (200 × 300 cm). Courtesy of White Cube.

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daughter discussing the hitherto ‘taboo’ subject of sex, and in the process developing a new intimacy; the closeness of showering together, the hazy, rounded shapes of the older woman’s breasts, back, stomach, seen close up, and then from afar. Water drips from her body and catches the strong Middle Eastern light, creating a stained glass effect. Distance, both geographical and emotional, is signified by the letters; by the grid of Arabic writing which at times feels like barbed wire; by the estrangement of exile which, as Edward Said has written, tears people from the nourishment of tradition, family and geography and creates a condition of ‘terminal loss’.5 ‘I personally felt as if I had been stripped naked of my very soul’, says Mona Hatoum’s mother, through this mix of fiction, tapes and slides, ‘and I’m not just talking about the land and property we left behind, but our sense of identity and pride ... So when you talk about fragmentation and not knowing where you belong, this has been the painful reality of our people’. Gabrielle Georgopoulos was born in Athens of a Greek father and English mother. She chooses not to live in her ‘home’ county, but her work draws upon Greek mythology and art. Euridice (1987) consists of a black and white photograph of a classical relief which has been divided into three framed panels. Orpheus has lost Euridice. In turning to look at her before leaving Hades he broke the one condition of her rescue. Euridice, fragmented between panels bids him farewell, while Hermes grasps her hand, ready to make the descent. His image is reworked in pastel and paint and is veiled in black, suggestive of mourning. In contrast, Orpheus is veiled in white, with its associations of marriage and new beginnings. The work speaks of distance and desire; of independence; of the claims we make on each other; the claims of life, and ultimately of death. Dreams and subconscious desires are evoked in a more recent work, the triangular diptych, Coming up for Air. As in all Georgopoulos’ work this combines photographs with other media (here, paint and acrylic) but in a freer and more pleasurable way, with swirling blue brushstrokes. In hot climes water is often regarded as a symbol of growth and life. Coming up for Air, was made after an introspective period, and appropriately is about plunging in and taking risks. In this, and other works, Gabrielle Georgopoulos uses photographs of her own body. Although conscious of the problems this can pose, she feels that ultimately every artist, whether or not they choose to represent themselves, is ‘stripped bare’ and made vulnerable through their work and public role. As artist, model and then spectator, however, she feels that the traditional power relationship between male artist and female model is effaced: she can control the image in terms of the pose (in an earlier work she reads a book and is self absorbed) and the size (she works to life size so that the figures have an immediacy and presence which confronts the viewer). Another strategy is the use of reflective glass, so that the spectator becomes an integral if transitory presence in the work, and is aware of her/his own gaze. Although all three artists picture themselves, they do not produce self-portraits in the usual sense. Mona Hatoum sees the body ‘as a site of metaphor or allegory for social constraints and the act of freeing oneself’, and to some extent this also is true for the others. But objects too become symbolic. Clare Charnley stirs the subconscious by juxtaposing seemingly unrelated images. In an untitled installation, large black and white photographs of beds line up against a wall. Beside them are bright colour photographs of

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doorways, the doorways of cardboard houses crudely fashioned by children. The photographs are larger than life, in the way that children often remember a room or building as more impressive than it really was. But it is impossible to see inside these dark entrances: dark like the blindness we experience when stepping inside from sunlight. Mysterious and beckoning, they are also images of exclusion. And the bed, normally a place of safety, intimacy and dreams, has become a location of loneliness and isolation. In Our Clothes the discomfort continues. An installation resembling a shop front explores the image we present to the world, and the fears and insecurities that lurk behind it. The bright window display with its appealing clothes offers some disguise but this business of looking good is competitive. As an earlier work explores,6 women and men alike, we allow ourselves to be seduced by fashion and an advertising industry that lures us, ever hopeful, with products called ‘Joy, Harmony, Simplicity, Desire ...’ But someone is on the run. Just visible through the garments is a naked figure. She lacks definition and is almost androgynous. Her expression is pained, as if screaming. She resembles Eve in Masaccio’s painting of The Expulsion from the Garden of Eden, caught in the moment of self-awareness, simultaneously conscious and ashamed of her nakedness and her sexuality. It is a potent image, from a potent myth. Yet Clare Charnley remains skeptical about this fall from grace and the idea of a ‘loss of innocence’: ‘I don’t believe for one second that we have come from somewhere wonderful and that we ought to get back there. It’s just that we can imagine things being better’. Perhaps this sense of optimism can also be applied to the portrayal of women within the visual arts. For if the female body has been ‘occupied territory’,7 then it is up to women artists to decolonise and reclaim it to express their own diverse experience. Artist-photographers like Jo Spence, Susan Hiller, Sue Arrowsmith and Helen Chadwick have already taken the risk. Mona Hatoum, Gabrielle Georgopoulos and Clare Charnley still venture into unsafe light. But if they don’t, the field will be left open to the sexism of the advertising industry, pornography, and the fears and fantasies of male artists.

Notes 1. Lisa Tickner, ‘The Body Politic: female sexuality and women artists since 1970’, Art History, Vol. 1, No.2, (June 1978), reprinted in R. Betterton (ed), Looking On, Images of Femininity in the Visual Arts and Media (London, 1987), p.235. 2. Hilary Robinson (ed), Visibly Female: Feminism and Art Today: – An Anthology (London, 1987), p.8. 3. Ros Coward, Yve Lomax, and Kathy Myers, ‘Behind the Fragments’, in H. Robinson (ed), Visibly Female, pp.299–300. 4. Zena Herbert, ‘The Dancer’ and ‘Heat’ in H. Robinson (ed), Visibly Female, pp.10–12. 5. Edward W. Said, ‘Reflections on Exile’ in After the Revolution, Granta No. 13, 1984. 6. Care, Wisdom, Confidence, Empathy, Two Pride, Control, Harmony, Delight, Two Small Joy, 1987. 7. Tickner: ‘The Body Politic’, p.239.

Reference IN AN UNSAFE LIGHT was at the Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, 1–30 Sep, 1989. Women Artists Slide Library Journal, no. 25, Oct/Nov 1988.

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he explicit body has returned from exile to occupy a central position in contemporary performance art. Virtually absent from feminist art practice of the 1980s, the re-emergence of the explicit body as site of interrogation, projection, desire and renewal for women artists and critics suggests a feminist rapprochement of far reaching effect. This is of course part of a much wider resurgence of interest in the history and meanings of the body which is common both to art practice and to academic disciplines. This new interest concerns the development of what American critic Sue Ellen Case calls a ‘full blooded cultural materialism’ bringing into play the ‘body imprinted by history’ and critiquing the ‘bodiless, essentialist quality of traditional history and critical theory’.1 That this has emerged at a time of, in theorist Herbert Blau’s words, an ‘apparent suffusion of the world by theatre’,2 is significant, and especially so for feminist performance practice where debates about the body, theatricality, truth and identity have been central since the early 1970s. Looking back from the vantage point of this renewed interest, it seems that throughout the late seventies and early eighties feminist discourse around the body came to be dominated by the views of pro-censorship feminists: Andrea Dworkin, Susan Brownmiller and Catharine McKinnon in the USA, and to a lesser extent writers and polemicists like Susanne Kappeler, Catharine ltzen and others involved in the Campaign Against Pornography. Arguments suggesting clear links between explicitly sexual imagery and rape and violence towards women found widespread support not only amongst the public but with women’s rights campaigners such as Clare Short and Dawn Primarolo in Parliament and in sections of the media. An alliance of pro-censorship activists and the moral right in effect marginalised feminist art practice which took more complex approaches to sexuality. The rise of the critical discourse addressing the explicit body in art practice gained ground towards the late 1980s, when the growing interest in cultural theory and the contradictions of desire, pleasure, power and sexuality moved debate towards a politics of

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representation which could accommodate sexually transgressive and explicit art practice. Artist and activist Tessa Boffin cited the ‘return of the repressed body’ into radical art practice as surfacing in the Photographer’s Gallery exhibition The Body Politic in 1987, ‘an exhibition which explicitly engaged with the banishment of the body in the theory and practice of an earlier but still productive tendency within socialism and feminism, best exemplified in art by the work of Mary Kelly and in film by Laura Mulvey’.3 Tessa Boffin paid tribute to new photographic practices embracing the body, no matter how problematic this might be in terms of representing women, and challenging the unwillingness to engage with problematic sexual representations in any other way than through censorship. Recent debates concerning art practice in Britain and America have centred around both photography and performance art and were given further visibility in the US in the late 1980s through the campaign against the work of Robert Mapplethorpe and the attempts by the National Endowment for the Arts to de-fund performance artists, Karen Finley and Holly Hughes amongst others, whose work dealt with sexuality, whether lesbian or heterosexual. In Britain, conferences such as Where do we Draw the Line?, organised by Projects UK in Newcastle in 1992, Preaching to the Perverted at the ICA in 1993, and the recent Performing Sexualities at Lancaster University, as well as exhibitions such as Ecstatic Antibodies and Stolen Glances, the 1993 Bare Essentials, Bad Girls, and Queer Bodies seasons at the ICA, have furthered the discussion. While the definition of performance is still contested, its wider influence on art practice is undisputed. From the mid 1960s, the incorporation of live and unrepeatable elements into the work of painters and sculptors moved the experience of art away from engagement with the object towards engagement with the art event, whether in the present or experienced through photographic documentation, foregrounding time, context and the complexity of the viewer’s experience. This opened art up to multiple readings and created an environment in which a work could be seen as always in process, without an absolute closure of meaning. * * * The first significant and collectively endorsed wave of feminist performance art appeared in the early 1970s under the influence of radical art programmes such as the California Institute of the Arts Womanhouse project under Suzanne Lacey and Judy Chicago and was followed by performance art events and programmes in Britain and America which offered women artists a space in which the personal history and presence of the artist could be given voice, emphasising the continuity of the artist’s practice with her experience as a woman. In this context the expression of female sexuality and the representation of the female body were of prime importance. As Griselda Pollock and Rozsika Parker pointed out in Framing Feminism, performance offered the ‘possibility for women to make new meanings, because it is more open, without an overwhelming history, without prescribed materials, or matters of content’.4 Early feminist performance art events dealt openly with sexuality, bodily fluids and the naked female body, addressing the unspoken and illicit through performances, dealing, for instance, with menstruation, as in Catherine Elwes’ Menstruation II, also cited in Framing Feminism, where the artist ‘reconstituted’ menstruation, enabling it to become a ‘metaphorical framework ... the medium for expression of ideas and

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Figure 3 Catherine Elwes, Menstruation 2, 1979. Courtesy of the artist. experiences ... giving it the authority of cultural form and placing it within an art context’. The Cuban artist Anna Mendieta saw performance as a highly experimental environment in which the work could ‘explode off the canvas’ allowing her to create images of power and magic and openly taking on fear and shock in what Lucy Lippard called her ‘shocking, bloody “rape tableaux”’ in which an unsuspecting audience of artist friends discovered her bloody, half-naked body on entering her apartment. Other performances included Blood Writing and Blood Sign, in which she wrote in blood or left

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marks with her blood covered arms.5 Much earlier performance takes an oppositional stance to what was seen at the time as patriarchal constructions of women’s experience, stressing the identification of the artist with her own material, an identification allied, amongst other things, to the authentic speaking subject who ‘found a voice’ in the consciousness raising group. The parallels between political and artistic activism are many and form a continuity that allowed for the projection of a collective experience of ‘woman’, a strength in the simplicity and coherence of feminist ideas and a challenging of the isolation of the artist. Performance was a meeting point between practitioners whose backgrounds included political theatre, street performance and community art as well as body art, sculpture, film and dance. The strategies of art practice were often carried into political protest, and the relationship between symbolic action on the streets and the strategies of feminist art is a subject which deserves serious critical attention. Feminist performance was always at pains to distance itself from theatrical illusion, rejecting the identification of performer with character in favour of the authenticity of the artist speaking from within her own experience. In 1985, artist and curator Catherine Elwes wrote that ‘performance is the real life presence of the artist, she takes no roles but her own. She is author, subject, activator, director and designer. When a woman speaks within the performance tradition, she’s understood to be conveying her own perceptions, her own fantasies, her own analyses’.6 American critic Jeanie Forte also stresses the direct relationship of identity to agency in women’s performance: The performance context is markedly different from that of the stage, in that the performances are not acting, or playing a character in any way removed from themselves; the mode provides women the opportunity for direct address to an audience, unmediated by another author’s “scripting”. Rather than masking the self, women’s performance is born from self-revelation as a political move.7

The projection of this work by Elwes and Forte as unmediated self revelation remains central to the principles of performance art but the question of whether any performance can ever be said to be unmediated has since been fiercely debated. While the strategies of performance seemed to offer a space of radical openness to feminist artists, the work also foregrounded the problematic presence of the female performer. The contradictions and questions were and are important for feminist art practice and its reception. As soon as feminists became visible as performance artists, they invoked the highly charged history of women’s representation in public spectacle outside the context of the play, not only with reference to the accepted performance art precursors of Dada and Surrealism, but also to the presence of women as vaudeville dancers, litigants, preachers, acrobats, prostitutes and mediums – all of whose public appearance, speech and bodily presence has been problematised in culture which constructs woman as other. Feminist discourse itself often re-echoed older anxieties over women’s performance in ‘illegitimate’ and ‘disreputable’ forms. The very radical rejection of theatricality and the valorising of personal experience in performance exposed performance artists personally at a time of high visibility for feminist ideas. At the same time the emerging feminist critique of mass media and art historical representations of women

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focused the anger women felt about sexist and explicitly sexual representation of the female body. In this context self-exposure as women and as artists, while intending to challenge and disturb, was often seen as too dangerous, vulnerable to a male gaze that might easily construct the artist’s representation as pornographic and potentially oppressive to other women. Catherine Elwes wrote of Carolee Schneeman, ‘Certain stills from Meat Joy could well double as Playboy centre-folds and to my mind do not escape re-appropriation’.8 In the political climate of the late seventies and early eighties it became harder for women artists dealing with more dangerous territory to have their work seen, understood or validated. Where performance addressed more contentious areas of desire and the erotic, this became increasingly confined to ‘safe’ women-only contexts or was, until recently, marginalised or ignored by critics and documented, if at all, ephemerally. The changing critical attention given to Carolee Schneeman is exemplary of the problematic body’s disappearance and reappearance: celebrated in the sixties and early seventies as the ‘sexual revolution’ in performance (Meat Joy was much anthologised), forgotten or condemned in the late seventies and early eighties, and rediscovered in the nineties, so that every new book on performance now has a picture of Interior Scroll. During the 1980s, the collective ideology of women’s experience identified through the women’s movement was disrupted and fragmented. Linda Hart, speaking of collective performance groups of the seventies in the recent collection of essays on feminist performance, Acting Out, argues thus: As the utopian fervour of such collectivities gave way to a realisation that they were, to some extent, based on a vision of feminist homogeneity that could not fully take into account the divisions and productive conflicts between and among feminists, the “idea” of a collective suffered fragmentations, largely in response to women of colour and lesbians, who began calling attention to the inadequacies of the model.9

However, looking back to her own feminist activism in the early 1970s Sue-Ellen Case argues that the very experience of a generation of academics and artists educated in political activism and critical theory and art practice, whether involved in civil rights, feminism, black politics or gay and lesbian issues, ‘slowly bored its way down into the methodology and epistemology of the disciplines themselves’,10 eventually forcing the pursuit of ‘the elusive sameness’ identified by Linda Hart in feminist theory to give way to critical theory and political practice which could account for and embrace difference. While the body has continued to be the battleground in struggles over ideologies, as Barbara Kruger has put it, the terms of engagement have now changed dramatically. For many cultural critics the body is the site where theory and history converge, no longer the unproblematic natural object with universal needs and wants but, as historian Roy Porter points out in his article Resurrecting the Body, the body ‘as it has been experienced and expressed within particular cultural systems, both private and public, which themselves have changed over time’. He acknowledges the numerous stimuli, including feminism and Marxism in effecting this cultural revolution and points to a ‘new cottage industry, dedicated to weaving a gigantic tapestry of the history of the body’.11

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With the recognition that the body has a history and that the nature of identity is subject to change, a renewed attention to theatricality and spectacle in performance has emerged fuelled by cultural theory emphasising the validity of butch/femme roleplaying, dressing up, power play, transgression, rather than expressing clear sexual identity. ‘Identification is fluid’, Tessa Boffin wrote ‘it crosses the boundaries of gender, desire, race and class, enabling me as a woman to identify with a man, a gay lover’.12 This was territory she was exploring in photography and in club performances shortly before her death. The spectacle of the sexualised, theatricalised, transgressive body which stalks contemporary culture has itself become the subject of recent discussion. Cultural critic Elizabeth Wilson talks of ‘nightclubs where the floorshows become more and more daring, as if performance were to utter the truth of sex. If we make sex a spectacle, at least we know it’s real’.13 Lived experience knows itself to be real through becoming theatricalised. Performance art strategies had been absorbed into popular culture throughout the seventies and eighties through figures such as Laurie Anderson, David Bowie, David Byrne, Madonna and Sandra Bernhardt. In the nineties, critics have become interested in performance as a way of looking at culture, exemplified for instance in the work of Judith Butler, Peggy Phelan, Michael Taussig and David Chaney whose recent book Fictions of Collective Life looks at public life as performance.14 * * * What seems to have emerged in the 1990s is a renewed interest in performance, now free to explore the meanings of bodily experience, representation and language; an interest which still seeks to ally these to political activity. So, the contested ground of performance comes back to the body and to theatricality, or perhaps more profoundly to an investigation of the boundary between the real and the imaginary.

Notes 1. Sue-Ellen Case, ‘Theory/History/Revolution’, in J. G. Reinelt and J. R. Roach (eds), Critical Theory and Performance (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1992). 2. Herbert Blau, To all Appearances: Ideology and Performance (London: Routledge, 1992). 3. Tessa Boffin, ‘The Blind Leading the Blind: Socialist-Feminism and Representation’ Feminist Review No 36. 4. Griselda Pollock, and Roszika Parker (eds), Framing Feminism (London: Pandora Press, 1987). 5. See the museum catalogue for Anna Mendieta: – A Retrospective, curated by Petradel Ric and John Perrault, New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, 1987, and Lucy Lippard ‘Transformation Art’, Ms, No. 4, Oct (1975), pp.33–39. 6. Catherine Elwes, ‘Floating Femininity: A Look at Performance Art by Women’, in S. Kent and J. Morreau (eds), Women’s Images of Men (London: Pandora Press, 1985). 7. Jeanie Forte, ‘Women’s Performance Art: Feminism and Postmodernism’, in S. Case (ed), Performing Feminisms (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1990). 8. Catherine Elwes, ‘Floating Femininity’. 9. Lynda Hart, ‘Introduction’ in L. Hart and P. Phelan (eds), Acting Out: Feminist Performances (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1993). 10. Case: ‘Theory/History/Revolution’. 11. Roy Porter, ‘Resurrecting the Body’, in Peter Burke (ed), New Perspectives on Historical Writing (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991).

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12. Boffin: ‘The Blind Leading the Blind’. 13. Elizabeth Wilson, ‘Art at the cutting edge of politics’, The Guardian, 30 July (1992). 14. David Chaney, Fictions of Collective Life: Public Drama in Late Modern Culture (London & New York: Routledge, 1993); Judith Butler, ‘Imitation and Gender Insubordination’, in Diana Fuss (ed), Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories (London & New York: Routledge, 1991); Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London & New York: Routledge, 1993); Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity (London & New York: Routledge, 1993).

Reference Women’s Art Magazine, no. 57, Mar/Apr 1994.

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uccessful New York artist, Kiki Smith, had her first retrospective at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in March. Her work has not been obviously visible in this country up until this show and a parallel show at Anthony D’Offay’s. D’Offay has shown her work before and Damien Hirst included Smith in the show at the Serpentine, Some went mad, Some ran away, in May last year. Smith made most of the work at the Whitechapel specifically for that site. Concern for convention informs her use of materials and techniques; she approaches these matters in a whimsical way, describing her methods as ‘out-dated technology’. She uses a wide range of materials from bronze to glass, rice paper, iron, cotton-burlap, beads etc. Her approach to the body has usually been democratic, as life-sustaining fluids, organs, limbs and joints have been treated with equal enthusiasm. In 1995, Smith completed the training to become an emergency medical technician where she studied bodies in a similar way to Renaissance artists, analysing the often mutilated, dissected, fragmented and near-dead, or deceased body. Her sculptures have been cast from life and death. Althea Greenan (‘Moths, Bodies & Disorder’ Women’s Art Magazine, no. 63 pp.22–23) discusses Smith’s interest in the internal spaces of the body. In the same article, Smith herself described an interest in the meanings attached to the body and the social functions it performs. Her oeuvre could be described as representing the paradigm of I’écriture féminine or ‘writing the body’, as expressed by the French feminist writer Hélène Cixous. For Cixous, the relation between inside and outside differs for men and women. For women, the inside is liveable. Smith insists that her sculptures, based almost exclusively on the female body, are not made deliberately to exclude men but rather to reflect her own first-hand lived experience of inhabiting a body that is female. Her mentors are Louise Bourgeois, Eva Hesse and Lee Bontecou. During the 1990s, the body has emerged as a metaphor for cultural signification and as a site for the psychosexual and social construction of gender, power and disease. Smith’s use of ‘the body’ in her recent work has moved away from internal representations

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Figure 4 Kiki Smith, Scaffold Body (detail), 1995. White bronze, mild steel, 259 × 239 × 91cm. Courtesy of Pace Gallery and WAL archive.

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to external ones. This has had a reductive effect in terms of reading the work contemporaneously. By producing sculptures that consist of whole, solid, cast-modelled figures, there is less possibility of applying a reading that uses a psychoanalytic interpretation for instance, with reference to metonym and metaphor, fragmentation, trace, etc. Smith’s previous work could more easily be discussed in these terms. The continual questioning, by the artist and audience, of the ways the body is used in representation and the developing discourse surrounding this issue, will conceivably allow ‘the body’ in question to be successfully and democratically utilised within contemporary art practice. As a primary experience of Smith’s work en masse, the show at the Whitechapel was disappointing. ‘What about the parts that dangle loose and trail behind’, Smith enquired in a notebook of 1992. ‘Your hair holds on you, the shit and the pee and the chafed skin, the milk, the cum, the placenta’!2 There was no evidence of body fluids, flayed skin or sinuous bodies. Blood Pool came closest to such observations, but the bronze cast clearly represented something whole and external. The female, painted the colour of a slaughter beast, was cast in a foetal position, the spinal cord starkly exposed. Women are more pathologically linked to their bodily functions; they bleed through loss of their virginity, during menstruation and childbirth; vulnerable women are battered everyday in incidents of domestic violence. Blood is also the transmitter of infectious and fatal diseases. The psychological response to the Blood Pool inevitably created an unconscious relapse into victim-stereotype, and Smith’s total exclusion of the male figure in the show pointlessly denied the knowledge that men are also beaten and injured; that they can infect and be infected as well. Characters from mythology and religion inspired some of the pieces. The female demon Lilith, traditionally the first wife of Adam who rebelled against his authority over her, appeared to be crawling naked in an animalistic fashion on the far wall of the gallery. Her beady glass eye cast a cold glance on the spectator below. Mary Magdalene, once exorcised by Christ of demons, and identified by medieval scholars as the repentant sinner who anointed the feet of Jesus, stood hunched and heavy, eyes cast to heaven. Her body almost covered in hair, she seemed smaller than life-size, her foot chained to the floor. She resembled a Yeti in the way she had been modelled and as such it was hard to sympathise with her obvious plight. These reductive images represent ‘women as victim’, which is retrogressive in comparison to an enlightened contemporary experience of some women, comfortable with, and in control of, their bodies and sexuality. The show lacked a social and political framework. By placing figures within mythology there is no recourse to the real horrors experienced by women and girls throughout the world today; for example, living in fear of rape and torture in a war zone, or with the pain and humiliation of genital-mutilation and oppression directed upon the body. Other figures in the show aspired to cosmology, Squatter with Butterflies is painted the blue of mysticism and cosmic-aura similar to the pigment used by Yves Klein. Smith may also be in pursuit of a ‘mystical’ relationship with her work. Religious overtones are in play, as the blue also imitates the robes of the Virgin Mary in innumerable iconographic representations. Smith had a Catholic upbringing and the Virgin Mary as a subject has surfaced more overtly at other times in her work.

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The artist is said to be fascinated with India and recently visited there. The screening of the psychedelic video during the show bore evidence of this trip. It was the decorative aspects that seemed to have captured her voyeuristic interest, as expressed by the use of beads, birds, flowers and flowing lengths of fabric employed as adornments in some of the sculptures. The beggars, and women with no access to birth control, bringing up families in abject poverty, were apparently not of interest to Smith. Again, there was no acknowledgement of the real world, and no context in which to understand or locate the work. If Smith has a feminist approach she uses it selectively. As Margaret Higonnet has pointed out, India is a country that institutionalises female suicide.3 In Peacock, torn paper, delicately hand-painted vaginas emanated from the genitals of the female figure, and were loosely attached to the wall by string. But the analogy is hard to understand; in nature usually it is the (male) peacock, not the peahen, who displays his illustrious feathers in the act of courtship. If the show at the Whitechapel was an attempt by Smith to counteract negative responses within our culture to the female body, the result was confusing. It is also rather late to be exploring these issues, as artists such as Judy Chicago, Betty Dobson and Hannah Wilke dealt intelligently and quite adequately with these concerns in the seventies. Increased awareness since then, partly due to the effectiveness of their work, has made this a less valid issue. The overall impression of the show reinforced an essentialist discourse. Smith’s obsession with primal and biological representation denies the intellectual capacity of women. The female figure was a domineering presence, but the many ambiguous references that accompany ‘the burden of representation’ had not been fully considered or explored by Smith. The work on the show at the Whitechapel looked merely decorative and ephemeral, especially compared to the visceral quality of Smith’s earlier work made from materials such as wax and cheese-cloth, e.g. Virgin Mary (1992).

Notes 1. KIKI SMITH: THE TIME SOMEONE POINTED TO THE OUTSIDE was at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London 24 February – 24 March 1995. 2. Kiki Smith: Silent Work, exhibition catalogue, (Mak Gallery: Vienna, 1992), p.39. 3. Higonnet, ‘Fragmented Identity: Women’s Suicide’, in S. R. Suleiman (ed), The Female Body in Western Culture: Contemporary Perspectives (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), p.69.

Reference Women’s Art Magazine, no. 64, May/Jun 1995.

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W

eaving and plaiting, says Freud, are women’s only contributions to civilization. In Femininity1, Freud claims that, through this symbolic invention, women re-enact nature’s art of concealing with pubic hair that which is women’s great genital deficiency. In his discussion of ‘shame’, women literally weave in imitation of their pubic hairs. In this account, weaving imitates the concealment of the womb – the Greek hysteria, the Latin matrix – so that women weave their own veils, weave their own clothing and consequently their own disguises in order to hide the terrifying source of life.2 Despite the implications of Barthes’ claim that the author is dead, the struggle for women to be subjects of and in discourse, disrupts the lens of Freudian theory so that ‘when his patients came into possession of their own stories, Freud believed that they would not have to speak across the body. Yet Freud neglected to ask how women come into possession of their own story, become a subject, when even narrative convention assigns her the place of an object of desire’.3 Female sexual energy is dangerous and pleasurable, angry and chaotic, and remade as in the recasting of text as texture which spins through an ancient link of textile skills and storytelling. But as in Freud’s case, images of women working with cloth reveal a capacity for violence and sexuality which does not always correspond with conforming ideas of delicate stitching or patient virtue. Cloth as used by Clytemnestra is a powerful weapon. She ties Agamemnon up with cloth before she stabs him to death. Images of string, fabric, carpets and netting are interwoven into the story before the murder takes place. An association with netting is one among many textile metaphors which reoccur in We Knitted Braids for Her4 , a first public showing in Britain of textiles produced by the Australian twins, Christine and Irene Hohenbüchler with their sister Heidemarie. They write that textiles are a guiding metaphor to their ideas and working practices. In their exhibition, language, texts and textiles are interwoven to explore the conditions of female subjectivity caught in complex webs of chain knitting, dream diaries and woven

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bundles of cloth. Elongated, knitted scarves with dropped stitches, gaps, and runs cascade from the ceiling near a hospital bed. A vibrantly coloured rug with the sexually charged motif of a pomegranate ‘rests’ inside as if in some private iconic code. Mock hospital cabinets with daisy chain bars are deliberately placed within a stage-set of confusing items. Wall-paintings with legible dates and hand-drawn scribble are interspersed with curiously knitted samples of no use-value. Female voices speak through a collaged tissue of found texts and (later I learn) dream diaries. This audiotape interferes with concentrated vision and the delight of touch so that I begin to feel some sympathy with Tania Guha’s ‘wince with embarrassment’ review in Time Out, especially in relation to ‘folksy’ rugs and tacky knitting. But why? I reminded myself of the struggles to displace such readings from within the purity of perfectly crafted material to the psychoanalytical discourses that might surround it. Can there by a prescriptive and proscriptive conception of ‘proper’ textile practice? Resolved to do battle with myself, I remembered Elaine Showalter’s recollection of a scholarly conference in 1980 when: Germaine Greer made a majestic entrance into the auditorium and withdrew a large roll of knitting from her briefcase. If, with her needles clicking loudly as the men read their papers, she hinted less of Mrs. Ramsay than of Madame Dufrage, nonetheless her presence signalled a return of the repressed ...5

Figure 5 Christine & Irene Hohenbüchler with Heidemarie Hohenbüchler, We Knitted Braids for Her, exhibition view, ICA London, 1995. Including the works: Christine & Irene Hohenbüchler, Glasvitrinen, 1994, Lacquer-coated steel hollow section, glass, aluminium discs, various sizes; Christine & Irene Hohenbüchler, Untitled, 1995, Knittings, each ca. 300 × 50 cm. Courtesy Galerie Martin Jarda.

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The figure of Mrs. Ramsay and the practice of the unfinished knitting feature both metaphorically and literally in We Knitted Braids for Her. As described in the sister’s dream diaries, a ‘text dictionary would alert us that one knits a web, which is a text, Woolf uses the image of Mrs. R’s knitting (an auto-erotic textuality) strategically’.6 Deploying the same non-linear narrative and stream of consciousness techniques that Virginia Woolf uses in To the Lighthouse, the Hohenbüchler sisters’ feelings are frequently performed through the character of Mrs. Ramsay, perhaps to rescue something of her and their own auto-erotic desire? Here, by a process of intimation, an appeal to the female reader and the body is tacitly insinuated as Mrs. Ramsay folds into her body or reverie, an invitation to embark on a journey unravels as if by emphatic relation. A feminine textual body is always without end. There is no finish as the ‘I’ of women’s inner poetic voice gathers a pace of her own. I recall that in Woolf’s writings, the sensual is privileged over the symbolic. Using techniques drawn from linguistics and psychoanalysis, Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray argue that the symbolic represents not only a form of language but a way of thinking and ordering the world to the benefit of men. Via a process of metonymy, the sisters and Mrs. Ramsay mix and mime sensations through interior moments of being; each is entangled with the other. Manifestations of the struggle of female subjectivities, ‘fluids’ over ‘solids’ and melodic movement are continually evoked as I walk through and around the Hohenbüchler sisters’ displays. Do I let myself be read by the texts/textiles here as I move between the sisters’ complementary/contradictory subjectivities and the use of the third person pronoun: ‘her’? There is a lack of an assertive, authorial presence in the exhibition but this creates room for another and the ideas that space and time might exist only through the emergence of woman as the subject of her own discourse. Perhaps this is difficult to comprehend, except through a series of projected identifications with a female imaginary (which in Irigaray’s terms would include cultural production) and ideas about the visceral unconscious. Would these support the Hohenbüchler sisters’ claim in their dream dictionary that ‘knitting corresponds with masturbation’ and the auto-erotic pleasure felt by Mrs. Ramsay in her own time.7 Does Kristeva help here? In Women’s Time the ‘feminine’ is equated with cyclical or monumental time but the ‘masculine’ retains logical connections with the symbolic.8 However the symbolic is evoked through the power of cloth and its rhythms, colours and tones that wrap us to our mother’s bodies.9 A great deal here depends on believing that new forms of language can value the ‘feminine’ in the everyday conscious world which is what I think I hear the Hohenbüchler sisters suggesting; that the raw materials of the semiotic do transgress the linguistic, rational structures of the professional, institutionalized worlds of health and art. Their work could now be read as fluid, productive incoherence and one which resists any final, conceptual or material closure. There are no boundaries or edges. * * * So, I return to Mrs. Ramsay knitting as a sign of her own auto-erotic textuality only to be violated by Mr. Ramsay’s continual interruptions, as the Hohenbüchler sisters’ dreams are broken by (I speculate) the hospital routine and their own conscious actions which they resist and become frustrated by. In 1981, I made a textile piece, woven in dark red sisal, which I called Double Labia. The sisal was a substitute for flesh but I do remember

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ideas that argued for a women’s language as plural, auto-erotic, diffuse and indefinable within the structured rules of a masculine logic. It is one reason why I started to weave and then, as now, am haunted by the spaces of an inner, dream life where the potential specificity of writing in the feminine resides. Where is she? Where am I? Where are the sisters? Between our lips, yours and mine, several voices, several ways of speaking resound endlessly, back and forth. One is never separable from the other you: we are always several at once. And how could one dominate the other? Impose her voice, her tone, her meaning? One cannot be distinguished from the other; which does not mean they are indistinct10

The sisters play with ideas of any unified subject, fracture any single notion of identity and begin to speak from somewhere between the instinctual drives and social practice, but overflowing the boundaries of each. The many voices that appear in We Knitted Braids for Her are literally knitted into the textiles and Irene and Christine Hohenbüchler We Knitted Braids for Her 1995 woven together in the soundtrack. To speak with meanings that are tactile, corporeal and conceptual, reverberate in the plurality of possibilities within the exhibition. Desire, women-as-subjects of their own discourse, this is the link in the chain, the untying of the knot that accentuates breaks in the pattern of the cloth, weave of the web, the dropped stitches in the knit; the sisters invite play. However, it is not just the Hohenbüchler sisters who equate textiles with auto-erotic desire. Sensual and sexual preoccupations with material and processes more commonly associated with textiles, coincide with what Rosalind Krauss has characterized as an instance on the hepatic and textual qualities of contemporary art practice as a critique of ‘antivision’.11 There have been a number of recent exhibitions which have shown work by artists exploring their bodies, sexuality and difference through material stuff and abject mess.12 James Levine has remarked that a reversal of gender roles by male artists permits an appropriation of textile skills, culturally associated with ‘women’s work’ for an exploration of their ‘masculine’ identity and sexuality.13 Moreover, the link between materials and rites of passage, birth and death, is a very poignant reminder of the fragility and precariousness of our lives. The Names Project quilt finds its emotional impact, increased by the quilt’s association with comfort and the loss of sexuality within the context of AIDS. In Mike Kelley’s scatological installations, soft, cuddly toys and blankets do not offer any comfort but serve to explode myths of infantile sexuality and dreams of domestic bliss. As with his contemporaries, traditional forms of heroic media (conventionally associated with painting and sculpture), taste and prescribed forms of sexuality are explored through often very deliberately chosen tacky materials and a low-tech relationship to craft rather than textiles per se. The influence of feminist art practice from the 1970s (remember Miriam Schapiro’s great femmages, Judith Shea’s cloth works and Maureen Connors, readymade garments performed in striptease to reference female textuality) marks a profound transition from the conceptual cool of an eighties slick, expensive commodity aesthetic (except when parodied as in ‘Pretext: Heteronyms’.14 Many male artists using cloth would appear to be in rebellion against a form of conceptual art, Law of the Father kind, which abrogated the aesthetic. Any material and intimate engagement between hands-on making, gendered

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bodies and partial objects seemed denied. Anna C. Chave’s reappraisal of Robert Morris’ sculpture and writings from the 1960s bears this out when she makes an argument for a ‘psycho-sexual dimension to Morris’ trenchant objections to relationships and intimacy, to his insistance on distancing the view, as well as a fixation on keeping his objects discrete and intact’.15 More recently, Meyer Vaisman is quoted as feeling disgusted with the hero-at-work image so beloved of the past and which excluded any questioning of male sexuality within this representation of the artist-as-hero.16 Nonetheless, a critical question as to the implications of an expanded field of textile materials and processes, remain. As with They Knitted Braids for Her, there appears to be a willful disregard of artistic boundaries as the gap between high and low, fine and applied arts, the domestic, private and public, professional worlds are transversed but in whose interests?

Notes 1. Sigmund Freud, ‘Femininity’ in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. by J. Strachey et al (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–74) vol. 23, p.132. 2. Sadie Plant elaborated this point in her lecture ‘Shuttle Systems’ on 15 October 1995 at the J.A. DeSeve Cinema, Concordia University, Montreal. 3. Claire Kahane – In Dora’s Case, reproduced as a preface to Alison Fell, (ed), Serious Hysterics, (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1992). 4. WE KNITTED BRAIDS FOR HER was at the ICA, London, 9 Sep–24 Nov, 1995. 5. Elaine Showalter, ‘Piecing and Writing’ in Nancy K. Miller (ed), Poetics of Gender (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), p.225. 6. Transcript of audio tape accompanying We Knitted Braids for Her exhibition of same title, 2 September-26 November 1995, ICA, London p.5. 7. Ibid. 8. Julia Kristeva, ‘Women’s Time’, in C. Belsey and J. Moore (eds), The Feminist Reader: Essays in Gender and Politics of Literary Criticism (London: Macmillan, 1989), pp.197–217. 9. These ideas of semiotic textiles are explored in Diana Wood Conroy, ‘Texts from the Edge: Tapestry and Identity in Australia’, catalogue essay accompanying exhibition of same title, Jam Factory Craft and Design, 1994, pp 1–5 and Janis Jefferies ‘Touching Material, Reading in Detail’ one of three accompanying essays to Lia Cook’s retrospective exhibition Material Illusions, Oakland Museum of California, USA, 1995. 10. Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One trans by C. Porter and C. Burke (New York: Cornell University Press, 1985) p.209. 11. Rosalind Krauss, ‘Anti-Vision’, October no. 36, Spring (1986), pp.147–54. For a thorough critique of vision’s allegedly superior capacity to provide access to the world of things and people, see Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth Century Free Thought (University of California Press, 1993). Jay argues that an ocularcentric discourse can be linked to phallocentrism and traced through the language of proximity rather than the mortifying spatialisation of the masculine eye, through touch and the economy of flow which is amongst other things tactile. See Luce Irigaray, ‘Questions’ in This Sex Which Is Not One, p.148. 12. ‘Abject Art: Repulsion and Desire in American Art’ catalogue for exhibition of same title (New York: Whitney Museum of Art, 1993). Two essays are helpful to further ideas on materials, fabric and sexuality. These are: Leslie C. Jones, Transgressive Femininity: Art and Gender in the Sixties and Seventies, pp.33–59, and Simon Taylor, The Phobic Object: Abjection in Contemporary Art, pp.60–84. On the relationship between gender, clothing and sexuality, see the catalogue, Empty Dress, Clothing as Surrogate in Recent Art, Nina Felshin, guest curator and essayist

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13. 14.

15.

16.

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(Independent Curators Incorporated: NY, 1993) and on ‘Fabric as Fine Art: Thinking Across the Divide’, see Paula Marincola’s essay in Fiber Arts Magazine, Sep/Oct (1995), pp.34–39. James Levine, ‘Home Boys’, Artforum, October (1991), pp.101–105. There are three textile related works in this exhibition and which was previewed by Juliet Steyn in ‘Subject to Adventure’, Women’s Art Magazine, Nov/Dec 1995, p.18. My interest is in Haden’s work that parodied minimalist formalism through a strategic use of gold cloth and Rae Mae’s thread on canvas work which follows the same non-linear narrative of They Knitted Braids for Her. Rosalind Brodsky’s Suit of the Woman who went to the Russian Revolution in Virtual Reality celebrated a form of cross-dressing. Plenty of multiple subjectivities are pursued. Anna C. Chave, ‘Minimalism and the Rhetoric of Power’, in F. Franscina & J. Harris (eds), Art in Modern Culture: An Anthology of Critical Texts (London: Phaidon, Open University Press, 1992) pp.232–3. Levine: ‘Home Boys’, p.102.

Reference Women’s Art Magazine, no. 68, Jan/Feb 1996.

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INDIFFERENCE IN DIFFERENCE EMMA COCKER INTERVIEWS HELEN CHADWICK

Figure 6 Helen Chadwick, Piss Flowers, 1991–2. Photo: Kippa Matthews. Courtesy Richard Saltoun Gallery & Kippa Matthews.

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Emma Cocker: Would you consider existing systems of representation inadequate to deal with sexuality, pleasure and desire? Helen Chadwick: I have always worked from a personal position rather than trying to critique language and it’s from this personal perspective that I want to try to create an iconography appropriate to explore desire. I won’t say that I haven’t found precedents. I’ve looked at Rococo architecture and painting and feel it’s the birth of abstract art. Autonomous decoration as form. That interests me because it is an aesthetic that is purely about pleasure and a kind of organic flux; constant and dynamic. EC: Are you in a position of dealing with female sexuality? HC: I used the body to explore ideology. Feminism was arguing that you shouldn’t use the naked female body. I disagreed with that and thought that it is really important that one uses one’s own body. I was looking for a way to create a vocabulary for desire where I was the subject, the object and the author. I felt that by directly taking all the roles, I broke down the normal situation of the viewer as a kind of voyeur. The viewer was completely expelled from the sovereign space Of Mutability. The only way to enter the work was through a kind of mirror identification. Rather than trying to see the female as a desired object, you had to feel yourself as a desiring subject. After Of Mutability I needed to find ways of using photographic images that moved away from the overt depiction of my body, a female body. I didn’t know how I could depict my body without being female. It was at this point that I thought if I used the cells of my body, my interior self, then this would be read as ‘human’. It is ironic because when I was producing Ego Geometria Sum and especially Of Mutability I was working against the grain of feminism. Yet towards the end of the 1980s suddenly I found myself in several group exhibitions to do with selfrepresentation and female identity. With hindsight, it seems that a relevant area was opening up and that people strike echoes off each other. Now the field is open for people to pursue idiosyncratic perspectives. AE: Do you think that there will be more people reclaiming the pleasurable, sexualerotic side of sexuality? HC: I think a lot of people are exploring anxieties and the problematic of sexual identity from straight, gay, and female perspectives. Someone like Robert Gober is interesting but his works are uneasy and anxious whereas someone like Matthew Barney is fabulously interesting. His practice seems to be so hybrid. He is part sporty-jock boy and some kind of pagan mythological figure. EC: Your work is deeply seductive but the nature of the seduction is often uneasy. Particularly in Enfleshings, the source of the seduction is difficult to locate. You ask yourself why you respond to the eroticisation of this dead flesh. HC: Because of the curvilinear shape of these pieces and their use of boxed light, they have a depth that is not photographic. Not exactly a sculpture, not exactly an image, and for me that is the space of the body. The confrontation with the object is an intimate encounter with another body that echoes your own. Because it is not given any individuation, – what you are looking at is organic material in

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organic geometry. You can’t thrust it off as being ‘other than you’ because it does not represent another’s body. It is s field of material that could be you, a metaphor for your own self. EC: Is the initial aesthetic attraction a way of enticing the spectator to delve deeper, to look further? HC: Absolutely, I like to draw the viewer compulsively into a piece. Whether this is by way of three-dimensional space as in Of Mutability or Ego Geometria Sum, or by my use of light, or because of very tactile materials or whether there is a title that attracts before the spectator sees the work. In Piss Flowers curiosity drove people along. The papers especially wanted to write a sensational ‘piss artist’ story. When they saw the pieces they were disarmed, it was not what they expected. EC: Is humour a way of getting people to engage with the work? What about Piss Flowers? HC: What a wicked thing to do and call it art! In a way it is more wicked to call it art than to do the thing in the first place. I had no expectation that Piss Flowers would provide artefacts that would be shown. But once we pulled them off the surface of the snow and looked at them, they were so extraordinary, beyond anything that we had conceived that I felt they had a legitimacy as forms. They are accidents; – uncontrolled phenomena. Of all, they are my most erotic work; they were made in collaboration with a lover, rather than in Mutability where there is a projection of self as lover and beloved and I play all the roles which is quite narcissistic. Piss Flowers was a free encounter between two individuals. It’s erotic play. I think this is their power. I think it undermines a reductive discourse. EC: When I first saw Piss Flowers, it was exhibited with a text by Michelle Roberts. HC: One of the things I wanted to do at the time but I never have had the opportunity to do, was to employ six different essays or texts together to demonstrate that there is a multiplicity of possible meanings and readings for the work. So one could introduce a metaphysical love poem, Michelle Robert’s literary fantasy, a text by a doctor, or a more theoretical text by Jack Butler1 – all about gender and indifference. Ultimately there is a dynamic that should spark off readings in the future. Meaning is contingent on so many different things, – it is infinitely flexible. If I have a criticism about my work, it is that it is often too mediated, too controlled. I am constantly looking for ways of introducing some kind of flux or fluidity. EC: Is there not a dichotomy between dealing with the intangible and trying to contain it in visual form? HC: In a way you could argue that putting something you can’t articulate into form is the impetus for any visual work. EC: Do you feel that once you finish the work, the essence of what you were trying to capture has already eluded you? HC: I think in a way that things become less precise. Of Mutability might have been trying to look at a particular feeling or sensation, but it has increasingly become less specific. I couldn’t say that Enfleshings intended to embody a particular feeling or sensation. It came from a desire to produce an unpredictable reaction in which there is some recognition, pretty much blindfolded in the dark.

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EC: Your work is fluid, it is indefinable. It blurs meaning, and leaves the spectator with nothing to base their response on. HC: In a way, the work is a puzzle or riddle. It provokes people, not only for the sake of being provocative but because when someone is made to feel uneasy it rattles their perceptions. I feel that this can be quite pleasurable but I have noticed that some people can’t stand it. If you don’t like play, you won’t like this transgression challenging what you think or what you feel through a pleasurable impulse. One cannot passively watch. The works are not didactic. The spectator has actively to project themselves into the space, it’s a dialogue. EC: You want to touch and make a physical response. HC: It’s wonderful watching people’s hands go out to touch. They do it very cautiously as though the work might bite. EC: Gender distinction is impossible within the work. Is it hermaphroditic or androgynous? HC: Obviously flowers, as the bisexual reproductive organs of plants, have both male and female sexual features and that was one of the reasons that I chose this image. There is also the idea of inversion. People assume that the bit in the middle of Piss Flowers was made by a man. And others think that the small ‘flowers’ were made by a woman. What’s important about this is that people are looking for marks of difference. However, they don’t necessarily interpret things as I would, in that the central phallic column was made by a woman and for me, is a female phallus. I think it also goes a step further. Jack Butler was very perceptive when he discussed an interpretation of the male and the female. To make the point in public I once pulled out a femidom and held it up to ask: if you look at this diaphragm, does it describe the vagina or the penis? In actual fact it marks the point in between, you can read it as a measure of negative or positive space. So Piss Flowers is a diaphragm structure. It exists between male and female and is a measure of both. You can read it either way. This echoes what the experience of sexuality might be like. EC: Is it an echo of sexual experience or does it hark back to a lost ambivalence towards difference? Indifference? HC: Jack Butler saw this as the metaphor of sexual indifference. In a state of sexual intoxication, there is a slippage between male and female, there is a physical breakdown and the two participants are acting in some kind of liminal state. EC: Piss Flowers then, marks a return to a non-gendered sexuality, one that encompasses both the male and the female experiences. HC: I think the chocolate fountain [Cacao] was a variation on this. There was a phallic column but the spectator could read the bubbles as female. It becomes patently absurd to try to differentiate because this work is a pure, raw phenomenon. It is an equivalent for the libido that seems to subvert even individual identity. EC: Language determines the libido to be somehow masculine. There is an imbalance in language. Your work doesn’t refute the existing language laws but suggests that there are limitations, that there is an excess that spills beyond definitions. HC: I took that view at Camera Austria, where I was pretty much pushed into making some kind of stand. The conference was to do with signification, – the sign and

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the commodity and I wanted to show that I didn’t feel at ease with that way of thinking. I took the stand that there are things that exist beyond language. Part of the problem is that if you have to try to embody things, it becomes language. So it is tautological. EC: Is the aim to create a language or an essence?... HC: Or something that can exist and be interpreted through language and has another simultaneous dimension? Something that can harness the unexpected, to interpretations of traditional iconographies and languages? If that were possible, that may be a way, but don’t ask me what this other thing is. I don’t know how to put it into words.

Note 1. Jack Butler, ‘Before Sexual Difference: Helen Chadwick’s Piss Flowers’, in Andrew Benjamin (ed), The Body: Journal of Philosophy and the Visual Arts (London: The Academy Group, 1993).

Reference make: the magazine of women’s art, no. 71. Aug/Sep 1996.

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THE MONSTROUS AND THE GROTESQUE MARSHA MESKIMMON

Exiled and Excess

Figure 7 Jo Spence, Narratives of Dis-ease: Exiled, 1990. C-type print 64 × 40 cm, Copyright the Estate of Jo Spence, Courtesy Richard Saltoun Gallery, London.

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During 1989, Jo Spence collaborated with the doctor Tim Sheard, producing a series of phototherapy works entitled Narratives of Dis-Ease. These five photographs trace the experiences of a cancer patient undergoing medical treatment; the third photograph, Exiled, shows Spence’s exposed torso with the word ‘monster’ scrawled across it. As she put it: ‘I have a hospital gown which I stole from hospital because I needed it as a prop. I have used it in this piece of work. I then opened the gown and wrote ‘monster’ across my chest, because that’s how I experienced myself as a cancer patient: monstrous to other people: ‘How dare you talk about it. I can’t bear to hear your pain. I might get cancer’’.1 The phototherapy works produced by Jo Spence and Rosy Martin often included small pieces of text which were carefully chosen for their personal resonance and their wider, social significance. For example, the words written on the bandages in Martin’s Unwind the Ties That Bind (1988 with Spence) such as ‘pervert’, ‘dyke’, and ‘predator’ not only point to her personal experience of coming out as a lesbian in a homophobic society but are also words used during the House of Commons debate on Clause 28 that same year. How then, does the work Exiled figure in the process of phototherapy and what is the significance of associating the word ‘monster’ with the woman artist and the ageing, injured body of Spence? On one hand, the terminology simply indicates our culture’s oppressive body politics and the emphasis upon young, fit, female bodies as a social ideal. On the other, it links critically the contemporary representations of woman with the clinical gaze of the medical establishment. Working in tandem, these institutions define a rigid norm and create ‘monsters’ from all those who do not fit the pattern. But there is even more to the power of this image. It includes potentially novel models for the articulation of female subjectivity outside the binary tradition which defines woman solely in relation to man. The word ‘monster’, and the associated terms ‘grotesque’ and ‘freak’, have a special relationship to notions of representation, rational scientific knowledge (upon which the structure of oppressive binarism is founded) and the body of woman. Therein lies the potential empowerment of the monstrous and the grotesque for women’s self-portraiture. * * * As both Rosi Braidotti and Mary Russo have detailed in their work on monsters and grotesques respectively, the history of these concepts is inextricably linked to the philosophical and historical development of the natural sciences, particularly biology and medicine. The identification of certain animal forms as deviant was imperative to the activities of rational scientific discourses which sought to describe the norm. The definition of ‘nature’ through science is a cultural project which cannot be separated from the societies it sustains.’2 ‘Monsters’ and ‘freaks of nature’ provided science with an ‘other’ by which to define ‘healthy’ ‘normal’ animals, most significantly being, of course, ‘normal’ human specimens. So-called monsters and freaks were identified, used for experiments, explained and controlled through forms of knowledge which normalised ‘correct’ or ‘proper’ bodies. We should not underestimate the knowledge gained through examining monsters or the significance of the visual paradigm in rational scientific discourse. To see clearly was to know; these monsters were specimens to be seen (inside and outside) in order to be recognised and kept distanced from ‘normal’ humans. We are but one short step from the Victorian freak show.

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That natural science defined monsters in this way suggests how the construction of the category of woman in traditional Western knowledge systems operated through binary divisions of ‘self’ from ‘other’. Woman has been connected to the monster, the grotesque and the freak through biology, rationalism and aesthetics at least since Aristotle sought to describe the development of the (male) foetus by arguing that the development of female forms was deviant.3 Monsters are all about maternity: ‘a misshapen birth, an abortion’, the result of bestiality or a woman’s union with a demon, the product of some trauma delivered to a pregnant woman. Maternity itself is monstrous as it confounds carefully produced boundaries between the mother and child and indeed life and death. The pregnant woman is a shape-shifter whose body itself defies limits and borders throughout the period of gestation. Barbara Creed, writing about the ‘monstrous feminine’, delineated two forms of the phenomenon, one connected with maternity and the other with the vagina dentata, or the castrating woman. Creed’s argument was that the whole notion of the monster was constructed ‘in and through gender difference and female sexuality’.4 But probably the most striking evocation of the monstrous maternal function of woman comes through Mikhail Bakhtin’s trope for the grotesque as a pregnant, senile, laughing hag.5 In that figure coalesce all the boundary-breaking features of woman which make her the ultimate ‘monster’ to man. Aesthetically, the feminine is also connected to the grotesque and the freak. The grotesque was pictorially defined in terms of the particular rather than the heroic and general, or universal. These features of painting and sculpture speak to negated traditions within the Western, academic canon such as the gothic, the fantastic work of Bosch or the low arts of decorative border illustration. The low and grotesque was ‘other’ to the Western fine art tradition which centered upon the monumental, beautiful and universal. Clearly, both in theory and practice, the grotesque was feminine and marginal while the universal was masculine and central. Imagination and rationality play key roles in these definitions. The rational is read as that which can transcend the particular into the universal; masculine rationality is capable of this while feminine intuition and emotion remain fixed to the body and the particular. Thus, masculine thought and imagination become the neutral, transcendent ‘one’ to notions of feminine intuition as ‘other’. Female imagination is always, already monstrous. Significantly, if the grotesque is particular, so the freak is ‘a product of irregular fancy’, therefore associated with deviant femininity. Moreover, one of the models of monstrous conception relies upon thought traumas experienced by pregnant/conceiving women. Braidotti described the presumed process: The mother was said to have the actual power of producing a monstrous baby simply by: (a) thinking about awful things during intercourse ... ; (b) dreaming very intensely about something or somebody; or (c) looking at animals or evil-looking creatures (this is the Xerox-machine complex: if a woman looked at a dog, for instance, with a certain look in her eyes, then she would have the power of transmitting that image to the foetus and reproducing it exactly, thus creating a dog-faced baby).6

What is implied by all of these associations but never made explicit, is that the work of a woman artist, and indeed the woman as artist, is inherently monstrous and grotesque.

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Women cannot but imagine in ways which are deviant. As Sidonie Smith said simply with regard to women autobiographers, ‘the intellectual woman is grotesque’.7 Tracing these connections brings us full circle to re-consider Exiled by Spence. The word ‘monster’ written across her body is precise. The representational strategy makes specific interconnections between art, medicine, science, rationality, display, and the body of this woman artist apparent. The ageing body with its simultaneous lack (partial removal of the breast) and excess (fat) distorts boundaries and becomes monstrous. It is necessary to begin the phototherapy process with just such a staging of those constructions of the ‘self’ which are most oppressive to then be able to transcend these. In no way are these representations meant to secure a fixed, immutable identity. Spence explained: As we view the images and witness their mutability it becomes apparent that ‘truth’ is a construct, and that identity is fragmented across many ‘truths’. An understanding of this frees up the individual from the constant search for the fixity of an ‘ideal self’ and allows an enjoyment of the self as process and becoming.8

Thus, the monster could become an empowering trope for women artists precisely because it cannot be fixed; it is always ‘becoming’, poised on the borders which define female subjectivity negatively in terms of male subjectivity. It permits a space to open up which is neither one nor other, but always participating in both. This is the lost essence of the word ‘monster’ and the place to begin to reconstruct potential new identifications. The archaic definition of ‘monster’ is ‘a divine portent or warning ... a prodigy, a marvel’ and the associated word ‘terata’ which in biology and pathology signifies ‘monstrous formations or births’, originally meant ‘marvel, prodigy, monster’. The Greek root of these words, ‘teras’ was both ‘horrible’ and ‘wonderful’ suggesting the power of the divine and describing what is known as ‘the abject’. Following the lead of such theorists as Julia Kristeva and Elizabeth Grosz, it is clear that the abject is a powerful concept in terms of embodied subjectivity critically linked to woman.9 The abject is that which is neither wholly inside nor outside of the body but participates in both states. It is therefore the marker of the very boundary of the body with society and, as such, is carefully controlled. The abject produces both fear and desire which provides a clear analogy with the monster as both terrible and wonderful. The monster, as a compounded, in between form, defies distinct definition and perpetually threatens to overwhelm its careful policing. A number of women artists over the last two decades have begun to use forms of monstrous or grotesque imagery in their self-portraiture. Unlike Spence’s Exiles, the works have not been concerned particularly with exposing institutions like the medical establishment, but they have been trying to find new means to articulate the positions of women artists without fixing falsely unified subjects. As I have argued elsewhere, the self-portrait form is notoriously difficult to use for subjects such as women and artists of colour who have been marginalised through its traditions and those of postEnlightenment rationalism.10 The tropes of traditional self-portraiture posit exactly that universal and unified subject which it is necessary to challenge in order to come into voice through difference.

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Given the significance of the trope of the monster to concepts of woman, specularity and knowledge, the self-portraiture of artists such as Anne Noggle, Jenny Saville, Diana Thorneycroft and Esther Sayers encourages a dialogue between theories of what Donna Haraway has called ‘the promises of monsters’ and the visual strategies these artists have employed. These artists deal with excessive, borderless bodies, material re-combinations and potentially novel, process-based reconfigurations of themselves. These works provide moments of what Haraway calls ‘artifactualism’, acknowledged constructions of subjects which cannot be fit neatly into either of the categories of ‘self’ and ‘other’; like monsters, they are always both and neither. They remind us of the crucial insight of Haraway into the corporeality of theory: Theory is anything but disembodied. The fanciest statements about radical de-contextualization as the historical form of nature in late capitalism are tropes for the embodiment, the production, the literalisation of experience in that specific mode.11

Indeed, as Elizabeth Grosz has argued in Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporate Feminism, a corporeal ‘universal’ has operated in traditional Western knowledge systems hiding the fact that it is masculine, rather than universal, and requiring the domination of all difference in order to function. The first stage in dismantling this: ... would involve producing new discourses and knowledges, new modes of art and new forms of representational practice outside of the patriarchal frameworks which have thus far ensured the impossibility of women’s autonomous self-representations, thus being temporally outside or beyond itself.12

Hence this work makes manifest the corporeality of theory itself by challenging modes of purely objective seeing/knowing and by confounding definitive distinctions between subjects and objects. They are, as we shall see, dangerous strategies and open to reappropriation, but they are also moves which can provide modes by which marginalised groups can come into voice.

Notes 1. Jo Spence, ‘Cultural Sniper: Passing/Out’, in J. Stanley (ed), Cultural Sniping: The Art of Transgression (London: Routledge, 1995), p.211. 2. Donna Haraway, ‘The Promises of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d Others’ in L. Grossberg et al (eds), Cultural Studies (London: Routledge, 1994), pp.295–337, pp.296–7. 3. Braidotti: Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p.79. 4. Barbara Creed, The Monstrous Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1993), pp.2–3. 5. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. H. Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984) pp.25–6 6. Braidotti: Nomadic Subjects, pp.85–86 7. Sidonie Smith, Subjectivity, Identity and the Body: Women’s Autobiographical Practices in the Twentieth Century (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), p.15. 8. Jo Spence, ‘Phototherapy: Psychic Realism as Healing Art’ (with Rosy Martin), in J. Stanley (ed), Cultural Sniping, p.177

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9. See, for example, Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. L. S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982) and Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Towards Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994). 10. Marsha Meskimmon, The Art of Reflection: Women Artists’ Self-Portraiture in the Twentieth Century (London and NY: Scarlett Press and Columbia University Press, 1996). 11. Haraway: ‘The Promises of Monsters’, p.299. 12. Grosz: Volatile Bodies, p.88.

Reference make: the magazine of women’s art, no. 72, Oct/Nov 1996.

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SUBJECT & (SEX) OBJECT SIMON FORD

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t the beginning of 1976 Cosey Fanni Tutti’s partner, Genesis P-Orridge, wrote in a letter: ‘The [sic] Arts Council have stopped our grant midway, say we are inaccessible (and obscene) ... Now we are really underground again, finance is harder, we survive by prostitution in every form.’1 This article concentrates on just one of these forms of ‘prostitution’, the artworks produced by Cosey Fanni Tutti whilst working as a model for soft- and hard-core men’s magazines between 1973 and 1976. The images arising from these sessions were eventually ‘exhibited’ as part of the exhibition Prostitution held at London’s Institute of Contemporary Art during October 1976. It is the differences and similarities between the two contexts, pornography and art, and the shifts in meaning that the work undergoes between the two that forms this article’s central theme. Of course, by constructing this as the main theme, I do not seek to elide the equally significant shifts in meaning that occur between a male subject’s experience and interpretation of the work and that of a female subject. Before coming to these issues specifically it is necessary to review Tutti’s work in the context of her artistic development as a whole. In 1972, Tutti adopted her new name, a corrupted version of Mozart’s 1790 opera Cosí fan tutte. This adoption of a pseudonym was an early instance of Tutti’s interest in masquerade and the construction of multiple feminine identities. P-Orridge and Tutti left Hull in July 1973 after securing a studio in SPACE Studios, Hackney, London. It was at this point that Tutti began working as a model and COUM established themselves within the performance art movement in London and abroad. The major turning point for COUM and Tutti came in October 1976 when they took part in Prostitution. Tutti realized that sexuality was a subject central to both male and female experience and believed that it was necessary for her to explore it at all levels of cultural expression. Thus she situated herself at one extreme of the polarised debate over increasing liberalisation which saw pornography as the battle ground for the struggle over ‘morally acceptable’ images of sexuality. The gambit played by Tutti was to reverse the existing power relations between the artist and the model. In Tutti’s case it was the model who

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Figure 8 Cosey Fanni Tutti, Fiesta, Vol. 10, No. 7, 1975. Courtesy of the artist and Cabinet, London. ultimately claimed the work and the status of artist. The model as artist was vocal and active and possessed a shifting identity that negated the usually passive, silent, objectified role of the model as erotic spectacle, object of the gaze of the male artist and audience. Tutti’s works for magazines were claimed for the status of art when they were described as part of COUM’s strategy to make art more accessible through the utilisation of pre-existent channels of communication outside the art world. This notion of infiltrating popular culture was described by COUM as ‘subliminal performance art’.2 Generally though, Tutti disagreed with the use of ‘performance art’ to describe her work because of its entertainment connotations. She preferred instead the term; ‘action art’.

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The idea of publishing artworks in magazines was already a strategy adopted in the mid-1960s by Dan Graham when he placed artworks, disguised as advertisements or articles, into magazines. Thus in Homes for America (1966–67) he introduced a photo essay on ‘tract’ housing developments into the pages of Arts Magazine. For him the meaning of these magazine works was ‘contingent upon the specific meaning of each of its appearances ... This work functions as both art and art criticism.’ All work, he believed, carried out in an ‘existing situation’ has to be re-presented in an art context for it to function as an artwork. Similarly, it was only at the moment when Tutti’s works for magazines were named as ‘performance art’ in the legitimating context of an art magazine that the work began to function as both art and art criticism. The next stage in this process of legitimisation was for them to be exhibited in an art gallery, in this case the ICA.3 The outrage at Prostitution followed on from a debate that had started earlier that year relating to Carl Andre’s Bricks at the Tate Gallery. This ‘debate’ had been further sensitised by Mary Kelly’s exhibition of her work-in-progress Post-Partum Document (1973– 1979) at the ICA immediately before Prostitution. The main source of controversy for the newspaper reporters concerning Kelly’s work was her use of soiled nappy liners. An admittedly summary reading of Kelly and Tutti’s work reveals that each represented, at this time, opposite sides of the debate within feminism concerning images of women. In Kelly’s Post-Partum Document literal depiction of the female body and child were denied in favour of forms of representation ‘to avoid any means of representation that risked recuperation as a slice of life’.4 The press furore accompanying Prostitution was instrumental in the marginalisation of Tutti’s role in the production of the exhibition, since P-Orridge was often portrayed as the sole artist responsible for the exhibition. When Tutti was named it was often to demonise her and exaggerate her involvement in the sex industry. Seen in the context of COUM’s work up to 1976, Prostitution was the culmination of a practice that had inevitably, given the nature of the group’s male/female collaboration, drawn on notions of sexual difference as a recurring theme and structuring principle. Tutti wrote of her collaboration with P-Orridge ‘when we worked together we were never working ‘together’ as such. We would both work individually but within the same space and quite often the difference between us would be the masculine and feminine version ...’5 Linked to these concerns, COUM’s repeated use of vaginal imagery in their mail art and menstrual blood and tampons in their actions was no mere prurient sensationalism, it was a serious effort to demystify and affirm key elements of female experience commonly repressed as mysterious and shameful. The confusion of gender roles was also a significant theme running through much of Tutti and P-Orridge’s work. During 1974 and 1975 P-Orridge often took on the persona of the cross-dressing ‘Crystal P-Orridge’ and in the 1974 action Orange and Blue at Art Meeting Place, London, he, dressed in orange labourer’s wear, and Tutti, dressed in a blue dress, slowly swapped their clothing and thus the superficial signs that registered their gender. P-Orridge’s career as a male model in his own right was confined to an appearance as a £10 prize winner in Health and Efficiency. P-Orridge and Tutti though appeared together in at least two issues of pornographic magazines, both published after Prostitution. These sessions could be compared with the more recent collaboration between Jeff Koons and Ilona Staller (La Cicciolina).

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The main difference was that their series Made in Heaven (1989–1991) – which consisted of explicit but aestheticised images of themselves performing various sexual acts – was made specifically for an art world audience. Within the performance art movement COUM’s work was most closely associated with that category known as ‘body art’ and it is within this wide-ranging project to test the body’s physical and psychological limits as medium, object and subject that Tutti’s work for magazines should be situated. Women artists were often at the forefront of the ‘body art’ genre but their specific contributions were often marginalised or misunderstood by male critics or found to be problematic by feminist critics. In 1976, Lucy Lippard voiced her misgivings about the type of work artists like Tutti were producing 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.’6 Another early attempt to situate women’s body art within the terms of a feminist critique of ‘images of women’ was Lisa Tickner’s 1978 article in which she made a brief but ultimately negative reference to Tutti’s work as ‘those who claim an art form out of being ‘intentionally’ exploited like Cosey Fanni Tutti of the COUM group ... shift the meaning of the work, however serious its original or possible intentions, from parody to titillation.’7 The problem for Tutti, as identified by both Lippard and Tickner, lay in how she could investigate pornographic imagery and present her findings without merely reproducing that culture’s prejudices and values. In the context of the initial publication of the magazines themselves Tutti could not escape from being ‘reduced’ to the role of an interchangeable fetishised object of private male sexual fantasy. But where Tutti’s roles were multiplied, as in the public exhibition, to become subject and object, artist and model, viewer and viewed, the work became difficult to consume as pornography. It was this difficulty, for the male gaze especially, in ‘fixing’ Tutti, when she presented herself so openly to the gaze that de-eroticised the imagery. The power conventionally located in the male gaze was undermined by the way in which Tutti combined artistic display with the sheer excess of pornographic spectacle. Tutti’s works for magazines began to operate explicitly as critique when they were re-presented away from their ‘original’ context, and read according to the terms of another discourse. Tutti’s work could not avoid addressing issues relating to the male consumption of images of the female body. But Tutti’s project was not meant to provide a critique of pornography alone; it also encompassed a critique of the wider tradition of the beautified female nude and its historical and cultural power to define a feminine ‘ideal’. Whilst artistic nudes and erotic photography were sanctioned because of their associations with a patriarchal high art tradition, pornography was demonised because of its association with a debased and illicit mass culture. One of the many taboos broken by Tutti and COUM in Prostitution was to exhibit mass cultural ‘ephemera’ as high art artefacts. The pages from the magazines were signed and framed behind glass and the selling price of each piece was suitably inflated to reflect their new status as artworks. Additionally, Tutti’s work also referred to the genre of self-portraiture and can be compared to the work of Cindy Sherman. However, unlike the sense of control manifested in Sherman’s self-portraits (in particular those produced during 1980, and 1982) Tutti’s contribution

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to the construction of her imagery was less determinate, but purposively so. But this indeterminacy was equally intentional and controlled. The contrast between the artists’ work can be further refined when considering a particular series of Sherman’s works for a 1984 issue of French Vogue in which she produced fashion photographs which disrupted the stereotypical vision of beauty. In the debate over whether pornography should be censored, Tutti was quite obviously on the side of the anti-censorship campaigners which was then, unlike now, very much a minority viewpoint within the feminist movement. The freedom for her to deploy her body as she saw fit was perceived by her as a form of empowerment. The exhibition of her work for magazines was a means towards the repossession of an identity that refused to be tied to a feminine ideal or a ‘true’ self. At the time of Prostitution Tutti wrote, ‘I project myself into the role of ‘model’ knowing fully what is happening and what to expect. To me it is predictable. The only thing that invisibly sets me apart is my perception of things.’8 As this statement made clear Tutti saw her work as a model as one of role-playing, a form of acting and masquerade, and what distinguished her from the other models was ‘invisible’ and thus almost negligible and did not become ‘visible’ until her work for magazines was exhibited at the ICA. Even here her ‘perception of things’ was intended to be presented in the simplest and most neutral way possible, in clip-frames, arranged in grids, with no explanatory text other than that provided by the magazines themselves. It was COUM’s intention to leave interpretation of the work as open as possible: ‘In relation to art theory and documentation we thought it was more important to leave gaps so that people had space to think for themselves, it wasn’t in black and white for them. We didn’t want to explain how the work was produced and what it meant’.9 This aversion to closure of an artwork’s meaning was a recurring theme in COUM’s work. In each case, it was the viewer that brought his/her gendered experience and values to the work and it was the viewer who was forced into reflecting upon his/her own gendered role in the construction of the work’s meaning. There were at this time few, if any, precedents for this type of work and this lack of reference goes some way to explaining Tutti’s, the audience’s and the critic’s difficulty in situating the work within existing theoretical contexts or critical discourses, including that of feminism and performance art. Tutti was thus unwilling to utilise feminism as a context within which her work should be read, except that it was obviously the cultural expression of a particular woman’s experience in the sex industry. What makes Tutti’s work relevant today has much to do with the current reappraisal of the work of her contemporaries, the now canonical ‘women’s art’ of artists such as Carolee Schneeman, Marina Abramović, Francesca Woodman, Hannah Wilke, Valie Export, Gina Pane and Lynda Benglis. Since the late 1970s the number of artists employing their body (make, issue 80, Jun – Aug 98) as the subject and object of their art has continued to multiply, with other examples being Helen Chadwick, Sophie Calle, Cindy Sherman, Annie Sprinkle, and ORLAN. It is telling that, whereas Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document eventually became recognised as one of the ‘paradigmatic feminist artworks’10 Tutti’s work for magazines has hardly ever been discussed. Such amnesia may partly be due to the circumstances of its display, that it was never exhibited in its intended form. COUM were persuaded by the ICA, The Crown Commissioners (who owned the ICA’s lease), and the Arts Council of

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Great Britain to desist from hanging Tutti’s works for magazines on the wall. Instead the ‘offending’ images were stored away in white containers and could only be viewed one frame at a time. The intended public spectacle of the works for magazines was negated through censorship and replaced by the public spectacle of the journalist induced scandal and the ‘mug-shot’ images of Tutti and P-Orridge as ‘deviants’. The content of the exhibition and the work’s intentions were thus distorted beyond recognition. Just what the massed ranks of images of Tutti would have looked like, and what kind of effect this would have had on the reception of the work, is now something that can only be imagined. Viewed in their intended form the works would have partly functioned as a critique of the industrialisation of sex and a subversion of the magazine’s tendency to objectify the women appearing in their pages. The repetition of images of Tutti – in a variety of roles, costumes, settings, poses and activities – would have destroyed the illusionistic principles and generic coherency necessary for them to function as pornography. This particularly powerful spectacle of the multiplicity of possible gender roles, all of course circumscribed by the aims and objectives of the commercialised sex magazines, would have distanced and made public that which was usually an intimate and private male experience. Unfortunately, in the process of censoring the exhibition, the images were returned to the private realm. This worked against Tutti’s intentions to display the work in public as her artwork and thus invite a new female gaze not catered for by the pornographers. Both sexes before this work would have been put in the uncomfortable position of viewing in public what is customarily only encountered in private. By re-presenting the work for magazines as art Tutti reclaimed both the work and her image. This appropriation was registered graphically by the addition to the magazines of that ultimate symbol of authentication, the artist’s signature. It was only as signed art behind glass that Tutti was able to begin to redirect the production, distribution, and consumption of this imagery. The strength of the work lay in its play on artistic ‘authenticity’ and for this to register there had to be a certain loss of control and agency in the studio stages of its production. It was this ability to draw on ‘real’ experiences as a ‘real’ model in the fantasy world of pornography that made the work so difficult to reconcile at the time. Today it is this explicit play on notions of authenticity and identity through a foregrounding of pornography as a signifying system that marks out Tutti’s works for magazines as a significant contribution to the feminist critique of an essentialised femininity.

Notes 1. Genesis P-Orridge, Letter to the editor dated 10 January 1976, Vile, vol. 3, no. 2, Summer (1977), p.31. 2. Genesis P-Orridge and Peter Christopherson, ‘Annihilating Reality’, Studio International, no. 982, July/August (1976), p.45. 3. See Simon Ford, ‘Doing P-Orridge’, Art Monthly, no. 97, June (1996), pp.9–12. 4. Mary Kelly, Post-Partum Document, (London: Routledge, 1983), p.xvii. 5. Cosey Fanni Tutti, Time to Tell (London: Conspiracy International, 1993). Quote from page 8 of booklet accompanying the CD. 6. Lucy R. Lippard, ‘The pains and pleasures of rebirth: European and American women’s body art’, in From the Center: Feminist Essays on Women’s Art (New York: Dutton, 1976), pp.123–125.

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7. Lisa Tickner, ‘The body politic: female sexuality and women artists since 1970’, in Art History, vol. 1, no. 2, June (1978), p.246. 8. Tutti quoted in Genesis P-Orridge, ‘Performance art/COUM Transmissions’, ICA Magazine, October (1976). 9. Tutti, Interview with author, 11 November 1995. 10. Catherine Lupton, ‘Circuit- breaking Desire: Critiquing the Work of Mary Kelly’, in J. Roberts (ed), Art Has No History! The Making and Unmaking of Modern Art (London: Verso, 1994), p.235.

Reference make: the magazine of women’s art, no. 80, Jun/Jul/Aug 1998

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THE BODY IN QUESTION: TRANSGENDER IMAGES IN CONTEMPORARY VISUAL ART JUDITH HALBERSTAM

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ike a sly pun on the meaning of ‘inversion’, Jenny Saville’s painting of transgender photographer Del LaGrace Volcano turns the body inside out, upside down and forces the viewer to contemplate the image of a man trapped outside a woman’s body. First you see the genitals, splayed out like a slab of meat on a butcher’s block. Then, as your eye travels up the scary and distorted landscape of an ostensibly female body, you come face to face with the ruddy and bearded visage of the model and, inevitably, you must now travel back down the pink slopes of breast and belly to see if this head belongs to this vagina. The body is just barely draped over the platform, half on and half off, the head slumped and lifeless, one breast endlessly falling to earth, pulled downward by gravity and the other breast seemingly moving in some other direction. Body parts hang and droop, smudge and blur into an approximation of ambiguous flesh; the model looks uncomfortable, the viewer shares in his discomfort and the artist deliberately frames the whole as a study in body dysphoria. Transgender images are popping up in contemporary art with as much frequency nowadays (and often in the same spaces) as fish in formaldehyde and religious figures in elephant dung. In other words, where transgression is called for (and transgression is always called for) a gender ambiguous image is never far behind. But we have recently witnessed very particular renderings of the transgender theme: now, at the start of the twenty-first century, it tends to be the female-to-male (FTM) transgender body which captures the popular imagination and the avant-garde eye alike. And it is in these intimations of new or ‘other’ masculinity that gender takes an unexpected turn. In his essay ‘On Being a Jenny Saville Painting’, LaGrace Volcano discusses the strange ‘out of body experience’ that he had while posing for another artist as a woman. As Saville took pictures of what LaGrace Volcano calls his ‘naked and corpulent hybridity’, he feared that her photographs and the final painting might ‘dislocate and/or diminish my transgendered maleness’. Having carefully created and sustained his own ‘mutant maleness’,

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LaGrace Volcano feels threatened by the sheer excess of the Saville portrait, its curves and crevices, its gynaecological, intrusive gaze. And yet, LaGrace Volcano’s mutant maleness survives the painting. Indeed, it becomes the very point of the painting, highlighting the exaggerated quality of all gender; the body attached to LaGrace Volcano in Saville’s Matrix, 1999, resembles the remains of a gender once femaleness has been scooped out of the flesh and pushed to the side like a half-eaten meal. Saville’s transgender portrait of LaGrace Volcano is, of course, no more or less grotesque than her other paintings of rearranged female flesh. Whether her female subjects have been surgically altered or simply captured at a particularly undignified angle, women’s flesh in these paintings just looks excessive and somehow hyper-natural. For Saville, femaleness resides in the flesh but comes apart at the seams, bleeds over the

Figure 9 Jenny Saville, Closed Contact No.9, 1995–96. Photo: Glen Luchford. C-print mounted on plexiglass 72 × 72 × 6 inches/ 182.9 × 182.9 × 15.2cm. Edition of 6. © Jenny Saville and Glen Luchford. Image courtesy of the Gagosian Gallery.

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edges of the body and makes us unsure as to the limits of skin or self. LaGrace Volcano in his work, on the other hand, makes gender a sleight of hand and his photographs of drag kings and FTM transsexuals as well as his self-portraits over the last 15 years make the body into a canvas for spectacular and often highly aestheticised gender transformations. In his collection Transgenital Landscapes, LaGrace Volcano lovingly fetishises the testosterone enhanced clits, the ‘dick-lits’ of FTMs, daring the viewer to laugh at or reject the hormonally managed genitalia. In the Mutantselves series, he makes and remakes his own look, refusing to make biology into the platform for identity and in fact expressing minute changes in gender registers through facial expressions and casual gestures. While LaGrace Volcano may squirm under the photographic gaze of another artist, he seems perfectly at ease being the auto-biographical, indeed auto-erotic subject of his own camera. In a new work, LaGrace Volcano gives his newly FTM transgender persona a good tweak and appears now as Debby Would, a mutation of his old femme self from way back, Debby Wood. As Debby, a manic, wannabe glam diva, LaGrace Volcano grimaces and glares at the camera, supermodel one minute, supersuburban mum the next, super tranny the next. Never content to let a gender identity settle completely into his bones, LaGrace Volcano leaps from one creation to another and in the same Mutantselves series, morphs back into a gay boy, an older balding man and an ‘androskin’ clone. As Balding Del, LaGrace Volcano looks sinister, grey and oddly sick. This photograph belies the myth of testosterone as the wonder drug which imparts sexual energy and new life to the FTM. Here the testosterone has worked its magic only into a male balding pattern and the slight sneer on the mutant man’s face hints at the ‘side-effects’ of becoming male. In Androskin, gender markers are literally removed from the flesh as a platinum head leaps out from a checked background and returns the gaze with a fearful intensity. While Androskin refuses to suggest maleness or femaleness in any explicit way, it is not beyond gender or genderless. Indeed, Androskin captures the instability of the transgender body as it shuttles back and forth between the wholly inadequate poles of male and female; gender becomes a skin effect and here it is whiteness in particular which marks the spot where distinct gender has been lost in a photographic flash. LaGrace Volcano seems to be quoting Robert Mapplethorpe’s similarly featureless, hairless head of Ken Moody (1983) in this piece as well as his own earlier marble-like photography of the hairless and bald bodies of The Three Graces. While LaGrace Volcano’s work turns the whiteness of his models into androgynous alabaster body moulds, Mapplethorpe never loses sight of the over determined relations between blackness and masculinity and his photograph makes the model into a still life without freezing his gender codes. LaGrace Volcano’s Mutantselves pull him in multiple directions at once; one moment he is sensationally all woman and the next he is tragically all man. In one frame, a wide-eyed Glammadeb bursts out of the frame and in the next the Androskin seems to be leaping out of its own indeterminacy. Another contemporary artist who uses alteregos to explore the complicated visual space of transgender reinvention is Brian Dawn Chalkley.

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THE BODY IN QUESTION

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Relying not at all on the trickery of visual gender attribution, Chalkley deliberately makes his gender work voice-activated. In his video I Probably Want Perfection in Everything and a Little More: Maybe That’ll be My Downfall, Chalkley effectively splits his selves between Brian and Dawn and allows them to communicate; the soundtrack of their conversation in a transvestite pick up bar runs across the visual image of a large woman/transvestite lying lifeless in a floodlit forest while night creatures fly back and forth in front of the camera light. The spooky combination of the inert body and the lively insects makes it hard to concentrate on the banter between Brian and Dawn, all of which is rendered in one male voice. As so many transsexuals will attest, the voice can be a major giveaway in the gender guessing game. A dashing and handsome figure with a high voice, or a buxom beauty with a deep bass growl can confuse or even anger an unsuspecting listener who may have already made a confident gender attribution which must now be reversed. Chalkley does not attempt to make his voice higher when speaking as Dawn or lower when speaking as Brian; instead he just patters on at an even and banal clip as the transvestite and her John exchange irrelevant information before deciding to leave the bar together. The ominous image laid out on its bed of leaves in the background of the shot, however, suggests that the subsequent encounter slipped violently from desire to rage. Chalkley’s transvestite shows no marks of trauma as she lies in the forest seemingly dead to the world, her back to the camera, her gender in doubt. If we return to Jenny Saville’s paintings, we notice the way Saville literally paints trauma into and onto the raw f lesh; she tattoos the skin with the demands that have been made of it and she binds the f lesh in its own undergarments. And in her image of LaGrace Volcano, she brutally marks the disjunction between the female f lesh and the male head, the unruly body and the ego ideal. Like Chalkley’s mute mound of transvestite, the hilly female in Saville’s painting also seems to ‘want perfection in everything’ and for both of them, that will be their downfall. This search for perfection, for the match between body and gender-ideal which LaGrace Volcano’s own work gleefully disdains, sows the seeds of violence against men who have been women and women who have been men. One of the most brutal and perhaps enduring images of the violence directed at the transgender body can be found in the surprisingly popular independent film Boys Don’t Cry by Kimberly Peirce. At the heart of this narrative, based upon the life and death of Nebraskan transgender man Brandon Teena, is a brutal rape designed to expose Brandon once and for all as a woman and punish him for trying to be a man. Hilary Swank’s masterful performance as Teena reaches an apex in the scene where she has to be vulnerable and scared while holding on to Brandon’s immutable sense of himself as not female. In the face of rape, forcible penetration and a severe beating, Swank sustains Teena’s masculinity and renders it as much a fact of nature and culture as the dusty prairies of Nebraska. All of these recent representations of the indeterminately gendered body in art, film and video recognise violence as an intimate part of the transgender landscape in the

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Figure 10 Brian Dawn Chalkley, I Probably Want Perfection in Everything …, (video still), 1998–9. Courtesy of the artist. late-twentieth century. All of them recognise also the day to day violations that threaten the integrity of the transgender body, the blows of indignity and humiliation that make a carefully constructed self-image look and feel as if it cannot hold together for much longer. But the power of this work, in the end, is that by visualising the nightmare of the body coming undone – the flesh spilling over it boundaries, the well wrought identity slipping out of place – it allows the body to carry on, flawed, imperfect, tremulous and always in question.

Reference make: the magazine of women’s art, no. 88, Jun/Jul/Aug 2000.

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INTRODUCTION

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uring the time period of The Magazine’s run, the issue of representation in art theoretical discourse was loosely associated with post-structuralist and postmodernist theories. According to the latter, representation is a second order system of signification in which codified images and signs confer identity on things. However, representation in this section has three main orientations: form-giving; quantification; and the politics of signification, the latter relating more overtly to poststructuralist and post-modernist theory. Form-giving has to do with how the female body and female experience are given form in terms of what Hilary Robinson, in her text in this section, refers to as ‘visual or verbal imaging’. Quantification relates both to the numbers of women artists represented in galleries and museums as well as to the quantity of images of the female body and/or female experience in art. The former abound in the overdetermined visual economy of Western culture which categorises the female body as, on the one hand, a symbol of purity, truth, and beauty, and, on the other hand, of monstrosity and abjection, thereby making representation of the female body a particularly fraught subject for feminist-inspired art. Feminist-inspired art incorporates female experience into representation, both to challenge the canon and to provide an alternative to it. This has led to one of the key debates in feminist art practice, often framed as a division between artists accused of ‘essentialism’, i.e. grounding representation in an anatomical female body and in female experience, and those accused of being ‘deconstructionist’, i.e. artists committed to exploring the social and political construction of the category of ‘Woman’. This split, which had particular force in the US, also created false dichotomies between artists’ practices here in the UK, as testified to in the texts in this section by Robinson and Christine Battersby. Robinson discusses how the UK camps of ‘deconstructionist’ and ‘essentialist’ positions denied ‘fruitful crossovers’ between them. The former’s use of psychoanalytic theory as a tool to analyse female desire and women’s place in the social order of patriarchy was categorized as alienating to female experience. Painting was seen as more conducive to the latter in a view that considered both to be intuitive and preverbal, although, as Rebecca Fortnum’s and Gill Houghton’s 1989 text explores, women painters were

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searching for theories that could allow them to articulate their interests in abstract painting in ways that differed from modernist discourses of abstraction. All forms and practices have to interrogate the conditions and contexts of their making. For Battersby, this not only means reclaiming aesthetics from the Kantian inspired extremism developed in the nineteenth century, but also the more constitutive representational goal of establishing female artists’ oeuvres in the framework of art historical appreciation, a position she sees as being at odds with Griselda Pollock’s concentration on the social historical explanation of women’s artistic practices. The tensions and continuities between ‘essentialism’ and ‘deconstructionism’ can be traced throughout this section beginning with Marilyn Crabtree’s review of Mary Kelly’s Interim, Part 1: Corpus, 1984–5. Crabtree’s is an early critical account published in 1986 in the Women Artists Slide Library Newsletter, thence the brevity of the text, but its importance in this anthology lies in how it unapologetically situates Kelly’s ‘scriptovisual’ practice in terms of female experience and women’s cultural lives more generally. Interim is most often considered as a social and historical document that articulates ‘the post-modern complexities of subjectivity’ putting the ‘figurations of femininity’ under scrutiny in relation to the signifying systems in which they are constructed.1 Experience here loses a sense of the intuitive and the tacit in favour of incorporating women’s desire into history by intervening in established systems of knowledge and power. Monica Bohm-Duchen’s review of Susan Hiller’s Monument, 1986, is also an early example of feminist-inspired art criticism. Bohm-Duchen’s approach uses Hiller’s own words to describe a strategy of focusing on the fragment as a non-hierarchical means of representation that rejects a ‘unifying (male) discourse’. Feminist-inspired art is not simply about female experience per se, but a whole gamut of art historical and formal problems which become magnified for the female artist, but which are necessary to address in order to avoid promulgating modernist principles that are unwittingly destructive of female experience and genealogy. As we move into the 1990s, there is a shift from more collective considerations of female experience in art practice and debate to a more subjective sense of transgressive desire. Sadie Murdoch, in her review of a key UK exhibition of the 1990s, Fetishism, critiques what she sees as a dilution of a social and political agenda in favour of the illicit and transgressive kudos of fetishism. Fetishism as a concept was celebrated as being resistant to the patriarchal order given its psychoanalytic categorisation as a perversion of the patriarchal tenor of the Oedipal narrative. But, without proper attention being paid to the potential for transforming the concept to incorporate specifically female forms of fetishism, the latter, as Murdoch argues, may end up reiterating ‘the props of male castration anxiety’.2 Lorraine Gamman’s interview with The Guerrilla Girls directly addresses the work of representation in relation to women artists’ visibility. The Guerrilla Girls’ textual tactics in posters and banners expose the lack of representation of women artists in galleries and museums, mainly in the US. This interview, conducted on a visit to the ICA, London in 1995, is notable for making a distinction between the UK and the US art worlds in the mid 1990s. Both Gamman and the Guerrilla Girls consider the UK art world to be less market-driven, this allowing for more equal representation in galleries.

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According to the insights of this interview, there was a backslide occurring in the US in 1995 in relation to the numbers of women artists and artists of colour being represented in exhibitions and museums there. Gamman’s view that the UK art world is more equal might seem naïve in hindsight, especially in relation to the market driven legacy of the yBA phenomenon, but it is of interest historically and in relation to possible futures, as is the Guerrilla Girls’ US perspective on feminism in art in the UK as having a lack of solidarity and being befuddled by individualism.

Notes 1. Griselda Pollock, ‘Interventions in History’, Women Artists Slide Library Journal, no. 33 (Mar/ Apr 1990), p.14. 2. See Lorraine Gammon and Merja Makinen, Female Fetishism (New York, 1995), for an exploration of female forms of fetishism, especially in relation to food.

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INTERIM MARILYN CRABTREE

Figure 11 artist.

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Mary Kelly, Interim: Part 1: Corpus, detail Supplication, 1985. Courtesy of the

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INTERIM

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INTERIM is the overall title given to Mary Kelly’s latest project, concerned with the representation of women in middle age. It is based on over a hundred conversations with women which, Mary Kelly says, ‘focus on the recurring themes of body, money, history and power’. Part I, CORPUS, was shown at the Riverside Studios, London, 24 Sep – 19 Oct and also at Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, and The Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, in Autumn 1985. Corpus consists of thirty panels of paired image and text, combining laminated photo positives, screenprints and painting on perspex. The panels are divided into five sections of three pairs under the titles of Menacé, Appel, Supplication, Erotisme, Extase. These were five ‘passionate attitudes’ poses defined by Dr. J. M. Charcot, a French nineteenthcentury neuropathologist, as expressing the symptoms of sexual desperation in his hysterical female patients. Dr. S. Freud was interested in Charcot’s studies into hysteria and hypnosis; his work of psychoanalytic enquiry, its concern with sexual identification and difference and his construction of femininity, mainly in terms of sexuality, as a problem, an enigma, came later. A piece of bodywear or accessory is the subject of the image as a series of three, under each ‘passionate attitude’: Thus a leather jacket, a bag, a pair of boots, a nightdress, a white dress, move from appearing new, neat and orderly to a degree of disorder and a kind of forced exposure to reveal the inside (the lining of the boot, the open necked dress) through to self-imposed constraint and bondage (its straps tie the bag’s middle, its lacy armholes constrict the waist of the nightdress). Accompanying each image, the texts are highly personal handwritten ‘stories’, the unfolding experiences of a woman striking poses corresponding to the ‘discourses of fashion, popular medicine and romantic fiction to show how woman is defined primarily by her body in its procreative capacity and as a fetishised object, representations from which a woman in middle age is predominantly excluded’. The stories involve a huge emphasis on appearance, a desperate struggle to ‘get it right’, shifting to preoccupation with the body ‘fight the dreaded flabby thigh’ and its inability to meet the requirements of ideal femininity as the ageing process continues. The third text in each section often ends up in romantic dreams or idealised situations, tempered by a note of passive acceptance of reality. The way out, the answers are here posed in terms of ‘Prince Gold Hand and his Princess’, a perfect island, a ‘boat, a cave, a castle and someone else to do the cooking’. There is an underlying reluctant voice in the stories, a woman who somehow knows her fate within society’s prescriptions for her, but who is also bewildered and questions from an uncertain place. In the last section of Extase, the white dress, (‘simple, silk, embroidered bodice, gathered at the waist, full skirt falling just below the knee’) the final romance is enacted. She leaves behind her jeans, boots and black leather jacket, symbols of rebellion of another kind of femininity. It is an escape into a happy family, a land of ‘good-enough’ mothers; in a fairy tale land of dwarfs and champagne, a life of happy ever after. Woman is finally obliterated by her own wishes, her desire to exist as female in patriarchal culture. Corpus is a very complex, striking, and, for me as a woman caught up in a similar web of social definitions and constraints, an endlessly fascinating show. I also found it

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peculiarly comforting because it is such a familiar terrain. Partly, I only wish it wasn’t. The stories and juxtaposed images set up tensions, resonances and questions for us. You can make of it what you will. Mary Kelly talked about psychoanalysis, sexuality and representations of the body in relation to her recent work at the Riverside Studios on October 11. A catalogue of the show is available with an essay by Laura Mulvey. In this catalogue we are told how Mary Kelly’s art is directed within a context which seeks social change and how it uses the ‘heterogeneity of society’s discourses to expose the multiplicity of structuring systems and cultural representations at work’. In fact, Corpus glaringly makes us aware of the restrictive narrowness of society’s discourses that women are legitimately allowed to enter. It also encompasses the negative aspects of the practices of many women’s cultural lives; there is little consciously present here about the enjoyment of clothes, bodies (a lot of guilt and dissatisfaction), friendships. Is social change, for women, likely to come about from the use of nineteenth-century reference points of female hysteria defined in terms of sexuality? Would it not be better to forget aspects of Dr. Freud, forgo patriarchal psychoanalysis as far as representation is concerned, and break out of the bondage of our female sexual selves? The so called ‘problem of female sexual desire’ referred to by Laura Mulvey won’t be resolved by seeing it as such or hypnotically concentrating on it. The riddle of the nature of femininity, as Freud posed it, won’t be solved by us becoming ‘mommies’ either, as Mary Kelly refers to in Extase. The metaphorical inferences of Corpus that we are masochistically in bondage to ourselves, that our desires in culture across a limited number of discourses are our own undoing, just as the female hysteric’s neurosis was the fault of her sex (hysteria means uterus/womb) is a depressing viewpoint with a closed circularity. We are constrained because we are women. The questioning voice in Mary Kelly’s show – ‘the gap’ – is not loud or firm enough for me. As Maya thinks, in Menacé, perhaps there is a certain freedom attached to getting older. To be liberated from having a primarily sexual identity through a fetishised physical appearance and motherhood, and breaking open the possibility of truly participating in the heterogeneity of society’s discourses, would certainly confirm this. The aim surely is to widen out women’s lives, not re-seal them into their secondary status by redirecting them into the arena of our desire. Being reminded so forcefully of our desperation and cultural disappearance in middle age, and ending up in a romantic dreamworld of fairy tales and non-existence, as Mary Kelly’s Corpus ultimately suggests, does not necessarily help us live out the material reality of our ‘Interims’ and the rest of our lives.

Reference Women Artists Slide Library Newsletter, no. 14, Dec 1986.

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SUSAN HILLER MONICA BOHM-DUCHEN

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merican-born Susan Hiller is one of that all too rare breed of women artists who have managed to penetrate the London art-establishment1 without compromising her avowed aim of providing a ‘critique of existing culture’2 by revealing the inadequacies of its conceptual models. While the marginalisation of women is a major preoccupation in her work and her strongly feminist sense of identity informs all that she produces, she refuses to be labelled or pigeon-holed, and the scope of her oeuvre is wide and undoctrinaire enough not to scare people (women, as well as men) away. Which is not to say that her work is easy to understand. Hiller trained as an anthropologist but soon rejected its supposedly value-free premises. Her work appears to approach its raw materials (that is to say, cultural artifacts) in a scientific manner, only to force the spectator to a curiously poetic realization of just how fragmentary our knowledge of the world is, and always will be. To Hiller, however, the fragment is something positive, because non-hierarchical, a means of rejecting a unifying (male) discourse. Using whatever medium (or combination of media) suits her purposes, and favouring the installation as the most fluid format available, Hiller’s work of the last 15 years or so has consistently confronted certain recurring themes. Notable among these is the complex relationship between life and death, dream and waking, past and present, the individual and the collective, reality and representation, and last, but not least, the role of automatic writing in exploring the gap between ‘fruitful incoherence’ (to Hiller, this is the special domain of women) and ‘so-called rational discourse, which by definition means white, middle-class male language in our society’. Although Hiller’s work is intellectual (over-intellectual, perhaps, to some), she does not begin with a coldly abstract idea, but with an engagement with some material aspect of the everyday world (be it picture postcards in Dedicated to the Unknown Artists, 1976/7, potsherds in Fragments, 1978, or memorial plaques in Monument, 1981). As was amply demonstrated by her recent show at the ICA, it is this balance between physicality and intellectuality that makes her best work so satisfying to experience ‘in the flesh’. If her work appears at times over-solemn, it is illumined by the occasional flash of humour

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Figure 12 Susan Hiller, Monument, 1981. Courtesy of the artist. (as in the spoken text of Monument, in which she refers, with just a hint of self-mockery, to her ‘obsession with gender’, or the tongue-in-cheek references in her Home Truths series to the ultimately arid gesturalism of a Jackson Pollock). Above all, her output exhilaratingly embodies her own belief that ‘in spite of the disadvantage of being a woman in the arts... for those of us who have a feminist perspective, there’s a sense that what we are doing matters...’.

Notes 1. Hiller is represented by the eminently respectable Gimpel Fils gallery and in 1984 her video installation Belshazzar’s Feast was acquired by the Tate Gallery. 2. All quotations are from Susan Hiller herself. She is an eloquent spokeswoman for her own efforts.

Reference Women Artists Slide Library Newsletter, no. 15, Feb 1987.

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WOMEN AND CONTEMPORARY PAINTING: RE- PRESENTING NON - REPRESENTATION REBECCA FORTNUM & GILL HOUGHTON

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ainting has been a problematic area for feminist discussion.1 The gulf between what has been critically defined as ‘feminist art’ and art being done by feminists is forever widening. Our intention in this article is to look at the work being produced by six women artists in an effort to bridge this gap (Helen Ireland, Rosa Lee, Helen Pavel, Antje Siebrecht, Madeleine Strindberg and Kate Whiteford). For most of these artists, feminist politics was not central; all however saw gender as setting them apart within the dominant masculine tradition whether it be in the social world; art school; teaching; the reception of work or in their own practice. * * * There are two main reasons for creating readings of women’s work that takes on issues of gender. The first is that feminism should not be seen as single strand theory. There are many differing voices within The Women’s Movement. It is hoped that Feminism might aim to contain the work being done by women rather than control it. Yve Lomax refers to this viewpoint in her photo-text work Broken Lines: More and No More Difference: ‘Even though I may say with much response I am a woman, even though I may resonantly speak of “we”, don’t expect me to remain the same, don’t expect that we are all the same’. Linda Nead supports this view from a different perspective in her essay ‘Feminism, Art History and Cultural Politics’ when she states that feminism must resist becoming ‘simply a term of difference for the traditional disciplines’.2 Our second reason is to examine the artists and their work in terms of ‘positionality’: that is the place they occupy as women within society and its resulting influence. * * * Artists whose work does not have any obvious referent outside the language of paint can be seen as emerging from modernism which in turn descended from the nineteenth century’s aestheticism best summed up by Cousin’s famous maxim l’art pour l’art or Wilde’s ‘art never expresses anything but itself’. Unlike much film, performance, video, text and

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scripto-visual work, it does not directly refer to women and their position in the world. Rather than pinning down meanings, or purifying ‘texts’, it creates multiple readings with no area of certainty as to the artist’s intention. For some women however, this deferral of immediate referent can create a certain freedom. Helen Ireland, voiced it thus: ‘I like the idea of remaining anonymous in (abstract) painting...I find it much more stimulating because it allows me room’.3 It is also interesting to note how abstract or non-representational women artists have been acknowledged by the mainstream art histories in unprecedented numbers. Sandra Blow, Jennifer Durrant, Helen Frankenthaler, Grace Hartigan, Barbara Hepworth, Lee Krasner, Tess Jaray, Joan Mitchel, Elizabeth Murray, Georgia O’Keefe, Bridget Riley, Paule Vézelay and others have a place in mainstream art commentaries. There is now a strong and established canon in operation for students of art. Most Anglo-American feminist theorists to date have seen feminist art as that which takes as its aim the disruption that comes from a political agenda. Griselda Pollock states this clearly in her essay ‘Feminism and Modernism’: ‘A feminist materialist practice is founded outside the art world but indexes the art world to the social relations of which it constitutes an element’.4 However, it does seem possible to trace in this involvement with the language and history of painting a different kind of radicalism. This can be seen as the disruption that occurs when a language is re-assessed, re-evaluated, when its old meanings and associations take on new dimensions. For example, the French theorist Julia Kristeva’s interest in ‘modernist’ literature (e.g. the work of Joyce or Woolf) as a site for disruption (the ‘sujet en procès’) seems to show her confidence in this ‘interior’ avant-garde as a prefigurement or parallel to a revolutionary disruption in society. Such work can be seen to destroy comfortable notions of passive consumerism and challenge the spectator to actively engage with the work in order to extort meaning. The viewer is forced to re-evaluate her position. Critics such as the Italian Anne-Marie Sauzeau-Boetti have seen the artist’s involvement with the workings of the medium as a definite site for feminism. In her essay on ‘Negative Capability as Practice in Women’s Art’, she states: ‘When a woman artist lives profoundly as a woman in her profession and strongly enough in her mastery of the means she is managing, it is my belief that a gradual differentiation from this “father” art occurs’.5 For some critics then it would seem possible to review work by women in a feminist context and in the next section we will try and outline four possible areas of enquiry.

i) Resisting Definition For a woman, the refusal to name can be seen as a political intent for, historically, women and their work have been ascribed inaccurate and unwanted meanings. As Helen Ireland told us: ‘People try to manipulate things. I don’t want things to be named somehow’.6 This refusal to name means a refusal to allow identification with or possession of an image or described object. The heroic self identification process is thwarted. Kate Whiteford’s recent installation at the Whitechapel Art Gallery – four large canvases of red and green optically vibrating arches – can also be seen in this light. The optical effect

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of the complimentary colours disturb our ability to survey the whole piece; instead we have to home in on a small area of the canvas. In refusing to allow us to consume the whole installation with our gaze, Whiteford tells us metaphorically that, although we have much information at our disposal, we are in fact limited in what we can hope to understand; what we can possess. This refusal to define within the work, the refusal to present a comforting and comfortable position for the spectator can be seen for women as their resistance to participating in a dialectic which positions the powerful and active (masculine) viewer as opposite to the passive, weak, (female) viewed subject.

ii) Working with uncertainty, speaking from the margins. The ‘feminine’ is a term which associates women with certain characteristics: vagueness, irrationality, lack, chaos. It is a yardstick used to measure women in a system which lauds certain lifestyles and occupations. For women working in traditionally male domains have a real capacity for self doubt. Strindberg and Whiteford, both art school lecturers, told us how they noticed the self questioning, self doubting nature of their female students. However, uncertainty is only read as failure if it is seen in opposition to the ‘masculine’ desires for order, control and certainty. As Madeleine Strindberg said: ‘Traditional weaknesses can be turned to strengths once they are recognised’.7 Helen Pavel saw the positive advantage of being able to posit a statement of uncertainty as a woman as preferable to the ‘masculine’ urge to define. It might also be possible to trace these positive statements of uncertainty into the method and material process within the painting. The fragmentation of mark making

Figure 13 Rosa Lee, Knots, 1987. Estate of Rosa Lee. Courtesy of the Eagle Gallery, London.

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within the paintings of [Rosa] Lee, [Thérèse] Oulton and [Helen] Pavel can be seen to be dispersing definite images. Their paintwork appears to be moving away from the ego-centred personal trace, the vigorous brush mark. Julia Kristeva has put it thus: ‘Fragmentation (of language) in a text calls into question the very position of its mastery’.8 The ‘feminine’ has also been defined as ‘that which is marginalised by the patriarchal symbolic order’.9 Historically, women artist’s marginalisation occurs literally for they appear often only as footnotes in articles, appendages to artist husbands, fathers, brothers. Again, the influence of this felt liminality can be tentatively traced through to work that women produce. It is often consciously de-centred, refusing to take on connotations of the pure, central icon. For example, Strindberg has entitled her most recent work Off Centre. Whiteford’s optical arches and verticals also refuse the precision of geometry. These investigations of uncertainty and marginalization are not to be seen as a celebration of ‘femininity’ as defined by the male order, rather they can be seen as subversion; women can be seen to be diffusing phallocentric power.

iii)

Re-imagining the Body

As Rosemary Betterton, Marina Warner and others have pointed out, women are bombarded on all sides with images of the female body.10 However, our visual knowledge of our own bodies is limited. Freudian psychoanalysis has shown men’s and women’s perception of the female sex organs in particular as hidden, secret, and, mysterious. In art, such readings of female genitalia abound, as Laura Mulvey has noted in her essay ‘You don’t know what is happening do you Mr. Jones?’ on the work of Allen Jones. Similarly, Kate Millet has observed in the writings of D.H. Lawrence: ‘Although the male is displayed and admired so often, there is, apart from the word “cunt”, no reference to or discussion of the female genitals; they are a hidden shameful subject’.11 However women seem to possess a constant image of themselves.12 This image bears no relation to the visually objectified body. The constant acknowledgement of physicality is therefore not a visual understanding but an internal knowledge. It is possible to see this ‘internal knowledge’ in much non-representational painting, certainly in the work of the artists under discussion. Strindberg has said: ‘I paint large to physically experience the process of painting...they are close to performance, to installation’.13 Although one is reluctant to give her paintings a point of reference, she sees them in the context of human structures. Whiteford’s recent installations also appeal directly to our physical senses. It is possible to experience a sense of one’s own body when dwarfed on all sides by the sheer physicality of her work. Similarly Antje Siebrecht told us: ‘I want and I need this whole large expression, the big paintings are a measure of my own [body] size’.14 Ireland also finds it possible to refer to her physical being in an abstracted way. Her painting Sixteen Seeds has as its object of reference the most natural but unseen body function of all, breathing. The historical position of women as the viewed and visual object can be challenged by non-figurative work as it exchanges women’s representation for her physical presence.

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Access to the Unconscious

The use of the unconscious in the process of painting is one of the most problematic areas of discussion when trying to read work within a sexual political framework. Women who might wish to work with concerns such as fantasy, desire and imagination often wish to utilize areas of unconscious experience. Helen Pavel noted: ‘I think the ones that I feel most excited about are maybe the ones that haven’t consciously been done. There is something unknown there and there is still room for discovery’.15 The use of the unconscious means a loss of the artist’s control over the meaning or readings of her work. There is a sense that the artist might ‘betray’ herself by employing inherited or patriarchal values that she has unknowingly absorbed. Though this might present problems in terms of reading the work purely in terms of feminist ideology, it does not mean that it should be outlawed as a practice. Conflicting, often mutually exclusive interpretations of a painting do not necessarily mean its failure on a formal or intellectual level. Often such a way of working can be of immense value to the individual woman. For some, the painting is the site on which they explore their lives and emotions. Rosa Lee explained: ‘The painting is a way of working out a lot of things you want to bring in, even if it is for you personally’.16 Strindberg, too, can place her work within a similar framework; it can be seen as a diary where she can trace her emotional life. The artist Jacqueline Morreau put it succinctly when talking of painting generally: ‘By understanding and manipulating the potentials of the picture, we, as artists, can reveal our experience as women to the viewer who is drawn in to participate with this presence as to a real human reverberation’.17

Notes 1. For recent discussions of painting within a feminist context, see: Rosa Lee, ‘Resisting Amnesia: Feminism, Painting and Postmodernism’, Feminist Review, No. 26 (1987), p.5; Katy Deepwell, ‘In defence of the Indefensible: Feminism, Painting and Postmodernism’, Feminist Art News, Vol. 2, No. 4 (1987), p.9. 2. Lynda Nead, in A.L. Rees and F. Borzello (eds), The New Art History (London: Camden Press, 1986), p.120. 3. Helen Ireland in conversation with R. Fortnum and G. Houghton, 22.12.88. 4. Griselda Pollock, and Rozsika Parker, Framing Feminism: Art and the women’s movement 1970–85 (London: Pandora Press, 1987), p.109. 5. Anne-Marie Sauzeau-Boetti: in Framing Feminism, p.279. 6. Helen Ireland in conversation with R. Fortnum and G. Houghton, 22.12.88. 7. Madeleine Strindberg in conversation with R. Fortnum and G. Houghton, 11.12.88. 8. Julia Kristeva, in E. Marks and I. De Courtivron (eds), New French Feminisms: An Anthology (Brighton: Harrester Press, 1985). 9. Toril Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics (London & New York: Methuen and Co., 1985), p.166. 10. Marina Warner, Monuments and Maidens (London: Picador, 1987). Rosemary Betterton, Looking On: Images of Femininity in the Visual Arts and Media (London: Pandora, 1987.) (Betterton’s title for her recent talk at W.A.S.L. in Oct 1988 has been borrowed for this section.) 11. Kate Millet, Sexual Politics (London: Virago, 1985), p.239. 12. John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: BBC/Penguin, 1972), p.46. 13. Madeleine Strindberg in conversation with R. Fortnum and G. Houghton, 11.12.88.

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14. 15. 16. 17.

Antje Siebrecht in conversation with R. Fortnum and G. Houghton, 26.1.89. Helen Pavel in conversation with R. Fortnum and G. Houghton, 8.12.88. Rosa Lee in conversation with R. Fortnum and G. Houghton, 16.12.88. Jacqueline Morreau, Feminist Art News, Vol. 2, No 4 (1987), p.20.

Reference Women Artists Slide Library Journal, no. 28, Apr/May 1989.

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DIRT Y WORDS FOR THE TATE CHRISTINE BATTERSBY

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hat should a feminist who thinks about art do with the concept of ‘aesthetic value’? The phrase has such a dirty philosophical history as to render it thoroughly problematic to feminists of all descriptions. Should we junk the notion of evaluation altogether? Revise it? Retain it (assigning it a place in some dialectical relationship with feminist values)? These two final positions are not necessarily alternatives; but both are out of step with the purist view which would reject the whole tradition of ‘art history- as-appreciation’. This is the position argued by Griselda Pollock in Vision and Difference.1 Pollock believes that there is no point in feminist art critics seeking to insert women artists within a framework that distinguishes ‘between the major and the minor, the good and the bad, the eternally valued and the fashionably momentary’. Any concern ‘with quality – i.e. positive and negative evaluations of artefacts’ is suspect: an ‘alternative’ (feminist) standard of appreciation would merely result in ‘another way of consuming art’: ‘The effect is to leave intact that very notion of evaluating art, and of course the normative standards by which it is done’. Instead, Pollock adopts a sophisticated form of Marxist analysis: ‘I am arguing that feminist art history has to reject all this evaluative criticism and stop merely juggling the aesthetic criteria for appreciating art. Instead it should concentrate on historical forms of explanation of women’s artistic production’. My impression as an outsider (I’m a philosopher, not an art historian) is that, in this country, Pollock’s position on evaluation represents that of the feminist academic mainstream. It certainly represents the position that has been theorised in the most sophisticated and compelling ways. But I will be arguing that it is neither practically desirable, nor theoretically possible to opt out of the whole arena of aesthetic evaluation. What I will be suggesting is not that feminist art criticism must simply seek to insert women artists in the ‘canon’ of great artists, but that there is no value-neutral critical space in which feminist critics can reside and that present-day women artists will suffer unless feminist art critics employ those dirty evaluative words for feminist ends. What is needed is not an excision of notions of aesthetic evaluation, but a revision of such notions: a revision

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radical enough both to insert women artists into the ‘canon’ of great artists, and to bring the notion of a universal, historically-timeless canon into question. I am not, in any sense, intending to devalue or condemn the kind of Marxist-feminist practice that Pollock recommends. The analysis of art institutions and the material conditions of artistic production have revolutionised (and surely will continue to revolutionise) feminist art-historians’ understanding of their discipline. But I do think we should learn from Bertolt Brecht’s working slogan for a revolutionary art: ‘Use what you can’. And I do believe that feminist art critics who seek to revalue the work of female (and male) artists also have a role to play in transforming artistic display and practice. We can’t yet afford a new feminist orthodoxy (whether Marxist, psychoanalytical or ‘deconstructionist’) that rejects as merely ‘liberal’, ‘individualistic’ or ‘humanist’ the whole tradition of art-appreciation. * * * At present those interested in assessing art by past generations of women must, in general, end their tours of UK national and provincial art galleries with a feeling of defeat. But, for all that, it is possible to be too despairing about the possibility of changing the way that British institutions manage their collections. The Tate Gallery, for example, seems to have embraced one portion of a revolutionary aesthetic in its first major re-hang for 20 years (opened 25 January). For Nicholas Serota, the new director at the gallery, has rejected the notion that artistic values are pre-given and that the function of a museum is simply to provide a record and display of some single, monolithic canon of ‘great art’. Serota intends to change the artistic display every nine months, and via a kind of permanent revolution keep alive the question of what is (and what is not) appropriately relegated to the basements or allocated a subsidiary role in terms of exhibition space. The Tate Gallery is thus theoretically committed to a philosophy of display that should bring out of storage works by neglected women artists. But in practice there is a spectacularly low proportion of works by female artists in the first of the Tate re-hangs, something made more noticeable by the fact that Serota opted for galleries and artistic categories (such as ‘Figurative Art between the Wars’, ‘Neo-Romanticism’, ‘Abstract Art in Britain, 1949–56’, ‘British Figure Painting’) that might have been expected to favour women. Gwen John and Barbara Hepworth are amongst the (few) women included in the new Tate catalogue; but even their works have been relegated to store in an exhibition that proves that post-modernism is, indeed, compatible with conservative values. I am not wanting to pretend that the absence of woman artists is the only thing that is the matter with the new Tate display. The gender-blindness is symptomatic of a political blandness in the selection and description of the art-work on display. But I can’t help wondering whether Serota would have found the exclusion of women quite so unproblematic had the major feminist art historians in this country not directed most of their energies to a critique of art institutions, rather than to the revaluation of the work of individual women artists. Would things have been different here had we moved along the (more humanistic, less theoretically rigorous) lines of feminist art history in the States? And how might things have turned out if the Women Artists Slide Library were as wellendowed (with funds and institutional prestige) as the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C.?

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Gombrich has suggested that there is really no such thing as ‘Art’, only a series of artists.2 Against him I am asserting that there is really no such thing as an artist, only a series of art-works that critics hold together via the notion of an oeuvre. But the concept ‘oeuvre’ has been used in gender discriminatory ways. Women’s works have been scattered and dispersed to a much greater extent than those of the males. Nor is this simply because of the material disadvantages under which women produce their art. Inherent in the notion of an oeuvre – and hence built into the notion of an ‘artist’ – is a value judgement ... a notion of a significant, important or (at least) interesting expression of a fully-human self. But since the norms and ideals for human personality are based on the development of the male psyche, women have to struggle to get their artworks interpreted in such generous ways. Thus, in addition to work on collectives, we need work on women as individuals: of the type that, in recent years, has allowed Gwen John and Frida Kahlo to emerge from the shadows. We need exhibitions (and critical ‘appreciations’) which allow us to see how the artist developed (or failed to develop and suffered) as she struggled to create in an environment in which the forms for creativity (and for individuality) privilege the male. There have, of course, been some exhibitions of this type in our smaller galleries. But even there the work is often displayed in ways that make it hard to understand the particular and peculiar difficulties faced by women who are artists. For example, the 1988 exhibition of work by Hannah Hoech (1889–1978) presented her as if she were merely a Dadaist and creator of collages. The oil paintings, water colours and sculptures that were an integral part of her remarkably lengthy artistic career (and which were contained in the much-larger German exhibition of her work) did not tour the UK. By contrast, the 1989 exhibition of Meret Oppenheim (1913–1985) at the ICA, London, contained work from a variety of media and the whole of her artistic life. But it was nevertheless obfuscating, for the display was organised round similarities in subject matter, and not chronologically. This can, of course, be a valuable philosophy of display for artists whose work has become over-familiar; but Oppenheim certainly does not fit into that category. In fact, a chronological account of a female artist’s life can surprise much more than thematic display. Since women artists have to gain access to display-spaces which have been organised around the principle of ‘genius’ – and since typical ‘genius’ was theorised as an atypical (often feminine) male – it is important to learn from the way that past generations of women artists coped with the paradoxes of being both female and creators.3 A chronological exploration of Hoech’s and Oppenheim’s lives would, I think, have revealed this as the tension at the heart of their fractured oeuvres. [ ... ] But it is not just the Surrealist and Dadaist women who manipulated (and resisted) theoretical models which linked artistic creativity with displaced male procreativity and misplaced female procreativity. To understand what is (and is not) subversive about past art-work by women we need feminist art historians to pressure institutions into the display of the oeuvres of individual women artists. But this means we have to write back on to the agenda of feminist art history the ‘appreciation’ and ‘evaluation’ of the work of individual women artists ... in the past, as well as in the present.

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To evaluate a painting favourably is not simply to say that one likes it, that others like it, or that an elite of critics like it. An evaluation is not a report (either about external properties or about the state of mind of the observer). To evaluate is not to describe what one does like or think, but what one ought to like or think. It is to set up an ideal observer as a standard of comparison: against which one’s own (and others’) likes and dislikes are to be judged. This ideal observer judges the picture in viewing conditions that are as-near-as-possible ideal, and in terms of a range of knowledge, experience, sensitivity and emotion that are appropriate for the picture under observation. It is against this ideal that all one’s responses to the picture have to be judged, since terms like ‘delicate’, ‘forceful’, ‘subtle’ fuse factual and descriptive elements in ways that make interpretation – and even apparently neutral descriptions – evaluative through and through. Evaluation does not imply one ideal observer (with only one range of experience, of sensitivity, of emotions and knowledge). It seems highly implausible to suppose that the ideal observer of a late Picasso would require the same qualities of mind and of knowledge as the ideal observer of a portrait by Angelica Kauffman. Whether each picture only has one ideal observer (i.e. whether aesthetic evaluations are universals) is a matter for debate. Personally, I would want to say that there is more than one valid response to each picture that is painted (which is not to say, of course, that all responses are equally valid). I hope this explanation goes some way towards making the notion of feminist aesthetic evaluation more acceptable. For what I am demanding is not a complete unanimity of feminist response; but also not an infinite variety of critical response. I am simply building into the notion of an ‘ideal observer’ a person with a range of experience, a sensibility and a body of knowledge that has been shaped by an engagement with feminist politics. I think the hostility that feminists (and Marxists) often feel towards the notion of aesthetics comes, in part, from a confusion of ‘aesthetics’ with ‘aestheticism’. In its original (eighteenth-century) meaning, the subject-matter of aesthetics was the ‘science of the senses’. The German inventors of this branch of philosophy were concerned to discover how it might be possible to reach universal conclusions (valid for all persons) on the basis of individual, immediate (= passive and unconceptualised) sense experience. I have already said that I do not believe that it is necessary to demand that aesthetic judgements be universals. But neither do I believe in the notion of ‘immediacy’ which philosophers like Immanuel Kant used to justify the claim that the pure aesthetic response must abstract from all sensual appeal, and concentrate (in an utterly ‘disinterested’ way) on the ‘form’ of the object. It is, I believe, this notion of a ‘disinterested’ withdrawal from all material and use value that has done most to bring the notion of the aesthetic into disrepute. For, during the nineteenth century, the aesthetic movement developed this notion of Kant’s to an extreme. The aesthetic was equated with a particular attitude of mind: with a (determined) blindness to moral, social and political considerations and even with an indifference to bodily dictates and needs. But this is a perversion of the notion of an aesthetic, and is a mode of artistic evaluation that feminists can and must revise and resist. For it by no means follows that to deny that aesthetic judgements are universal, disinterested

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or immediate is to deny that there are no evaluative standards that can be developed to discriminate between adequate and inadequate response to art-work or good and bad art-works. The director of the Tate has said ‘Art is not just data, just information ... The point is that the contents of a museum, the values that a museum embodies, are not givens’.4 I agree. But, when I look round the re-hung Tate one of the things that upsets me at least as much as the absence of female artists is how many of the art-works on show seem to represent the perverse variety of aestheticism. Matter (flesh, but also natural objects) is endlessly prettified and idealised in ways that reveal how much real bodies are disdained. It comes almost as a relief to move into rooms of blank abstractionism or even to those artists who vigorously assert the value of male lusts. Remarkably few of the art-works on display laugh at, reject, or counter the (false) polarities: either form or matter; either art or politics; either god or beast. Which is why I want to say (very firmly) that the values of this first re-hang at the Tate are unacceptable in terms of a feminist aesthetic.

Notes 1. Griselda Pollock, Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism and the Histories of Art (London and New York, 1988), pp.26, 27. 2. E. H. Gombrich, The Story of Art (London: Phaidon, 1972), p.4. 3. See my Gender and Genius: Towards a Feminist Aesthetics (London: The Women’s Press, 1989). 4. The Independent, 23 January (1990).

Reference Women Artists Slide Library Journal, no. 33, Mar/Apr 1990.

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BODIES OF KNOWLEDGE HILARY ROBINSON

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omen’s bodies have been a focus of attention through the women’s movement at the different points in its history. The politics of representation are of fundamental concern to the movement, even if we interpret both words – ‘politics’ and ‘representation’ – as widely as possible. The written and unwritten laws and conventions about who represents us as women in our social, governmental and legal structures, and who has a hand in shaping those structures, amount to a set of understandings about where women’s bodies can actually be, how and where we become visible, and what the attitudes towards that visibility will be. Just as the Black Power and civil rights movements in the USA during the 1960s focused on where African Americans were allowed to be, either by legislation or through convention, so too a crucial aspect of feminist thought is concerned with whether women are allowed to have a proportionate and equitable bodily presence in ‘our’ parliament, council buildings, unions, in the media as journalists, and throughout the hierarchies of all workplaces and organisations – including, of course, in the galleries and the pages of art magazines. Closely linked to the issues concerning this form of representation and visibility are the attitudinal issues – the attitudes towards women in such positions, and our own attitudes, as women in those positions, towards our positions and towards other women. Representation is again crucial: ‘representation’ as the word might be used in a studio: as visual (or verbal) imaging; how we choose to represent ourselves and how women are represented. Feminism has insisted that such issues are deeply political; representations, through imagery of women, are formed, understood, accepted, altered and compromised through a series of processes that are every bit as ideologically based as the electoral system. Automatically, women’s bodies are again to the fore. Their visibility or otherwise, the ways in which they are coded, policed, censored, constructed, praised or punished, the ways in which and levels at which they are represented as engaging with the viewer, and the contexts in which women’s bodies are placed in images and how images of women’s bodies are then distributed and consumed – all this adds up to a subtle politics of the representation of women’s bodies.

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John Berger’s exercise in Ways of Seeing of swapping the sex, while maintaining the body language and expression, of images of man and woman, remains a valid and simple kick start to an analysis of the politics of the representation of gender – whether Cadbury’s flake ads, Boucher’s ‘Miss O’Murphy’, fashion photography, or the House of Commons. *

*

*

From the re-emergence of the women’s movement in the late 1960s, the development of women’s thinking and activity about these matters has found a corresponding development in the work of women artists, and particularly in the ways in which women represent women’s bodies, whether their own or those of others. Women are so utterly used to working with their own bodies: we are trained to do so from the first time we wear pink-for-a-girl, and a concentration upon the significations of our physicality is encouraged to a far greater extent than is the case with boys and men. So, when it comes to the very physical activity of making art, many women turn to their own bodies or images of women’s bodies as a vehicle for making images, for making meaning. Additionally, to image women’s bodies can be a very direct way of making visible, of literally claiming space, and of contradicting other representations of women’s bodies. From the late 1970s, the debate around the imaging of women’s bodies was furthered, particularly in the UK and New York, by the work of those artists and theoreticians who wished to remove the body of woman from view while instead concentrating upon notions of femininity’, replacing the bodies of women as sites which produced struggle, with womanliness as a named site of struggle. Interestingly, this work drew to a large extent upon the highly-theorised use of psychoanalysis and deconstruction; it emerged around the same time that the feminist anti-pornography movement, on a grassroots and activist basis, was also seriously problematising our culture’s sight of women’s bodies. Also concurrent with this was the establishing of a mode, or even tradition, of working for feminist artists, which involved using their own bodies (although with widely varying intentions and political positions) – either producing images, or through performance or video. It was an incredibly rich time for woman artists with the whole area of debate around the body and representation opening up. Oddly enough, however, it was also a highly confusing time, as the debate – in this country at least – took place at arms length. People seemed to separate into camps, or to be misrepresented under labels – ‘deconstructionists’, ‘essentialist’, etc – and the crossover of information and ideas which could possibly have been so fruitful seemed instead a potentially explosive exchange. The debates sidestepped into discussions of desire in some areas, maintaining some political divisions between women and creating new ones, while the strongest artworks which imaged women’s bodies came from those for whom visibility was still a fundamental issue, particularly black women. As we move into the 1990s, much of the most interesting and challenging work by women is returning to the body with a new found confidence. But what we are seeing now is the fragment of the body, the body experienced minutely; we get an art by women that insists upon bodily experience as the subject for the work, as the process by which the work is made and as the process through which it is experienced. To engage with works by artists as diverse as Genevieve Cadieux, Annette Messager and Laura

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Figure 14 Laura Godfrey-Isaacs, Alien Blob, 1993. Courtesy of the artist and WAL archive.

Godfrey-Isaacs, to name but three, is to highlight these aspects of bodily experience. Because they are highlighted, so too is the gender specificity of the body and the bodily experience – the constructions of the body that go to make it male or female. Although some of this work may be informed by certain theoretical readings – Irigaray, Cixous, Kristeva, Judith Butler, or some of the work by Italian feminists on the mother-daughter relationship – there is a real sense in which these artists could be said to be producing theory visually. Where this might lead us in terms of political thought remains to be seen. Possibly, after what might be described as puritanical streaks through the 1980s, and after the theorising of desire and the occasional turning of the body into a no-go area, there is a need to explore pleasure – in the artist, the artwork and the audience; the pleasure in that three way encounter. If this is the case, then it will have to be a pleasure informed by the work of the 1970s and 1980s, by the theoretical work, by the activist work, by the knowledge of AIDS, and so on. Anything less would be to return to representations of our bodies which do not belong to us, and which are produced in other languages than our own.

Reference Women’s Art Magazine, no. 49, Nov/Dec 1992.

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TOO MUCH OF A GOOD THING SADIE MURDOCH

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f the definition of fetishism is the irrational overvaluation of an object, then we are all fetishists. As good post-modernists, we know that language attributes false values to all things, in the way it is used to code and structure the world. Fetishistic misrepresentation would appear to be one of the hazards of discourse. The term however has been used to cover an ambitious exhibition and programme of events currently taking place in Brighton and organised by the South Bank. The curators of Fetishism1, attempted to investigate ‘three moments of fetishism in the history of art’, and have chosen to aim their scrutiny at African ‘power objects’, Surrealist photographs and sculpture and a selection of recent contemporary art. The press release depicted a photograph of a bondage-clad, bodypierced fetishist and a casual glance down the list of discussions and events revealed: ‘Leather and Liberation: Contemporary Feminism, Fetishism and Sexuality’; ‘Do Tongues Power, Desire and Domination’; ‘Sexualisation and the Aura of Art’. There was a curious blend of sensationalism and coyness in the organisers’ promotion of this show which was, I suppose, somewhat inevitable. As the press release rather unnecessarily pointed out, the word itself ‘conjures up images of fantasy, private obsession, sexual deviance, rubber and high heels’. The implications of this word overshadow the highly urgent political debates, from racism to the exploitation of women, raised by much of the work exhibited here. However, the real problem with a term such as ‘fetishism’ is that theorists fall over themselves to expand and interpret the meaning of the concept; from its etymological origins in European colonial descriptions of non-Western artefacts, to its application in Freudian and post-Freudian definitions of repression and displacement, to Marxist theories of commodity value. ‘Fetishism’ is a theoretician’s wet dream. It can signify excess and deficiency, desire and loss, and is imbued with a sense of the illicit and transgressive. The fact that the meaning of this word is both highly charged and impossible to fix renders attempts by the curators of Fetishism to cover this vast field of the overvalued a daunting task. However, they do succeed in diluting any social or political agenda that could be explored.

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This is disappointing for the exhibition begs a social or political reading. Notions of fetishism are used in discourses that are either about power or project power, or authority, on to the marginalised, exploited and dispossessed. Fetishism is an essential part of the West’s hidden history, where the term is implemented as an index of perversion, deviancy and transgression. In a society where abusive power stuctures are held in place by notions of ‘normality’, it should thus follow that a little bit of transgression can go a long way. Fetishism demonstrates just how ineffective transgression can be. This is not necessarily the fault of the exhibits, many of which are powerful and challenging. The exhibition is too wide-ranging in scope, hung in three separate sections, blocking any interesting juxtapositions that could be made. The first room displaying ‘power objects’ or nkisi from Central Africa fails to subvert the idea that so called ‘primitive’ (i.e. nonWestern) peoples are a basic, primal and a much simplified version of ourselves. Low light levels in this room (to ensure preservation) further enhanced a sense of cultural and chronological isolation. Section two displayed aspects of Surrealist activity, including work by Hans Bellmer, Salvador Dali, Alberto Giacometti, Ronald Penrose, Meret Oppenheim and Man Ray. A fair degree of consistency was achieved however between both the Surrealist room and the contemporary section in terms of the representation of female sexuality and the female body. In one room, breasts and buttocks abounded; in the other, it was all hair, clothes and shopping bags. Despite the lack of cohesion in the show overall, it is on the subject of women that we find a consensus on the meaning of fetishism. To understand the paradoxes of fetishism, particularly as used by the Surrealists, it is essential to refer to Freud. Fetishism in psychoanalytic terms involves displacing the sight of women’s imaginary castration onto a variety of reassuring but often surprising objects which serve as signs for the lost penis. The Surrealist movement was heavily inspired by Freud and it is significant that the few women members were mostly dismissed, or ignored at the time, or later written into the history books as the wives or mistresses of their male colleagues. Consistent with the minimal role accorded them within the group, women are presented as existing outside the domain of the social, occupying a kind of twilight zone of the irrational and fantastic. Simone de Beauvoir has described effectively how, in Surrealist artistic circles, women were viewed as enigmatic sphinxes with deeper psychic links with the unconscious. This unique woman at once carnal and artificial, natural and human casts the same spell as the equivocal objects dear to the Surrealists: she is like a spoonshoe, the tablewolf, the marble-sugar that the poet finds at the flea market, or invests in a dream. She shares in the secrets of familiar objects suddenly revealed in their true nature and in the secrets of plants and stones. She is all things.2

Women were Surrealism; they literally embodied it. From Bellmer’s dislocated dolls to Ray’s photographs of split crown fedora hats.3 Surrealism is locked into an obsessive dialogue with female sexuality. And this obsession is underpinned by a terror at women’s difference in the form of a perceived but imaginary ‘lack’. Meret Oppenheim’s trussed high-heeled shoes and fur cup negotiate this territory but ultimately remain circumscribed by Surrealism’s fetishistic frisson.

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It would have been refreshing, if not reassuring, to find that the contemporary section attempted to dismantle the fetishistic fixations proffered by Freudian-inspired Surrealists in the 1920s. Carlos Pazos’ items of bricolaged misogyny do not so much perpetuate this tendency; rather they wallow in it in a manner which questions the sanity let alone the sensitivity of the curators. She Left Deep Scars in My Heart and in My Cheque Book, 1988, presents us with a bathing costume hanging by the crotch from a sword, demonstrating, literally, the procedure of castration, with the female genitalia being formed from a wound, a slash. The extended nipple of Dorothy Cross’ Amazon, 1992, a cowhide clad female torso with a single udder/breast, assumed a grotesque phallic appearance. However, rather than confounding and scrambling notions of ‘penis envy’ and female masochism, Cross perpetuates, mystifies and stylises these issues. The references to mutilation, in the cutting and splicing of the hide (as well as creating a penis substitute which evokes castration) and the presentation of the female body as nurturing and animalistic, all present a negative image of female sexuality and desire.

Figure 15 Dorothy Cross, Amazon, 1992. Courtesy Frith Street Gallery, London & Kerlin Gallery, Dublin.

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Sylvie Fleury receives ‘nil points’ for her catalogue disclaimer in which she advises us that she is ‘against feminism’. This is a pity, for her video piece Twinkle, 1992, and installation Delicious, 1994, are perfect evocations of debilitating female narcissism, sexual frustration and displacement activity. However, again the representation of desire rests on the axis of absence; the high heels of the shoes she tries on in Twinkle are simply strap-on phalluses. Nevertheless, the campy humour and tacky soundtrack begin to crack the fetishistic edifice. Humour is a good debunker. Nevertheless, as Laura Mulvey stated in her scathing criticism of the arch-fetishist Allen Jones: The message of fetishism concerns not women, but the narcissistic wound she represents for man. Women are constantly confronted with their own image in one form or another, but what they see bears little relation or relevance to their own fantasies, their own hidden fears and desires. They are being turned all the time into objects of display, to be looked at and gazed at and stared at by men. Yet in a real sense women are not there at all. The parade has nothing to do with woman, everything to do with man. The true exhibit is always the phallus. Women are simply the scenery on to which men project their narcissistic fantasies. The time has come for us to take over the show and exhibit our own fears and desires.4

This last sentence is important, for it calls for a form of ‘female fetishism’ that explores the site of obsession and fantasy from a female perspective. But if language defines the limits of what can be discussed and if language is born of and instrumental in maintaining power relations, then we can never come round to a truly emancipatory ‘female fetishism’. For women are inscribed in language negatively. As feminist critics have pointed out, any notion of desire dependent upon the primacy of the phallic signifier is necessarily flawed, as it positions women in terms of a lack or deficiency. The work of Sophie Calle, also featured in the contemporary section, is of interest. Calle explores her own desires and compulsions, often engaging with strangers in ways which stretch the boundaries of speculative and casual interest. Autobiographical Stories documents her temporary employment as a stripper in Paris with texts and mementoes: a dressing gown, a wedding dress, snapshots of herself on stage being watched by men. It is not clear whether her adventure is fictitious or true, what is important is that Calle mostly delineates the field of female obsession without having recourse to the props of male castration anxiety. The same interpretation can be applied to the work of Annette Messager, whose Histoires des Robes, 1990, works consisting of montaged photographs of body parts pinned onto items of women’s clothing, present objectification from a female perspective. Rather than the glossy, cropped shots of glistening flesh that we find in advertising, we see instead images of mouths, hands, penises and nipples that look plausible, used and forlorn. There are still overtones of masochism and voyeurism in Calle and Messager’s work; Calle’s photograph of a mutilated life drawing sits very uneasily in the imagination. Female fetishism is a troubled area; desire, sexuality and fantasy cannot be removed completely from the socio-political context. Nevertheless, it should be possible to stake out new territory and be genuinely subversive using the mechanics of fetishism from a female point of view. Rona Pondick, included in the contemporary section of Fetishism,

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comes closest to this with her work. Previous pieces have included miniature upholstered chairs with shoe-clad feet, and clusters of embryonic ‘heads’ embedded with teeth. Anxiety and dread suffuse her work. Baby, 1989, a pair of turd-clad child’s legs with baby-bottles appearing at the ends, functions as an acutely observed spoof on the anal/oral dialectic in Freudian psychoanalytic theory. Ultimately then, the agenda for Fetishism is too wide, the points of reference too dispersed to deal in any great depth with the complex issues raised. This is unfortunate, as much of the work is provocative, compelling and, particularly in the contemporary section, begins to break the ground for a genuinely transgressive form of fetishism, which does not rest simply on sensationalism, exoticism or castration anxiety. As it is, the work is rendered harmless by its separation into ‘theme rooms’. It is interesting to imagine the political and cultural reverberations that might have occurred from placing a nkisi next to a Hadrian Pigott, or a Hans Bellmer in close proximity to a Dorothy Cross.

Notes 1. FETISHISM was at the Brighton Museum and Art Gallery, 29 April–2 July; Castle Museum and Art Gallery, Nottingham, 22 July – 24 September; Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts University of East Anglia Norwich, 17 October – 10 December; 1995. 2. Simone de Beauvoir, ‘The Myth of Woman in the Work of Eve Authors’, in The Second Sex (London: 1956). 3. Briony Fer makes an interesting case for Ray’s fetishising of female genitalia in ‘The hat, the hoax, the body’, in K. Adler and M. Pointon (eds), The Body Imaged: The Human Form and Visual Culture Since the Renaissance (Cambridge: 1993), pp.161–173. 4. Laura Mulvey, ‘You Don’t Know What’s Happening Do You Mr. Jones’, Spare Rib, no. 8 (1973), pp.13, 16, 30.

Reference Women’s Art Magazine, no. 65, Jul/Aug 1995.

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ARE YOU BEING SERVED WITH A MASK? LORRAINE GAMMAN INTERVIEWS THE GUERRILLA GIRLS

After ten years of fighting sexism and racism in the art world, one might have imagined the Guerrilla Girls beginning to tire of giving men bananas. Not true. The familiar figures of these female masked avengers, clad in miniskirts and stilettos, are still at large confounding the image of female sexiness. In London and Edinburgh recently, the Guerrilla Girls energetically attempted to make feminism fashionable again by donning

Figure 16 Guerrilla Girls Outside the ICA in 1995, Snapshot. Courtesy of Guerrilla Girls and WAL archive.

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their costumes and playing to packed houses to promote their new book Confessions of the Guerrilla Girls. One of the most enjoyable ‘confessions’ was that the ‘guerrilla girl’ image that has inspired so much publicity and attention came about accidentally. One of the original group of underground art activists was a bad speller and at an early meeting wrote ‘gorilla’ instead of ‘Guerrilla’. It was an enlightened mistake because the hairy masks, that enacted the pun literally, gave the women the required anonymity they needed when making their assault on the New York art world. Using statistics and hard words (instead of heavier ammunition), witty poster campaigns attacking institutions that excluded women artists of colour immediately hit their targets. One of the first posters created by the Guerrilla Girls was sponsored by the Public Art Fund. Unfortunately they weren’t impressed with the image based on Ingres’ famous Odalisque, saying that it was too suggestive and that the central figure appeared to have more than a fan in her hand! So Guerrilla Girls rented advertising space on buses in

Figure 17 Guerrilla Girls, Dearest Art Collector, 1986. Copyright © Guerrilla Girls, Courtesy www.guerrillagirls.com.

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New York, until this was also banned. Undeterred, they went on to create another poster about censorship which, because of an accidental juxtaposition next to a Toyota advertisement that also tried to utilise the language of equal opportunities, achieved added humour. Overall, the impact of the Guerrilla Girls poster campaigns should not be underestimated. In the early days, the anonymity of the organization as well as the ‘in your face’ nature of the words and graphs, gave rise to much speculation about the brains behind the masks. Their kudos increased when it was suggested that well-known women artists and curators as well as art students, featured amongst their numbers. Precisely who was gathering in hairy outfits and donning the names of dead women writers and artists in order to organize assaults on the virtually all white male art establishment became the question for much of the art world. The poster campaigns were immediately followed by messages to individual collectors, dealers, curators and critics. The personal messages were often signed ‘A public service from the Guerrilla Girls’, and were found by some to be intimidating, but nevertheless a damn sexy female boot in the rear. Consequently, a legend was born. Hard facts coupled with streetwise copy and playful aesthetics gave the Guerrilla Girls a recognisable style that got them immediate attention and international recognition. Mockery and humour channelled female anger. In their own words the group learned to ‘fight sexism and racism in the art world with facts, humour and fake fur’. Perhaps it wasn’t only the pranks and the graphic banana bombardments that gave the Guerrilla Girls space in the museums to make their views known. The fact that so many famous or powerful women were rumoured to be among the masked membership caused much paranoid speculation in New York. Who was watching whom? Under this sort of pressure the white male art bastion started to wonder whether senior female colleagues were by night masked avengers. Very soon Guerrilla Girls were being invited to make masked personal appearances everywhere specifically at these institutions they had previously criticised or attacked. Of course, success is the best revenge, but what sort of success did the Guerrilla Girls actually achieve? Apart from personal satisfaction derived by individual women from dressing up as female avengers to demonstrate female power and talent at large, how did all the activism, personal appearances across America, as well as over 50 graphic poster campaigns, actually change the situation for women artists and those of colour in the USA? When I interviewed the Guerrilla Girls at the ICA in London they argued that since 1985, when they first started counting and turning visual pranks into equal opportunities assaults on the art world, their campaigns made a difference in America. No longer could women and artists of colour simply be forgotten. ‘We have made dealers and critics accountable ... and things have got better for women and artists of colour since then...’ argued one of their numbers speaking as ‘Frida Kahlo’. Yet the statistics on the latest Guerrilla Girl poster undermines their idea of continued improvement. It’s clear that the headcount of women and artists of colour exhibiting at the Whitney today is better than ten years ago, nevertheless it is still less than inspiring. The figures are more optimistic than 1985 but the current numbers have decreased since 1993 (when most of the headcount appeared at the now notoriously ‘PC’ 1993 Whitney Biennial

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exhibition). So what has prompted the backslide? Have the Guerrilla Girls lost their energy? Are they still inspiring new or younger generations of women to fight for equality in the art world? The representatives of the group I met at the ICA were full of enthusiasm and very positive about future campaigns. They certainly didn’t accept my suggestions that the Guerrilla Girls have become an institution and are in danger of becoming token figures co-opted by large art institutions, rather than remaining a feminist force that makes male curators shake in their boots. When I suggested that the group has been more influential in terms of international design, rather than direct political intervention, I realised I’d hit a sore point. The two charming women, whose eyes I could just about see peering out from behind their masks, at once became tetchy. These particular Guerrillas did not agree at all that their aesthetics, like so many other post-modern aesthetics, could easily be separated from the political content that generated them. In fact, they refused to believe that Guerrilla Girl politics could ever be simply ‘overlooked’ by collectors of past or recent ‘subversive’ artifacts. GG: I don’t think there’s a way to separate what our posters look like from the content that’s in them. From the very beginning we wanted the look of the poster to be very direct and very sort of ‘in your face’ and we really haven’t laboured a lot over the design of them. It’s just been very straight-forward. From the beginning we wanted to be very quick and very fast. What we appropriated were the techniques of advertising in order to change people’s minds and also to get their attention. We really were working with time, with quickness ... Perhaps it is because New York has that feeling, that energy, that urgency, that you have to get things done. In Britain you might have a meeting and discuss it, and then decide who’s going to do it, and it just all takes too long. One of the reasons for our success is because we’ve learned to be succinct. LG: Because your approach has been influenced by graphic specialists within your number? GG: Maybe yes, maybe no. The Girls are very good at lots of things ... LG: Many of your posters use graphs or ‘agit-prop’ techniques – a style that imploded into the art world in the 1980s (Barbara Kruger, Jenny Holzer and later by AIDS activists). These technologies were also redefined by mainstream advertising in this period, companies like Benetton are known for adopting Guerrilla Girl style graphics. They have become part of the language of contemporary advertising... what do you think about that? GG: Well, I think there’s always a flow of ideas back and forth between the art world and the advertising world. Yes of course we think that David Letterman stole our idea of doing the ‘top ten’ this and the ‘top ten’ that. Although I think our lists are more funny than his. Actually, his are usually flatfooted. The Guerrilla Girl style was originally about cheapness and accessibility. Our original posters were letterset, in black and white. Now we are expanding the medium and going onto cd-rom. Hotflashes, the Guerrilla Girl newsletter, is already on the Internet, and we are working on other historical projects ... In fact we have been approached to work on cdrom to write a women’s history of art for museums, which we are excited about.

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LG: But what keeps you going and stops you thinking that your ‘success’ might just be part of the institutional recuperation or co-opting of feminism? GG: Just that we can see that we are making progress ... There are also our meetings and our thousands of supporters that keep us together. In a way we sort of symbolise the secret rage of women, and we are saying things for them that some of them can’t say without a mask on? LG: But is it all women you work for? Don’t you think the situation of women’s art in Britain is different compared to America? GG: I think the main differences are about economics and the way art is distributed. The economics of contemporary art in New York tends to be worse than the rest of the world because it’s money orientated. It’s really impure, it’s really corrupted by money. So there’s an opportunity in a place like London. If the art market is not market-driven in London, you have an opportunity for a little more purity. Purity is probably the wrong word ... honesty might be nearer it. Each culture has its own weaknesses and it’s these you have to attack. You know, the American weakness is that we can go right out there only equating art in terms of money – and many of our posters have challenged that. You could have great fun in your country especially with your tradition of satire and humour of attacking chauvinism, you know, attacking the maleness of art and genius, making fun of the words they use, such as ‘masterpiece’, you know ‘genius’, or ‘seminal’. Let’s ban that word from the art vocabulary. The next person who says ‘seminal’ you should start laughing at them. It’s an hilarious word ... But we’re getting lost up our own backsides. In Britain the problem seems to be that theory and practice don’t come together very well. The feminist art practice and the actual politics are sometimes disconnected or missing. LG: Let’s get a bit more specific about precisely what is missing. It has been suggested that one of the reasons that Fanny Adams1 – the British equivalent of the Guerrilla Girls – didn’t last very long or achieve similar success, was because the position of women in art in Britain is very different to America. It has been argued that women are very well represented both as artists and as gallery directors in Britain’s contemporary art world. Do you think this is the reason Fanny Adams didn’t achieve success? GG: Why don’t you ask Fanny Adams that. We don’t know. (Long pause). Let’s not focus on Fanny Adams because the thing I’ve noticed here in England is that feminists love to fight with one another, which is a way of losing their power because their solidarity falls apart. They are constantly trying to discover the perfect position for themselves at the expense of someone else’s position, rather than saying that there are many points of view and so what can we do together. LG: The reason to focus on Fanny Adams is not to be defeatist, but to raise appropriate questions about different or specific contexts of information. American feminism may not always be completely relevant here! Whether British women can, or how they should, make political interventions has to be reviewed in terms of their specific context, doesn’t it?

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GG: Yes. Let’s say: ‘Please Fanny Adams wherever you are come back!’ Or to anyone else out there ... Buy our books and steal our ideas. We won’t sue you – do it your own way. You don’t need us ... steal ideas from any group that inspires you. Just remember to have a good time when doing it.

Note 1. Fanny Adams (1992–1993) was an anonymous pressure group that was active in the UK from around Feb 1992 to Jun 1993. The group of women art practitioners from diverse backgrounds campaigned to publicly expose inequality and discrimination within the art world.

Reference Women’s Art Magazine, no. 66, Sep/Oct 1995.

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INTRODUCTION

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ebates about the relation of theory (discourse) and art practice are often caricatured as being split into two camps: those who consider that theory is an imposition on the work of art that can be used either to kill it or to justify it, making it seem more than it actually is; and those who feel strongly about the embedded nature of theory and practice and consider practice to be unavoidably theoretical as it is bound up with social, historical and discursive factors. According to the latter view, to claim otherwise is to be in danger of romanticising art and as seeing it akin to a notion of divine inspiration beyond interpretation. This debate underlies many of the texts in this section with the added qualification that feminist identities are given to these supposedly mutually exclusive positions. Following on from our previous section ‘Representation’, those feminist identities are mapped onto the perceived dichotomy of ‘scripto-visual’ or ‘deconstructionist’ forms of art practice and more material forms such as painting, with the identity of ‘good’ feminist position being associated with the analytic, interrogative, mode of the former, while painting’s legacy of expressive gesture and modernist formalism made it seem suspect from a feminist point of view. The discourses in this section revolve around these dichotomously perceived practices. Some of the texts focus on the analysis of language and the necessity of inventing new terminology, while others attend to the importance of bodily gesture and materiality to feminist discourse. The trajectory of the texts in this section moves towards the notion that these are not mutually exclusive positions. We begin with the commonsensical and contemporaneously relevant 1986 article by Pam Gerrrish Nunn that situates theory in a dynamic relation to practice, which any educationalist or policy maker involved in the currently fraught terrain of practice– led PhDs might do well to read. A response to the debates about theory and practice that ensued at the feminist section of the 1986 Association of Art Historians conference in Brighton, Gerrish Nunn’s allusion to theory as ‘the “why?” and the “how come?” behind an action, the rationale which explains an activity’, while in one sense unwittingly close to traditional notions of intentionality long debunked by post-structuralist and post-modern theory, nonetheless has the merit of situating theory as simply having ‘more to do with thinking about doing something than with actually doing it’. Although

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philosophical questions about the nature of what thinking is could be raised in relation to this statement, it refreshingly poses the relation between theory and practice in usefully practical terms rather than the over-emphasis on proper names which have become the sine qua non of art education and criticism. While Deborah Cameron’s text refers to one of these canonical proper names, i.e. the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, her approach does not lose sight of a commonsensical approach to discursive language as being a tool that forms our world. Consequently, it becomes of paramount importance to choose the terminology which defines the kind of worlds we inhabit or would like to inhabit as women. Griselda Pollock’s response to a host of letters and articles published in the Women Artists Slide Library Journal in the wake of an event at the ICA, London, in January 1988, organised to promote the book she co-authored with Rozsika Parker, Framing Feminism: Art and the Women’s Movement 1970–85, highlights the issues of understanding and communication in feminist discourse. We do not have space in this anthology to include the original letters and texts that are testament to the furore this book generated in the pages of Women Artists Slide Library Journal, a debate which kicked off with Clare Rendell’s review of the event in issue no. 22. Rendell, the then editor of WASLJ, while appreciative of the book’s call for women artists to move from practical to strategic practices, was critical of what she saw as Pollock’s promotion of ‘scripto-visual’ approaches to visual art, e.g. the work of Mary Kelly, over and above tendencies in feminist art practice to return to painting. Rendell also accused the art historian of using words to effect a metaphoric colonisation of the artist’s body, in this case, Pollock and her respondent at the ICA, the artist Lubaina Himid. In Pollock’s response to Rendell, which we include here, she makes it clear that her position is not as dichotomous as Rendell outlines and she elaborates what is at stake in ‘feminist discourse’ and the misunderstandings that ensue as a result of the lack of a common language. The discussion continued in issue no. 23 with a letter from Kate Bush which defended Pollock’s art historical strategies stating that they ‘should be regarded as an important aid’ in effecting change, concluding that unless ‘we intervene [ ... ] to undercut prevailing attitudes, that dominant discourse will remain happily intact’. In the following issue, Rendell took issue with Bush, stating that the ‘“dominant discourse” is merely a set of conflicting parties who represent their own interests’. Rendell argued that ‘we must create our own organisations (as many women already have) – not to remain rigidly separatist, but in order to gain “general recognition” on our own terms’. Underscoring the importance and intensity of this debate, the same issue also featured a letter from Marilyn Crabtree highlighting the importance of both radical feminist theory and material art practices to give voice to the multiplicity of women’s experience under and in opposition to patriarchy. Arguing against a feminist dogma, she concludes that: For feminist art practice (and feminist politics) to thrive, the inner voices and deeply felt experience of women artists must continue to inform their work. There is no reason to feel bound by feminism’s language. Instead its theoretical insights can be used by women artists to assist their creativity to fulfill feminism’s aims in whatever way they feel appropriate.

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As we move through the texts in this section, the debate shifts into more densely theoretical territory, which paradoxically searches for a way to broach a perceived gap between the abstraction of language and the materiality of the body. We include two introductions to the philosophy of Luce Irigaray. Philosopher Margaret Whitford questions her appropriateness for women artists, while Hilary Robinson explores the potential in Irigaray’s focus on materiality and gesture for thinking through practice. The ‘argument’ between these two texts, which are both responses to Irigaray’s 1994 essay ‘A Natal Lacuna’ which was published in Women’s Art Magazine, no. 58, (May/Jun, 1994) revolves around definitions of Irigaray’s concept of the female Imaginary. Whitford sees this concept as being bound up with traditional notions of unity and beauty that repeat the patriarchal projection of these attributes onto the female body as object. By contrast, Robinson insists on the importance of Irigaray’s stress on the specificity rather than the essentialism of female morphology, which Robinson finds in the work of artists such as Laura Godfrey-Isaacs. The dichotomy of ‘deconstructionist’ versus ‘essentialist’ again rears its head in Nancy Proctor’s analysis of The Magazine’s name change in 1996 from Women’s Art Magazine to make: the magazine of women’s art which for her is symptomatic of a phallic feminism aligned with deconstructionism pervading the cultural context of the time. She situates her analysis in terms of how the dichotomies promulgated in ‘historical feminism’ between ‘essentialism’ and ‘scripto-visual’ practices might hinder attention to the multiplicity of women’s art practice. Her discussion centres on Permindar Kaur as an example of an artist whose work attempts to find ways of addressing the differences of race and identity that are relevant to a nomadic global context of displacement. Griselda Pollock’s text ‘Inside the Visible’ introduces the theories of psychoanalyst and artist Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger which were used as a curatorial ethos of the key 1996 international exhibition Inside the Visible: An Elliptical Traverse of the 20th Century Art – in, of, and from the Feminine organised by the Belgian curator Catherine de Zegher. In an earlier issue of Women’s Art Magazine, no. 56, (Jan/Feb 1994), Pollock had introduced Ettinger’s concept of the matrixial as offering an alternative to the phallic economy of Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic theories. Ettlinger’s concept, which favours a feminine relational subjectivity, has been important in the search for a forwards thinking theoretical discourse that might be aligned with the specificity of women artists’ material practices. David Burrow’s and Paula Smithard’s ‘Enjoy your alienation’ bridges the dichotomy between so-called ‘scripto-visual’ and other materialist practices. They focus on Tracey Emin, Sarah Lucas, and Gillian Wearing, situating their work in relation to a feminist approach to popular culture that has a lineage in Laura Mulvey’s analysis of visual pleasure. But the stakes have changed since Mulvey’s 1970s Marxist-inflected approach and now women artists, rather than using strategies of defamiliarisation, explore the collective pursuit of pleasures not exclusive to women (Wearing) or the confrontation of stereotypes by mimicking them (Lucas). Although we end this section here, this discursive shift to an emphasis on affective, mimetic, and corporeal, approaches to women’s practices continued in later issues of the Magazine. Of particular note here is Marsha Meskimmon’s ‘In Mind and Body:

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Feminist Criticism Beyond the Theory/Practice Divide’, make: the magazine of women’s art, no. 79, Mar/Apr/May 1998, as well as Amelia Jones’ response in issue no. 80, which discussed the stakes involved in phenomenological art critical analyses. This impetus of considering an artwork as an encounter in which body and mind are mutually constitutive is a productive site of feminist art critical engagement that continued in The Magazine until its demise in 2002.

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THE USES OF THEORY PAM GERRISH NUNN

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ne of the issues that came up at the feminist section of the Brighton Association of Art Historians conference comes up within feminists’ own circles too, and needs to be attended to because it is divisive and therefore well able to undermine our collective efforts. This is the question of theory (as in, ‘That was so theoretical I couldn’t understand it’ and ‘Why doesn’t she get more theory into her work?’). More exactly, it is a question of how well we communicate with each other on what are assumed to be shared concerns, and the references on which we base that writing, speaking, teaching, painting, performance, criticism, that we are addressing to other women. I understand theory to be the ‘why?’ and the ‘how come?’ behind an action, the rationale which explains an activity. Though I don’t mean to set up a simplistic distinction between thinking and doing, it is the case that theory has more to do with thinking about doing something than with actually doing it. The arguments that feminists have with each other on this issue of theory seem to come down to differences of opinion about what thinking has gone into the doing of something. Given the inequalities that exist, it is by no means all feminists – let alone all women – who can afford to spend a lot of time reading, thinking and discussing in order to enrich or make more elaborate sense of their own actions/productions and the world at large. Many women have not had an experience which encouraged, or even allowed, such a philosophical existence, and many can’t afford to begin one (those who don’t want one can’t expect other women to necessarily make the same choice). So inevitably some feminists appear more learned than others, and – I’ll say it bluntly, it’s because they are. (Although we might criticise each other for elitism, I don’t see any grounds for criticising each other for imposture.) The problems that arise from this, in my experience, are: 1. that what you could call ‘book-learning’ and certain fashions within it (e.g. French psychoanalysis) seems to be the most important form of knowledge, because of the influence of the women who display/deploy it and because of its traditional power to intimidate; 2. that some women simply don’t understand others and so feel either diminished or deprived; 3. that

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the wisdom we as a movement possess doesn’t circulate democratically, so exaggerating the sense of inequality between women ‘in the know’ and women not; 4. instead of encouragement and celebration being the results of feminist effort within and without the artworld, envy, mistrust, impatience, condescension and resentment develop and do their damage. Accepting that we all want to know more (I do believe that knowledge is a fundamental source of power) but that we are not all, as things stand, learning equally, I would say that both speakers and listeners, both teachers and learners have a mutual responsibility to improve whatever situation they find themselves together in. The varying specific circumstances of our lives will encourage different habits in us: women who inhabit the academic world, women who live with children, women who live with men, women who keep only middle-class or white company, all will be used to using certain strategies. If these habits damage our communication with each other, then we must all work at minding that: just as the listener must resist the intimidation of name-dropping or long and foreign words, so should the speaker try to remember that being impressive is less important than being understood. And on a very practical note, it seems to me that a circumstance which aggravates this issue is that only a few feminist voices get a public platform, within our own circles and in the art world at large: we could all try more imaginatively and keenly to swell the chorus, could we not, so that feminism is being broadcast in as many different languages, in as many different places, as possible. To worry that theory is masculine is foolish. Thinking is a valuable human capability, and the more we use it the further we’ll get. The more feminist thinking that the women’s movement can circulate, the better. The more exchange of women’s ideas we all can get access to, the better. There are women who want to listen to men’s brains ticking over: well I want to hear what women think – as much and as clearly as possible!

Reference Women Artists Slide Library Newsletter, no. 14, Dec 1986.

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FRAMING FEMINISM GRISELDA POLLOCK

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he pages of the W.A.S.L. Journal have carried a continuing debate over the last few issues (Nos. 22, 23, 24), which was initiated by Clare Rendell’s review of the Framing Feminism event at the ICA in January 1988. Even before the Journal invited me to comment on the article and following letters, I had decided to write some kind of response. I felt that the issues raised by the debate were crucial for contemporary feminist cultural politics. I felt that Clare Rendell misrepresented the book. Rozsika Parker and I wrote Framing Feminism because we felt the urgent need to keep a record of what had happened in the 1970s, to provide a history for younger women and those coming into the movement who might no longer have access to the often ephemeral documents which were the remaining traces of that history. The book is more than an anthology. Two major essays charted a history of the women’s art movement and its place in its historical moment on the hinge of late and post-modernism. We mapped a gradual shift from a primary focus on ‘practical strategies’ for women to exhibit their work together and gain recognition to ‘strategic practices’, the question of what kinds of art practice constituted a feminist intervention. Retrospectively we may now see the 1970s history as exclusive – a history of small, mostly metropolitan groups of white women gaining a modicum of visibility. Writing a history of those groups without the sense of the struggle of women who did not even enjoy that small degree of recognition for their cultural activity can rightly be indicted for its unconscious racism. It is a point that Lubaina Himid and other black women from the audience made at the ICA. The forum for debate at the ICA was therefore essential in making us recover many histories, but this does not invalidate the importance of struggling to recover histories or writing those to which Rozsika and I had access. Framing Feminism included a lengthy essay on feminism and modernism. This was my attempt to balance the necessary narrative of women’s activities featured in the first chapter by looking at the larger issues governing cultural production in the visual arts in the same period. This is where my reference to Mary Kelly’s sense of the place of women

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Figure 18 Lubaina Himid, Freedom and Change, 1984. Courtesy of the artist.

in history was offered. The essay addressed both the internal field of feminist art politics and the broader field of cultural politics in which feminism is being rapidly being assimilated to the umbrella term ‘post-modernism’ without fully grasping the critical part played by feminism in Britain in making a radical challenge to modernism and, now, to the reactionary forms of post-modernism. Feminist art practices have a place in the cultural history of our time. It is an injustice to women to treat them in a separate category; that replicates the nineteenth-century strategy for isolating women from the seemingly universal category art. Feminism has obviously validated women’s sense of their specificity and much art work is based on that politicisation of difference. But in representing feminism in art it is important not to discuss it only from a feminist context. What I said about Mary Kelly’s knowing interventions into the field of late and post-modernist art practice has been misunderstood. I suspect that the reasons for this were twofold. Feminist debate remains caught up with the margins versus mainstream question. The autonomous women’s movement has been a major strength for feminism. Separatism has its basis in women’s real needs and orientations. The mainstream is identified with men – rather than with institutions in which men and whites are privileged. But as feminist art history has argued, white women have never been totally excluded from the narratives of Western art. Their continual presence in cultural production has merely been represented as marginal, or supplementary, or amateur or ‘feminine’. I stressed in my essay for Framing Feminism what makes the work of feminist artists feminist is never exclusively what they do at the level of the text. It involves a sense of acting in a social world – or that part of it concerned with the production of meanings

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and identities. Their work is a political practice, bound in with the vitality of a political movement, a critique of economic and ideological power shaping and oppressing people’s lives in many ways, gender being merely one of them. Women’s Liberation as we called it in the 1970s was redolent of that utopian conviction of the possibility of political change through people’s participation. Thatcherism has made such ideals seem simply outmoded. But that is why it is important to me to locate the emergence of feminist art practice on that specific historical moment which offered a critique of modernism but was based in the political hopes for a women’s liberation movement. I do not think we can understand what is happening to us unless we retrieve these specific histories, unless we think historically in general and see what we do as women as part of the vast canvas of historical processes and not a tiny, marginal even dislocated island composed exclusively of women. Clare Rendell puzzled about the dialogue between Lubaina Himid and myself in terms of the conflicts between ‘the ordering impulse of a white art historian’ and the position of a practising black artist. This statement worried me because she seemed to question the validity and indeed possibility of thinking historically. It seems to set up the absolute primacy of the artist upon whom art historians ‘impose meaning’. Of course what people write is shaped by their interests and competences; we are all constrained by our culture. But why do we continue to fantasise about artists as other than the rest of us? Why do feminists keep the old romantic myths going? In Framing Feminism, we tried to explain the kind of cultural theory in which the artist is not privileged as the ‘creator’ but as a social producer working with inherited conventions, socially shaped possibilities, and deploying socially acquired competences in pursuit of particular but historically locatable interests. The real excitement of feminist theory and the cultural analyses it currently draws upon is the debunking of mystifying ideas about creativity, the artist, art. Instead we work (artists and historians alike) with a recognition of skills, insights, sensibilities and competences but with a shared sense that what we produce – visual art or critical texts – are produced in a public language. The meanings of any piece are effectively what the consumers produce in looking and reading, and this is mediated by the prevailing languages of criticism, institutional sites for the consumption of culture, as well as several other histories. Feminists intervene therefore not only by what they produce, in the knowledge that they must control (as much as possible for never entirely) the probable readings of their work, but they also develop new critical languages, new ways of understanding and culture as a political site. It is in the dialogue between producer and critical consumer that women artists get both genuine critical, engaged response, and also a social image of what they are doing. I realised after the ICA event that there was a growing gap between the kind of cultural politics, which Rozsika and I were documenting and analysing in Framing Feminism, the kind of cultural politics in which we were formed in the 1970s and the current mood of the women’s art movement. The critical review of the Framing Feminism event is symptomatic for me of a depressing political divide, signified by the lack of communication, the lack of a common language, the lack of common theoretical assumptions. Can this be bridged? Can we set up debates in which anxieties can be acknowledged and allayed,

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anxieties which sophisticated theorising and new languages, new concepts, all implying a challenge to the safe and comfortable mythologies which sustain artists, men and women, black and white, in capitalist systems, inevitably incite? Some styles for women writing are more easily accepted in the women’s community than others. Women intellectuals and theorists are always suspect. There is anger if the maternal voice of unconditional love and support gives way to a claim for paternal authority – the ability to speak and name the world, to give meaning, to make knowledge power. But there are also sociological reasons for artists who are women having problems with the way feminist theorists of culture write nowadays. In British art education we are not used to theoretical or critical or academic training such as artists get in the States where Greenberg, Craig Owens, Martha Rosler, and so forth teach in art colleges and universities, where art students get something that passes for a decent general education instead of the apology for an education with which they are palmed off here. Women’s education in general in Britain schools women to be silent, if not silent, quiet in direct contrast to the North American model where artists are frequently articulate speakers and educated writers. The debate about theory versus practice, words versus art is part of an outmoded and debased romantic tradition which cannot be allowed to prevent women having access to the vital cultural theories which feminists in education sites are developing. We cannot afford to caricature those who offer their work in history and cultural theory to the women’s community as rigid ideologues imposing frameworks on feminist art. What I said at the ICA was inspired by the issue of Feminist Art News, Vol. 2, No. 4, ‘Women Painting Today’. In her article, ‘In Defence of the Indefensible: Feminism, Painting and Post-Modernism’ Katy Deepwell criticised the advocacy by me and others of ‘scripto-visual’ art as the only way forward for feminist art practice. Deepwell then outlined the possibilities for feminists interested in painting. ‘Painting’ defines an activity; in modernist theory and practice, however, it signals a very particular view of art. I sympathise with women who want to paint, who enjoy this medium, who feel compelled to express themselves through its possibilities. But when I hear someone differentiate between art practices in terms of medium, scriptovisual versus painting, I know I am still in the orbit of modernist theory which primarily defines art forms through their media, saying that what each art form must do is pursue the logic or potential of the medium. Feminist art has been posed, by the American critic Lucy Lippard for instance, as anti-modernist precisely because it refused to see games with flatness and colour as the be-all and end-all of art. Feminists reclaimed art for narrative, autobiography, collage, decoration. It reclaimed other media and skills outlawed by modernism’s hierarchies. Feminist art also brought back a public – not just buyers and connoisseurs, but audiences about whom and for whom art was being actively made. The result was the complete overthrow of medium as a critical category. Explorations of diverse resources for art works motivated not by formal concerns but the necessity of communication and representation led to the use of video, performance, tape-slide, collage, patchwork, installations, montage, film, postcards, mixed media events, thematic exhibitions, multi-pieced

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art forms, posters, photography, paint, you name it, it was utilised and validated under the conditions which we now call post-modernism, which ruptured the formalist domination of art by modernism. Furthermore feminist cultural theory and practice critiqued other tenets of modernism – the primary of the visual, the heroic celebrating of the artistic subject as source of meaning and reference for all art. We exposed the institutions, the critical writings, the role of magazines, exhibitions and art history in producing and sustaining a discriminatory system in which only selected white men achieved recognition as artists while only their work was hailed as Art. We indexed the art world to the social world of politics and power. Thirdly, we established a continuum between images and ideals in art and other kinds of imagery – advertising, pornography, cinema. All these moves radically changed what art was thought to be, breaking the modernist myth that art was a separate realm, apart from society and immune to politics and power. After what was said and done in the 1970s no one should be arguing the relative claims of painting or scripto-visual art. To do so shows a complete failure to grasp hold of what feminist cultural practice has been all about. No one is compelled to make art that looks like Mary Kelly’s or Susan Hiller’s or Lubaina Himid’s or Sutapa Biswas’s, but I think we owe it to the women of the 1970s and early 1980s to come to appreciate and understand what they have done to the very possibilities of art as part of women’s political struggle. If we consider that feminism has radically revolutionised our theories of art and culture, provided ways of understanding it as part of a complex network of representations, ideologies and institutions, then we can begin to approach the pressures and interests surfacing at the present. Can painting as a practice tell us about women, their position, the world? While I want to make it quite clear that I think the present terms of discussion about painting versus scripto-visual art or deconstruction to be quite pointless, there is none the less an important issue here: how do we react to women who want to paint as feminists now and feel inhibited because of the imagined force of a feminist orthodoxy? Firstly, we must think historically to comprehend the revolution in cultural theory. Secondly, we must think about feminism and painting in radically new terms: we need a feminist theory of painting. But it will come from a historical analysis of women who have painted – especially in the modernist era in which this medium became an issue in art practice separate from its utility in representation. Thirdly, we could look to a range of feminist theories within semiotics and psychoanalysis to draw upon new models to understand ways of inscribing meanings from a feminine use of colours, shapes, gestures, etc. i.e. semiotic systems. There is much to be worked out. But I fear that the climate as represented by Clare Rendell’s response to Framing Feminism suggests a battle between the generations of feminists when what we most need is to open the channels of communication and dialogue between all the communities involved across the factors of race, class, sexual orientation, age and educational background in the movement of women.

Reference Women Artists Slide Library Journal, no. 26, Dec/Jan 1988.

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SURVIVAL GUIDE: LANGUAGE & GENDER DEBORAH CAMERON

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n recent feminist theoretical writing, we often encounter phrases like ‘the language of x’, ‘the grammar of y’, ‘the discourse of z’. For those not well-versed in linguistics, these terms can be rather puzzling. Why are they used, and what do they mean? To understand them, we have to go back more than 70 years. In 1916, the study of language was revolutionised when the collected lectures of a dead Swiss linguist, Ferdinand de Saussure, were published under the uninspiring title Course in General Linguistics. Saussure broke with the nineteenth-century Darwinist approach to languages as evolving organisms, and analysed them instead as self-contained systems of signs. Signs are produced, Saussure said, by linking a form – for instance the sounds c-a-t – with a meaning, ‘feline domestic animal’. This link is not natural (there’s nothing about a cat which means we have to call it a cat) but arbitrary and conventional. The sign acquires its value not from anything intrinsic but by contrast with other signs: a cat is not a bat or a dog. Saussure also observed that not all signs are verbal. Money, traffic lights, games such as chess – all are examples of systems where arbitrary signs (coins, coloured lights, chess pieces) acquire conventional meanings by contrast with one another (a 50p coin is not a £1 coin and a knight is not a bishop). These systems can be treated metaphorically as languages. The study of them is known today as semiology or semiotics, from the Greek word semeieon, meaning sign. So when people talk about, say, ‘the language of flowers’ or ‘the grammar of ornament’, what they mean is the conventions which link form and meaning (e.g. ‘red rose = passion’) in those particular systems. To the extent that they form a system, visual images can of course be treated semiotically. And it is clear that many images are indeed highly coded. The classical female nude, for example, is not merely a representation of nature, nor is it an image we can simply read as we wish. Because it is part of a traditional language, it signifies a whole set of social and sexual relations. Slight differences in the woman’s pose or the direction

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of her gaze have conventional meanings too. We can analyse them and work out what they signify by contrast with the alternatives. Feminists have a particular stake in this sort of analysis. Arguably, female subordination is part of the meaning of the nude; but, by taking a semiological approach – which insists that the meaning of signs is not natural but conventional – feminist critics leave open the possibility that this meaning could be challenged and ultimately changed. This is important, because feminist cultural producers want more than just permission to write or sculpt or paint using the existing codes of meaning. Those codes are problematic for women, because in the sign systems of male-dominated cultures the place of the feminine is always negative. Theorists of gender point out that ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ themselves are cultural signs. They do not denote anything fixed and natural (if they did we would not find such variation through history and across cultures in what counts as ‘feminine’); they mark a difference and work, like all signs, by contrast with each other. But because men have been the dominant gender, the difference has become a hierarchy. Men have represented themselves as positive: strong, active, rational. Since language works by opposition, women are represented as the negative or inverse of men; weak, passive, irrational and so on. These polarized conventions of representation help to keep gender difference and male dominance in place; they are clearly in need of change. But just putting the pen or the brush in women’s hands will not necessarily change them. Some feminist theorists – those who follow the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan – believe the problem is not just particular inherited languages, but language itself. We become full members of our culture when we learn to speak its language; and because the process is associated with the child’s separation from the body of its mother, language is symbolically masculine, phallic. Those who do not ‘possess the phallus’ (roughly speaking, this means girls – though Lacanians insist there are exceptions, because the phallus is a fantasy-penis rather than a real one, and a girl may unconsciously identify with it) will always occupy a marginal place in language. This need not be such a total disadvantage as it sounds, however. According to some feminists, like Julia Kristeva, it can enable the marginalised feminine subjects to pursue radically different forms of creative expression with the potential to disrupt established codes. In the light of all this, we can see that feminist art practice has a dual task; to create new languages and to try to disrupt or subvert the old, inherited ones. Judy Chicago and Mary Kelly are two artists who have attempted novel representations, using nontraditional media and making images of the female body that do not appear in the ‘malestream’ art tradition. An example of attempted subversion is Jo Spence’s photograph Libido Rising, 1989, which shows a disembodied, fishnet-clad woman’s leg with a vacuum cleaner curling round it. Some of these elements are obviously drawn from the familiar codes of pornography; but, by juxtaposing them with the incongruous ‘domestic’ meaning of the vacuum cleaner, Spence frustrates the conventional reading and gives the image a slightly different meaning. Of course, it is open to debate how successful feminists have been in forging new visual languages. If they sometimes seem to ‘fall back’ into traditional, sexist readings (a common criticism of Chicago’s vagina imagery), that only goes to show how difficult

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it is to break away from conventional language. But no language is completely or eternally fixed. It is crucial for feminists to go on experimenting and criticising, for if we cannot make new meanings, we cannot remake the world. Indeed, current theories of language and gender suggest that ‘language’ and ‘the world’ are radically interdependent. Our ways of seeing affect our ways of being: language ‘speaks us’ as much as we speak language.

Reference Women’s Art Magazine, no. 39, Mar/Apr 1991.

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WOMAN WITH AT TITUDE MARGARET WHITFORD

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he fate of Irigaray among women artists and critics seems to have been a process of creative misunderstanding. Readers of her book This Sex Which Is Not One1 were fascinated by her evocation of a potential female imaginary. The idea of a female specificity, previously missing from cultural representations, the analysis of Western culture as the confusion of masculine with universal, had particular resonance for the visual arts. The fact that the concept of the imaginary was not well understood seems merely to have increased its attractiveness and the inventiveness with which it was translated. It is the woman-centredness of Irigaray’s work that makes her attractive to those women – artists or writers – for whom their sexuate identity is a significant or central issue. Yet it is quite rare for Irigaray to mention other women at all. And although she was at one time associated with what came to be known as écriture féminine, she has virtually nothing to say about women’s writing per se, although she does use the expression parler-femme (speaking (as) woman) and le discours sexué (sexuate discourse). When Luce Irigaray talks about art, which is rare, it is usually in terms of the representation of female genealogies or lines of descent; her favourite examples are the icon of Mary the Madonna with her mother Anne, or the genealogies of prehistoric or mythical female goddesses.2 This is partly because she is in fact unsympathetic to much contemporary women’s art, which she sees not as representing a female imaginary but rather as indications of its absence. Thus, through the curious ironies of dissemination, whereby ideas acquire an existence independent of their originator, Irigaray appears to be indifferent or even hostile to the vigorous and flourishing manifestations of women’s artistic imagination, for which she was at least in part an inspiration. In a paper published in 1990, ‘How Can We Create Our Beauty?’3 Irigaray sets up a distinction between beauty and ugliness in women’s art and writing. It becomes clear very quickly that what she means by beauty and ugliness is not a purely aesthetic distinction, though it is connected to form.4 What is ugly is characterised here as anguish, distress, suffering, irritation, and crucially, dereliction (here meaning the loss of division representation).5 Beauty is defined as a moment of happiness and repose,

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of compensation for the fragmentary nature of daily life, of unity and communication or communion. This distinction is a reprise of the themes of This Sex Which Is Not One where Irigaray discusses the female or feminine imaginary. The female imaginary, she said then, is in bits and pieces. In our culture we have only the remnants or the shards of a shattered wholeness. And she asks the question: ‘What if the female imaginary were to deploy itself’, could it bring itself into play ‘otherwise than as scraps, uncollected debris?6 The ‘beautiful object of contemplation’,7 which is how woman appears in and to the male imaginary,8 has little, on the face of it, to do with beauty as Irigaray now conceives it. ‘Beautiful’ and ‘ugly’ have been mapped on to the pair ‘identity’ and ‘dereliction’, so that what is fragmented and in bits and pieces, assumed to be suffering and in distress from this condition, is said to be ugly whereas a female imaginary, that brings the bits together, deploys them as a wholeness rather than its shattered remains, is said to be beautiful.9 Beauty is ‘the spiritual predicate of the flesh’.10 Female beauty, says Irigaray, has always been considered ‘a garment ultimately designed to attract the other into the self. It is almost never perceived as a manifestation of, and appearance by, a phenomenon expressive of interiority – whether of love, of thought, of flesh’.11 Beauty in this account is attached to the ideality of a woman’s identity-for-herself, and depends upon the divine woman, the ideal self which transcends the particularity of individual women. Disturbingly, however, this account of beauty seems simply to have shifted ‘the beautiful object of contemplation’ from the male imaginary to the female imaginary, and it is not clear to me that this shift is in the end much of an improvement. To understand why Irigaray has made this move, it is necessary to go back to the deconstructive analysis of Western philosophy in Speculum.12 In that wonderfully iconoclastic book, Irigaray exposed the hidden underside of the history of the masculine subject, starting with Freud and ‘going back through the masculine imaginary’ to Plato via about 2,000 years of philosophical and symbolic repression of the feminine. It is a brilliant tour de force which links a psychoanalytic attention to what is repressed by culture to a Derridean inspired account of the repressions inspired by metaphysics. What readers often fail to notice, however, is Irigaray’s stress on the death drives. Following Lacan, Irigaray interpreted Freudian drive theory in terms of the symbolic order. Drives were not pre-structured instincts; they derived their organisation from the structuration imposed by the symbolic.13 If this applied to the phallic organisation of sexuality, it applied a fortiori to what psychoanalysis calls the death drive (aggressivity and sadism, or masochism and depression) which appeared to be unevenly distributed between the sexes. In the light of Lacanian theory, this uneven distribution could now be seen not as a fact of nature (men as naturally more aggressive, women as naturally more peaceloving) but as a function of the symbolic order and, therefore, in theory at any rate, susceptible to modification. In my interpretation of Irigaray’s oeuvre as a whole, it is her emphasis on the death drive which seems to me most crucial for understanding her ethical position concerning art. For the point about the death drive is that it has two aspects: it is both destructive and creative. What was missing from the symbolic order – in Irigaray’s analysis – were the representations of women which would enable them to sublimate their own

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death drive and create, instead of functioning simply as a means of sublimation for the death drive of men14 (the ‘beautiful object of contemplation’ again). In sublimated form, the death drive energises creation by breaking up rigid forms and enabling the emergence of something new. According to Irigaray’s analysis, men’s creativity flourishes at women’s expense while women have inadequate symbolic resources for dealing with life-threatening drives. From Speculum onwards, Irigaray has always argued that women need representations of their sex which will validate the maternal genealogy and the mother-daughter relationship, and enable the cultural representation of two sexes and not just of one sex and its ‘other’ (the shadowy not-quite-man and therefore not-quitefemale). However, she has now turned strongly against the representation of women’s dereliction, the pain and madness which they feel in a symbolic order that does not recognise them. The expression and representation of pain may have been cathartic at a certain point, she writes,15 but the price is a heavy one: the representation of women’s pain and particularly of their fragmentation leaves them bare and denuded. Irigaray is concerned above all with the absence of symbolic representations of women. She sees representations of women’s dereliction as undesirable because of the dangers of self-destruction of one kind or another (whether physical or spiritual). The fundamental danger is that of irreparable fragmentation, paralysis and the loss of identity. With no symbolic support, women’s death drive is turned against themselves. In this danger, Irigaray has come to see painting – the reproduction of the image – as in some ways more important than words. She diagnoses the failure of words – verbal language – to lead either to liberation or to a new subjective identity for women, and looks to a creative imagination that is not purely verbal for a renewal of feminine identity.16 Here is a quotation from a 1986 lecture, ‘The Colours of the Flesh’, on the limits of verbalisation and the possible function of painting and the image, where the ability to paint is linked to the ability to heal: The point about painting is to spatialise perception and to make time simultaneous, to quote Klee. This is also the point about dreaming. The psychoanalyst should direct his or her attention not only to the repetition of former images and their possible interpretation, but also to the subject’s ability to paint, to make time simultaneous, to build bridges, to establish perspectives between present-past-future.17

Irigaray makes a distinction between two types of imagination. On the one hand there is the imagination as a source of symptoms, which can be blocked or encysted in its past; on the other hand there is the imagination as a source of identity and creative achievement, opening on to a future.18 These correspond, for women, to the options offered respectively by the male imaginary – in which women cannot grow – and the female imaginary – which offers a possible female future. As Irigaray sees it now, the critical, deconstructive and above all verbal moment tends towards a fragmenting analysis. Although that may be a necessary stage, it cannot offer much to a woman whose identity in a male symbolic order is necessarily fragmented already. At most, it can offer her a male imaginary and a male identity. ‘My interpretation is that, because women have not been allowed to keep their gestures, their imaginary, their symbols, these things become encysted in the verbal imaginary of man’.19 Compare her comments on the artist

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Unica Zürn: ‘Everything is dissected by an analytic not a contemplative gaze’, resulting in ‘her failure to be born’.20 In turning towards the figurative representation of women, and emphasising the beauty of women’s morphology, Irigaray has several motives. She wants women to be protected against the destructiveness of a masculine economy which is deadly to their identity. But she also warns against the destructiveness of women’s partial drives in an economy where these cannot easily be sublimated. This fear of the destructiveness of unsublimated death drive, coupled with a strong ethical position concerning women’s identity, makes her conservative when it comes to the explorations of women artists. For Irigaray, artistic creation is quite explicitly a means, not an end in itself. The end is a new and transformed symbolic order which would symbolize the couple and not simply male identity: ‘If art is a necessary condition for the establishment of a culture of affective and especially sexual relationships, then art is useful as a place where individual, bodily matter can be transmuted and sublimated’.21 Representations of fragmentation may still have a place in psychoanalysis, whose role it is to uncover the sources of suffering and attempt to heal them. But it has no place in art, which should offer representations of women’s beauty, (i.e. of her identity that is yet to come), not of her dereliction. Irigaray wants art to anticipate a society that does not actually exist and she looks to artists to supply a missing transcendence, the divine woman, rather than representing their struggles with the contradictions of the present. Thus for Irigaray, the representation of the human form is crucial. The artist has an ethical responsibility to present to women an ideal self, ‘discovering and displaying her own morphology’.22 Her fear of what will happen if women challenge patriarchy – that this will be destructive to women themselves – is a very real issue. But it leads her to stress the ideal harmony of representations of women’s identity. Look at the kind of vocabulary in which her vision of women’s art is described: repose, happiness, wholeness, beauty, unity, compensation, communion, and so on. This ideal of repose and lack of conflict might equally well be interpreted as the immobilisation of women by the patriarchal death drive, or a refusal to look at the reality of conflict rather than as a creative challenge to and breaking of paralysing moulds. From the point of view of the woman artist or writer, it might feel that there is little to choose between the prescriptiveness of the male art critic who is disturbed by feminist art and the prescriptiveness of Irigaray’s notion of the divine woman. To understand that a woman who has inspired so many women artists and writers with her concept of the female imaginary should want to place such stringent limits on what sort of art is truly ‘women’s art’, we need to read not only the well-known and more celebratory passages from This Sex Which Is Not One, but also the harsher and more pessimistic accounts in other parts of her work of the threat that thanatos poses to civilisation and the work of love.23 These modify considerably the visionary utopianism with which Irigaray is often associated and present a rather more complex picture than the Irigaray of the pre-oedipal, pre-symbolic fantasy.24 The ideals that Suzi Gablik outlines in the conclusion of Has Modernism Failed?: the ideal of apocalyptic renovation; the spiritual dignity of art; the healing function of art; are all ideals shared by Irigaray, who believes

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in the social responsibility of the artist, and her obligation to the community of women whose future coming-into-existence as a community depends on the ethics of practices such as art.25

Notes 1. Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. C. Porter (New York: Cornell University Press, 1985). 2. One exception is ‘A Natal Lacuna’ in Women’s Art Magazine, no. 58, May/Jun (1994), pp.11–13. 3. Luce Irigaray, Je, tu, nous: Towards a Culture of Difference, trans. A. Martin (London: Routledge, 1993). 4. ‘As women...we have been enclosed in an order of forms inappropriate to us. In order to exist, we must break out of these forms’ (Irigaray: Je, tu, nous, p.109). 5. See Margaret Whitford, Luce Irigaray: Philosophy in the Feminine (London: Routledge, 1991) for a fuller explanation of the meaning of dereliction. 6. Irigaray: This Sex Which Is Not One, p.30. 7. Ibid. 8. See Elisabeth Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992) on the prevalence of the beautiful but dead woman in Western art of the last couple of centuries. 9. It is important to note that wholeness does not necessarily exclude multiplicity. 10. Luce Irigaray, ‘Divine Women’ in Sexes and Genealogies, trans. G. C. Gill (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), p.64. 11. Irigaray: ‘Divine Women’. 12. Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman (New York: Cornell University Press, 1985). 13. Richard Boothby, Death and Desire: Psychoanalytic Theory in Lacan’s Return to Freud (New York and London: Routledge 1991) gives an extraordinarily lucid and detailed account of the Lacanian theory of the death drive. 14. Irigaray: Speculum of the Other Woman. 15. Irigaray: Je, tu, nous: Towards a Culture of Difference. 16. See Sexes and Genealogies on the limitations of psychoanalysis, the ‘talking cure’. 17. Irigaray: Sexes and Genealogies. See also Christine Battersby, ‘Just Jamming: Irigaray, Painting and Psychoanalysis’ in K. Deepwell (ed), Feminist Art Criticism: Into the 1990s (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994) for a different contextualisation of this remark. 18. Irigaray: Sexes and Genealogies. 19. Irigaray: Sexes and Genealogies, trans. adapted. 20. Irigaray: ‘A Natal Lacuna’. 21. Irigaray: Sexes and Genealogies. 22. Irigaray: ‘A Natal Lacuna’. 23. See Margaret Whitford, ‘Irigaray, Utopia and the Death Drive’ in C. Burke, N. Schor and M. Whitford (eds), Engaging with Irigaray: Feminist Philosophy and Modern European Thought (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), pp.379–400. 24. See Katy Deepwell, ‘Paint Stripping: Feminist Possibilities in Painting After Modernism’, Women’s Art Magazine, no. 58, May/Jun (1994), pp.14–17, for critical comment on this fantasy. 25. Gablik, (London: Thames and Hudson, 1984), see especially chapter 8.

Reference Women’s Art Magazine, no. 60, Sep/Oct 1994.

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I R I G A R AY ’ S I M AG I N I N G S HILARY ROBINSON

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he publishing by Women’s Art Magazine of Luce Irigaray’s ‘A Natal Lacuna’ (No. 58) and Margaret Whitford’s subsequent critique of it and an other of Irigaray’s writings, ‘Woman With Attitude’ (No. 60), mark an important moment in the development of feminist art theory. It is the first time (as far as I am aware) that Irigaray’s work has been presented so directly to an audience of women/feminist art practitioners, and therefore the first time her work has been presented as being of direct relevance to those practitioners. For this reason alone, it should be welcomed, as Irigaray’s writings do indeed have much to offer the feminist practitioner. However, I do have major reservations, both about the text chosen (although it is its first publication in English, is this a good enough reason for publishing this piece in particular?) and about the way it was then framed by Whitford’s article, which seems to miss the point about what is of most benefit to practitioners in Irigaray’s work. My disagreements centre on four main points. Firstly, writing is prioritised, both through examples cited and through literary theoretical models. For example Zürn is introduced by Irigaray as someone who ‘writes/draws’; in Whitford’s introduction Zürn’s ‘crucial’ relationship is with a (male) poet. Additionally, Whitford can only speculate as to why Irigaray selected Zürn, and her speculation rests upon Zürn being exemplary of ‘a certain kind of woman writer or artist’ who became visible in the 1970s because they reported on having been ‘driven by patriarchy into madness’. But this of course is the literary model: in the 1970s contemporary women artists were celebrated for their iconoclasm and political awareness, while historians were redocumenting their foremothers, no matter how sane. Secondly, neither Irigaray nor Whitford attempt to chart the differences and specificities of art practice. In particular, reading writing in a linear fashion and an art-work in a non-linear fashion are crucial to both, but ignored. Irigaray elides different forms of creativity and Whitford does not pick up on this. Whitford does, however, tacitly acknowledge differences, for example when she says that Irigaray has recognised the failure of words; but neither Irigaray’s recognition, nor the failure itself, are explored; thus the differing

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approaches that each requires are not foregrounded. Although Irigaray’s indication of the problematics of male representation of ‘female beauty’ is acknowledged, it is not indicated that this is brief, written in the 1970s, and not further expanded upon by Irigaray. Irigaray suggests that we have to discover and display our own morphology – a key moment for recognizing the specificities of visual representation and the work done by feminist artists and art workers on how they function – yet the gap is left, and ignored by Whitford. My third point is that Irigaray leaves plenty of gaps in her writing – creative gaps, full of potential – but Whitford glosses over them or chooses not to recognise them. Crucially, Irigaray’s call for symbolic representation, and representation of the female form, are mapped onto figuration in Whitford’s account. Yet Irigaray’s writing is far more suggestive than this account would have us believe. She delights in the concept and actuality of mucous – which would seem to militate against a simplistic figuration. Here there may be rich potential for painters in particular (and I am thinking most strongly of Laura GodfreyIsaac’s work here) to develop from the impasse that the modernism/post-modernism and painting/scripto-visual debates have created. But in order for this to happen a clear acknowledgement of those debates is necessary. A similar gap occurs later, when Irigaray leaves a way forward for non-figurative representation within the context of female genitals, suggesting that certain cultures have raised the question of female morphology ‘without reducing it in any way to anatomy and physiology’. Again, this is rich with potential; and the quasi-illustrational strategies of a Judy Chicago or a Monica Sjöö, whether ‘vaginal’ or of the goddess, would appear to be far too simplistic a response. A final main problem is with the lack of recognition of process – the process of making an artwork, and the process of reading it – and the processes by which it makes meaning. Instead of this, Irigaray elides Zürn and her work, and discusses the work as if it were a symptom of the woman, rather than the result of particular practices. This – and the fact that Whitford does not pick up on it – is again because of the two writers’ distance from the praxis of visual art. This is a surprising omission from Irigaray after her essays ‘Gesture in Psychoanalysis’ and ‘Flesh Colours’, which discuss the production and reading of visual signs and their meanings, and again are full of richness for the visual artist. In short, Irigaray’s main interest for the feminist artist is not in what she has to say about other visual artists, and Whitford is misplaced in her seeming desire for Irigaray to be a critic of sorts. Instead, Irigaray’s main usefulness is at the point where practice and theory are intimately linked; where the experience of reading becomes an experience of theory in practice; where the visual as process and praxis is acknowledged and integrated into this experience. I strongly believe that there is much in Irigaray’s work that is of rich, productive and direct benefit to the feminist artist. However, it is not in the obvious places, and can only be extracted by providing a reading of her work which also attends to the specificities of art production with which the feminist artist has to grapple. Anything else creates two steps back rather than one step forward.

Reference Women’s Art Magazine, no. 61, Nov/Dec 1994.

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IS WOMEN’S ART HOMELESS? NANCY PROCTOR

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or this article, I was asked to address the impact of a feminist history on practitioners and theorists – how has it helped, how has it hindered feminists’ work? Let me lay the cards on the table: for me, trying even to conceive of contemporary women’s art practices without some sort of feminist history is like theorising the unconscious without mentioning Freud. For better, or I’ll concede, sometimes for worse, the multifarious feminist histories are the very preconditions and ground on which the conjunction of femininity and creativity is figured today. So there you have both of my prejudices in a nutshell. But while my allegiances to these theoretical bodies are blatant and powerful, I don’t have to rack my brains to think of how historical ‘feminist’ discourses can hinder, even while motivating, women’s art practice. I put ‘feminist’ discourses in inverted commas because what we’re really talking about here is a deployment of feminisms (and even psychoanalytic feminisms) to produce yet another master discourse. There is certainly no shortage of examples of this sort of phallic feminism around. Just this month we were treated to Toril Moi at the Kristeva Conference in Leeds dismissing with a facile quip the entire theoretical work of both Luce Irigaray and Hélène Cixous as simply and exclusively essentialist. It made the audience laugh, but was it really a useful gesture considering the thousands of feminists who are using these theorists’s work in a non-essentialist, non-reductive manner? Forced into an unnecessarily defensive posture by the prevalence of this feminist policing, Hilary Robinson, writing on Dorothy Cross in 1994, felt compelled to spend the first half of her article clearing the artist (and hence herself) of charges of essentialism, before she could even begin to talk about the art. Dorothy Cross’s work is so much more complex than essentialism that it’s a real shame there wasn’t more time to address what is new and interesting in her work. Funny, that: why is it that male artists are never called upon to defend their phallic works from charges of essentialism? Ironically Robinson’s article appeared in no other ‘women-only’ space than the Journal of the Museum of Women’s Art. Even within their own pages, feminist women’s

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magazines still feel the need to justify being exclusively women’s domains. I fear that in shedding the ‘essentialist’ title of Women’s Art Magazine, make is similarly bowing to contemporary hostility toward anything overtly feminist. In keeping up with the times, perhaps dear old WAM is only wasting valuable resources; make-overs are by no means cheap. I suggest that at this historical moment, we need to interrogate not essentialism but phallicism in feminist discourses. If at times women have had to deploy a masterful discourse in order to demand visibility and rights within the phallic order, these strategies must always be recognised as contextually specific compromises with phallicism. If the master’s tools cannot dismantle the master’s house, they certainly can Miss-order the Women’s Room. Rather than make do with sound-bite simplification, feminists need to slow down, not be so quick to dismiss one line or another as ‘essentialist’. I recognise that such a method is at odds with make-ing a buck on the mag market, and may not always be tenable for financial survival; but still, some of those brave enough to try occasionally succeed – like Permindar Kaur, who was invited to exhibit in the British Art Show despite the lack of art market hype surrounding her otherwise very deserving work. Permindar Kaur is a young British artist of Sikh origins who has now returned to Britain after working in Spain for several years. In a recent interview, she told Ros Dodd, ‘It’s very difficult to make statements about particular things. Issues about race and colour are very complex now’. In the gallery publicity for her current exhibition, Cold Comfort, which is shown in a ‘nomadic’ installation at both Birmingham’s Ikon Gallery (18 May–22 June 1996) and the Mead Gallery in Coventry (25 May–29 June 1996). Permindar Kaur adds, ‘In my current work there is no longer direct polarisation between two distinct cultures. The work still contains questions concerning identity but on a more subtle level’. With the unsticking of national, cultural and linguistic identities in this increasingly nomadic world, we need a different way of thinking about differences – one which refuses to simplify and erase difference through, as Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger describes it, the phallic ploys of fusion and rejection. This is not to say, however, that phallically structured questions such as, ‘Where is home?’, asked by Permindar Kaur in relation to her recent work, are irrelevant. Maybe we just no longer believe that they are answerable in the same old definitive, phallic ways. The known and the knowable take on a disturbing and unfamiliar aspect in Permindar Kaur’s work. In Tall Beds, 1996, chiIdren’s beds are raised high overhead, beyond the safe reach of any child, on cold and spindly steel legs. In Cot, 1993, a cot whose sides reach high over even an adult’s head is piled with red cushions, red children’s clothes oozing ominously out from between the layers. They are objects and environments familiar and yet rendered foreign by their improbable scale and their location in the art gallery. We are forced to ask not only, ‘Where is home?’, in this work, but also, ‘Can that question be answered in the way we expect?’ The recent rise in feminist theorisation of lost homes and the exiled subject signals a search for ethical positions in feminist practice, beyond the dictates of moral laws. There is an understanding in these theorists’ work, and of artists such as Permindar Kaur, that ‘home’ is not utopia, that is, not ‘no place’, but rather an-other place, somewhere

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Figure 19 Permindar Kaur, Cot, 1993, Fabric, steel and foam, 150 × 105 × 62 cms, Photo: Peter Lundh. Courtesy of the artist.

just over the next hill, in the next land, in that other language. Any belief that we have found it – THE home, THE feminism, THE woman – is an illusion. Desire and its ethical pursuit is always somewhere Other, someplace foreign – or, as Kristeva would put it, ‘the stranger within’. Is this then, the ethic behind Women’s Art Magazine’s new name, make? Had we become too complacent, the old home too familiar, still to have any (self-)critical teeth? In opening up the magazine’s view to include male artists and writers, are we pursuing the desire of a feminist rather than merely female art practice? Or are we acting out of a fear of transgressing the antiessentialist law by continuing to insist on the exclusivity of Women in the Art. Are we simply on the make, after a sexy new image that attracts more of the cultural goods?

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Like Permindar Kaur, I want to resist nostalgic yearnings after the ‘lost’ home that was Women’s Art Magazine, and yet I remain deeply suspicious of claims that we no longer need to assert female as well as feminine specificity. What distinguished Women’s Art Magazine from other contemporary arts journals was its unabashed insistence on providing a space uncontestedly for women artists and their work. I now wonder what is the difference between make and Frieze, for example. * * * But apparently galleries and art-book vendors were loath to stock a magazine with the unfashionable name of Women’s Art. It is cool to use concepts conceived and developed by feminist theorists, but not to credit feminism for them. Plundering of feminist work is endemic; witness the femininmasculine exhibition at the Centre Pompidou earlier this year, at which speakers were invited to discuss ‘le sexe de l’art’, but specifically forbidden to use the ‘f-’(eminism) word. So when the editor says the magazine needs to attract more debate to its pages than was allegedly possible for an exclusively female publication, I agree in principle; but I also hope that widening the forum to include male artists and critics will not prove to be yet another example of women not getting any special notice for their work – ‘that’s what the bloody feminists do anyway’ – while men get trophies for doing the washing-up. When the Chapman brothers, for example, write for make on their ‘genderless’ art (their term), I hope there will be space in the new domestic arrangements to acknowledge that we would not even be discussing gender in art had it not been for decades of feminist work on gender, creativity, and representation in magazines like Women’s Art Magazine. make demands an object ‘make art’, for example, or a preposition ‘make up’ to give it an objective. I hope both the objects and the objectives of make will be feminist ones. Now, let’s make the best of it.

Reference make: the magazine of women’s art, no. 71, Aug/Sep 1996.

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INTO INSIDE THE VISIBLE GRISELDA POLLOCK

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Organised by the Belgian curator Catherine de Zegher, Inside the Visible: An Elliptical Traverse of 20th Century Art in, of, and from the Feminine, is a major event the like of which has not been seen for a decade. Neither a women’s show nor a feminist exhibition in the sense either term acquired as part of the strategies of the 1970s, it is nonetheless a key exhibition that has internalised in its very structure key aspects of feminist theory and its radical revisions to ways of thinking about art. Traversing the artistic and historical terrain of the twentieth century with an oblique feminist vision, it weaves into a matrixial web work from the margins, perceived from a shifted metramorphic viewpoint.1 Unfolding as an open-ended process, the exhibition project is prompted by the observation of multiple convergences in aesthetic practices both in time (over different periods of the twentieth century) and in space (in different countries of the world). This curatorial procedure may be likened to an excavation of material traces and fragmentary histories which are recombined into new configurations, producing alternative meanings and insights into reality. A structure that emerges is that of several possible recurrent cycles, rather than a linear survey (with its emphasis on artistic originality and historical genealogies). It allows us to read a more hybrid form of modernism during the twentieth century.2

Clustered around the intersection of histories of sexual difference and of social revolution or repression, e.g. Surrealism/Fascism; Conceptual Art/Vietnam War and the Chilean and Cuban Crises; Bosnia/Neofascism/Post-modernism: namely the 1930s, 1960s, 1990s, artists are grouped under thematics such as Parts of/For, The Blank in the Page, Weaving of Water and Words, Enjambment: ‘La donna e mobile’. The exhibition attempts to acknowledge that ‘difference is far more entangled and complex than we like to admit’ writes de Zegher. But there is a coherence in the fact that the ‘challenge to disrupt the

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dominant signifying continuity, to disturb identity, system and order and to problematise representational authority’ was most often taken up by a number of artists who as women were also of varied national, cultural, sexual and geopolitical situations.3 The exhibition is theoretically as well as artistically informed by the concepts developed by Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger, particularly the theories of the Matrix and the Matrixial Gaze, which realigns many of the issues and debates that have defined a feminist project in the visual arts since the early 1970s while offering an altered and altering reading of the pathways through twentieth-century art.4 * * * The Matrixial Gaze by Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger represents a radical move beyond the impasse of current feminist theory of the gaze, the image, and the feminine. She distinguishes several possibilities of the gaze. What we have identified – and got stuck with – as the ‘male gaze’ is this: Oedipal castration focuses sight and turns vision into an ordering, selecting, separating or unifying function. [ ... ] The gaze which has thus been civilised by the means of the Oedipus complex is a conscious, alienating, cultural tool of power in the service of the Ego.5 Behind the Oedipal gaze, Lacan identified another, a phallic gaze, the gaze as phallic objet a. This odd formulation refers to lost part objects and the archaic mother/other that are forever unattainable, but once hovered on the borderlines of corporeal, sensory and perceptive zones. The objets a – or objects little ‘o’ for other – put into play the lacks that generate the subject in desire before an Oedipal ordering of sexual difference organised around the idea of castration that then sets up sexual difference in its own image. Translate the longing for the gaze as objet a into everyday speech. What is it that we look for, try to see, long for, or momentarily feel we might have glimpsed that gives us intense pain and pleasure perhaps, when we look at painting, or search another’s face in love? Before the Oedipal gaze that masters, positions, possesses, dominates, there is the phallic gaze as a lost object, associated with the mother’s look. We might then imagine the gaze being like an almost tactile envelope that, being lost as we separate from the mother, is fantasised in retrospect as if it had been once possessed as an object. Bracha Lichtenberg writes, If exposure to the gaze by which painting attracts us also ‘touches’ us and soothes..., if painting as a manifestation of the gaze satisfies something in us as spectators, then a specific appetite unique and fatal to the eye as a zone separated from its part object unconsciously tapers the gaze as its point of support...Appearance is a screen that hides the gaze, and the enigmatic powers of art are not competing with that screen but what is beyond it.6

Bracha Lichtenberg argues, however, that even with this modification we are still unable to imagine an ordering of meaning, fantasy and desire outside the phallic model: on/off, either/or; castration. Our very concepts of sexual difference are phallic. Woman is the off term: not-man, castrated, lacking, Other, Thing, objet a for a man: the sublime blankness of the blank page perhaps. Structurally, therefore, the feminine is positioned only as the opposite or negative of the phallic. This means nothing. But that nothing is not just any nothing. It is all that we can currently imagine as the specificity of the feminine

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– not as the biological, psychological essential nature of women and not just as abstract linguistic positionality conceived by post-structuralist thought. The feminine might signify another possible system of meaning and subjectivity that runs along beneath, subjacent to the phallic, yet forecluded – i.e. closed out with no means of being known – by a Symbolic that is ruled by the single and sovereign signifier, the phallus. Lichtenberg

Figure 20 Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger, Mama Langue Borderline Conditions & Pathological Narcissism, n.5, 1989–90, Indian ink, charcoal, Xerox, photocopic dust on paper; plexiglass, 122 × 40 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

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proposes another signifier: the Matrix, for another stratum of subjectivisation, the matrixial, based on the ways in which the invisible specificity of the feminine body and the fantasies it generates, shape all infants through a sensorial registering of moments of encounter of the ‘several’ of ‘proximity in distance, difference in co-emergency’. This feminine has particular implications for our theories of art in general and what ‘inscriptions in the feminine’ in art might mean for us and for culture in general. Phallocentricism produces identification fantasies and repulsion fantasies – sexism, racism, homophobia. What is not like me and cannot be like me is other and must be rejected as threatening to my own integrity as subject. The model of later pregnancy, however, provides – and I stress a metaphor for – a moment when part-subjects coexisted in unknownness to each other without either rejection or assimilation, in relations that were non-phallic, not about absence or presence, yet sensationally and imaginatively codetermining and in the feminine. The becoming-mother fantasises; the becominginfant registers and garners in the last period of uterine life a similar array of sensations that, post-partum, may function as the resource for the drives and later inscription as fantasies and thought ‘in/of the feminine’ around severality and a kind of mutual affect across thresholds of the unknown other and the self. (Is this not one of the dimensions of the experience around art that has hitherto only been expressible through outworn romantic or mystical aesthetics?) Puzzling over the lures and pleasures associated with art works where the paradox of a visible tactility that touches the internal organisation of the drive through materiality and structure rather than through representation (i.e. content or image) might allow us to recognise a borderspace where we must primarily imagine subjectivity, even in its most minimal and primordial possibilities, as an encounter between several subjects. It deals with possible even if de-signified meanings that arise ‘in slight movements inbetween closeness and remoteness, or proximity and distance – and not, as in the phallic model, between absence or presence’.

Notes 1. These terms index the show’s debt to the theories of Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger. See Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger, ‘Metramorphic Borderlinks and Matrixial Space’, in J. Welchman (ed), Rethinking Borders (London: MacMillan, 1996). 2. Catherine de Zegher, statement proposing the exhibition, Inside the Visible (Boston: MIT Press, 1996). 3. Both quotes are from de Zegher: Inside the Visible, p.20, 26. 4. Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger, The Matrixial Gaze (University of Leeds Feminist Arts and Histories Network Press, 1995). 5. Ettinger: The Matrixial Gaze, p.11. 6. The Matrixial Gaze, p.13.

Reference make: the magazine of women’s art, no. 71, Aug/Sep 1996.

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ENJOY YOUR ALIENATION! DAVID BURROWS & PAULA SMITHARD

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A discourse on pleasure has emerged in feminist art and writing practices as a relatively new and yet mushrooming cultural debate. Various dominant strands within this might be loosely characterised as follows: 1. Visual pleasure as discussed by Laura Mulvey’s writings and the wide-ranging critical responses generated around notions of ‘the gaze’ by artists and writers, which often resulted in a denial of visual pleasure altogether through Brechtian strategies, though Mary Kelly pointed out this was nevertheless a pleasure of the Roland Barthes’ ‘knowledge is delicious’ kind.1 2. The adoption of a radical politics of libidinal economy in which a transgression of the boundaries of the subject take place through a drive which recognises neither hierarchies nor a divide between subject and object. 3. The search for ways in which to inscribe female pleasure through the Imaginary as discussed, for example, in Luce Irigaray’s writings. 4. Pleasure has also recently figured through discussions of Bakhtin’s carnivalesque in writings about feminist art. Each of these areas of debate has very specific relationships both to political practices and feminisms or the feminine. One of the references for feminist discourse is Lacanian psychoanalysis which argues that, through Oedipal identifications and the formation of an illusory self, the subject resides in alienation. For Lacan desire had the potential to destabilise the subject but psychoanalysis has been criticised for allowing the subject to live with alienation. Other references for feminist discourse have been anti-Oedipal theory and libidinal and other economies of pleasure, as valorised by Deleuze & Guattari, Francois Lyotard, Michel Foucault and Hélène Cixous in diverse contexts. These economies are seen as shattering the mirror of representation and alienation in a challenge to the tyranny of desire and involve a movement toward alterity; an existence outside of linear temporality.

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Such a utopian 2 impulse, a desire for a space other to that of the world brought forth by language, can be found in a range of artworks produced by British women of different generations. All of whom would acknowledge an explicit feminist project in their careers. Artists who have developed strategies in this direction have called for a politics of non-identification or sought a fluid conception of identity in a search for diversity and difference. Several such artists spring to mind here: the late Helen Chadwick, Kate Smith, and, more recently, Lucy Gunning. Gunning’s art is evidence that, despite claims to the contrary, there are younger artists producing work inflected through theoretical discourse. Her earlier films reveal women in activities which, whilst seemingly banal, enter into the realms of fantasy and the Imaginary through ways in which normal protocols of behaviour are suspended. In Gunning’s Climbing Around My Room, 1993, a female protagonist moves clockwise around the walls of a room without touching the floor evoking the kind of game children play; The Horse Impressionists, 1994, women are filmed mimicking the neighing of horses, some of which are hopeless or comic, whilst others sound startlingly inhuman. Gunning seeks such moments that shatter the temporality of the everyday, not a ‘continuum between art and life’ as has been suggested.3 When looking at recent art by other women in London who immerse themselves in ‘the everyday’ it is apparent that there is a particular relationship to pleasure, (or what might be more accurately termed ‘enjoyment’), that departs from the ways in which pleasure has been explored in the recent past. This attitude is embodied in the work of a number of artists and include, for example, Gillian Wearing’s video of boys playing air guitar in Slight Reprise, 1995, or Wearing getting into bed with transsexuals in Take Your Top Off, 1993. Tracey Emin’s pursuit of pleasure ranges from trying on friends clothes or dancing to her favourite pop songs to activities which leave her troubled by hangovers, unwanted pregnancy and heartache. Sarah Lucas takes a look at the banal pleasures certain men take in the use of sexist language and gestures in works like Get hold of this, 1994–5, a cast of an arm and fist raised in a phallic gesture. Lucas takes pleasure too in adopting a voice and modes of behaviour that are identified with the sphere of masculinity. Whilst the artists themselves take pleasure in depicting this fun, they are undoubtedly aware that the fun they have may offend others. To present these activities with unquestioning identification might incur the wrath of those who demand a more critical approach to culture and its pleasures. Slavoj Žižek has written about pleasure that incurs displeasure in his book For they know not what they do: Enjoyment as a political factor.4 He suggests that pleasure that does not involve risk is ‘mere pleasure’. Pleasure that involves transgression, that risks the displeasure of others, punishment or death, is pleasure with a surplus. Žižek defines this surplus as enjoyment. This places pleasure within a temporal relationship to the social realm, a temporality punctuated by repercussions, consequences, etc. Pleasure has been recognised in theories of libidinal economies as destabilising subject/object borders. Whilst this is undoubtedly true, Žižek however, implies that enjoyment can lead to the formation of identities as well: that is, communities are not formed through individual subjects reflecting on culture, but through a collective recognition of shared modes of enjoyment and communication. These modes of enjoyment can be inherited or formed anew, considered liberating or regressive. For Žižek, pleasure is often contingent

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and has limits where it confronts the social realm. Pleasure without such a consideration might be only so much idealism. Examples of shared modes of enjoyment include drug taking, dancing, foxhunting, reading philosophy and talking theory, all of which are not exclusive of each other. Some of the examples of art mentioned earlier therefore show a very different role for pleasure or enjoyment than has been witnessed previously. Thus, instead of seeking to undo identity through pleasure, some artists identify themselves and others through their pursuit of particular modes of enjoyment. This is a misconceived identification of alterity in some cases.5 If enjoyment, identity and representation are redefined in some recent art, there are problematic aspects to this. The unstable and complex relationships that produce identities can be overlooked. A number of artworks which depict modes of enjoyment produce images which fix identity, defining people through what they do: that is, in Žižek’s terms, some artists are producing images of stereotypes, organised by collective ‘myths and materialised in social practices’. Gillian Wearing, in particular, has been guilty of this by selecting – classifying – her subjects for photographs through unquestioned preconceived ideas about social types – the transsexual and the urban cowboys and cowgirls etc. This is not to forget many artists place vernacular forms of culture centre-stage and that they have been involved in re-positioning art practices in such a way as to effect a departure from the critical and distanced relationship to social experience witnessed in the past. Here there is, rather, an identification with the pleasures of everyday life. This is obviously contentious because everyday social relationships are often far from enjoyable. Artists could be accused of romanticising the everyday as ‘the other of art’ or an acceptance of stereotypes.6 This process, for some, risks the re-introduction of reified social relations. A more relevant approach to the problem of identity and naming is found in the work of Sarah Lucas who confronts collective myths rather than simply identifying with them. Her early work included lists of words that are derogatory terms for masturbation, homosexuality, excrement, women and genitalia. These works were clearly about the process of naming and the violence of language. Further, she makes a space in this for her own pleasure by not avoiding the enjoyment of vulgarity and sexual openness yet she doesn’t shirk the violence of it either. The voice she has often adopted is that of a certain British, working class, heterosexual masculinity, a stereotype that impacts upon her own identity as a woman. The gestures and pleasures of such a masculine aggression also compact upon the gallery space. When Two Fried Eggs and a Kebab, 1992, an arrangement of food representing a woman’s body was exhibited at the Saatchi Gallery, the smell was shocking, all the more so because the smell not only brought the moment of the after-pub meal into the gallery, it was also a reminder of the sexual potency of the smell of female genitalia. Sarah Lucas appears to be alienated by everyday, patriarchal cultures she inhabits, but this alienation is concurrent with her own enjoyment and it is this combination that is a driving force in her work and which allows her to come to terms – in a manner of speaking – with her alienation. Humour is the key for Lucas in negotiating this alienation. She has been accused of not allowing for a utopian possibility, something which has been so vital in the formulation of a political practice. Lucas does not seem to seek

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Figure 21 Sarah Lucas, two fried eggs and a kebab, 1992. table, fried eggs, kebab, photo. Copyright the artist, courtesy of Sadie Coles HQ, London. anything beyond the relationships encountered within everyday social relations. Sarah Kent, however, has quoted Lucas as saying that she is working in the spaces between ‘the ideal and the actual’7 which might also be said of Lucy Gunning. This relationship is one which is negotiated through enjoyment and pleasure. At times many of these artists mentioned above have used video, photography and other means of representation to engage with the everyday or mass culture. Photography and a critique of representation has had a central role amongst an older generation of women artists in Britain whose artworks examined the ways in which the everyday or mass culture circumscribe or define gender identities. Such art sought to deconstruct the ideologies of mass media culture and the mechanics of representation itself. Little space was left in such works for an acknowledgement of pleasures or desires other than the pleasure of the text(ual) production. Recently artists have made identifications that contrast sharply with the artist alienated from such a culture in the later 1970s and 1980s. A space is opened in recent artworks for the acknowledgement of enjoyment and pleasure in everyday relationships and activities but in many cases, the artists abdicate any acknowledgement of feminist politics, critical responsibility or theoretical investigation which crucially informed earlier generations. While this criticism might feel like a straightjacket to some, (and some theoretically informed practices did become

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instruments of theory and had to be challenged), art works that find no contradictions between representation and identity lead only to affirmation.

Notes 1. Mary Kelly, ‘Beyond the Purloined Image’, BLOCK, no. 9 (1983), p.72. 2. Utopia here is not used to indicate the construction of a perfect society but to indicate the desire for a space beyond linear temporality. Alice Jardine’s concept of ‘Gynesis’, a study which explores textual spacing and finds utopian gaps outside the logics of what she calls ‘modernity’, is an example of this. 3. Kate Bush, ‘Animal Instinct’, Frieze, issue 21, Mar/Apr (1995). 4. Slavoj Žižek, For they know not what they do: Enjoyment as a political factor (London: 1991). 5. It must be noted here that there is much at stake in Žižek’s interest in pleasure and enjoyment for it explains the creation of national and ethnic identities described as an ‘eruption of enjoyment within the social field’. [ ... ]Racism is the fear that others will destroy a way of life, steal enjoyment or that another’s enjoyment is perverse, peculiar and different. 6. This was the case made by Peter Osborne at the symposium ‘Healthy Alienation: Conceptual Art & the New British Art’. 7. Sarah Kent, Young British Artists 11 (London: The Saatchi Collection, 1993).

Reference make: the magazine of women’s art, no. 77, Sep/Nov/Dec 1997.

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he title of this section is borrowed from theorist Vilém Flusser who uses the term ‘technical image’ to mean images that are produced via a technical apparatus which programmes the mediation between subject and world. Writing in the 1970s and 80s, photography is the base of such images for Flusser, but his ideas are immediately applicable to the computer technologies that were being developed at the time. Although not referred to in any of the texts in The Magazine, we find his concept of ‘technical image’ useful to group together texts and images that deal with a range of technologies from photography, video, film, the internet or ‘cyberspace’ as it is referred to in the later texts in this section. The term allows us to avoid the rigidity of medium specificity, while at the same time making distinctions between painting, which Flusser sees as belonging to a different economy of decodable signs, and ‘new’ technology, which many women artists considered as a site of resistance to modernist notions of genius and elitism. In the 1980s, photography offered a space of working between the gallery and the market that was more accessible to women, as the areas it covered were part of their everyday practices, e.g. the family album and fashion magazines. But at the same time, photography was still perceived by some as being associated with masculinist tendencies, especially in relation to the language of the apparatus and terms such as ‘shooting’ and ‘touching up’. Linda Wilson Green’s text introduces these issues, asking why, when photography was being appropriated by women artists as a valid art form that related to a feminist ethos and praxis, so few women photographers were registered at the Women Artists Slide Library. She is writing three years after the magazine Women and Photography was launched, following an event of the same name held at Battersea Arts Centre, London in 1985, after which, the following March, a new magazine Women and Photography was launched. That magazine came about after many women, finding themselves operating in a traditionally male dominated field, felt the need for more contact with others. The ethos of the magazine was to make a start in redressing the balance and represent every aspect of photography by women, just as the Women Artists Slide Library and its newsletter were founded to do the same in the field of arts practice. We also include here Shirley Read’s text on cyberspace which reviews its masculinist tendencies in early discussions of this technology. Read emphasises the necessity of practical training for women so that they can overcome the emphasis in education and leisure

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on computer technology being a male dominated realm. For Read, women artists take a different approach to new technology putting the emphasis on sharing knowledge and changing the terms of user interfaces. Numerous texts were published on technology, especially photography, in The Magazine, as many women artists embraced these technologies as a way out of a perceived impasse in the more traditional media of painting and sculpture. This has made our selection very difficult and we have had to exclude important texts such as ‘Image simulations, computer manipulations: some ethical considerations’, an extract from a catalogue essay by Martha Rosler for the exhibition Digital Photography: Captured Images, Volatile Memory, San Francisco Camerawork, 1988, which was published in Women Artists Slide Library Journal, no. 29, 1989. In this text, Rosler puts forward a feminist case for making ‘manipulation apparent’ in digital photography, appropriating this collage strategy, associated with Dadaist and Brechtian principles, as a means of resisting the contemporary de-legitimation of truth in mediatised images. The same issue featured an article by Jo Spence addressing her phototherapeutic practice in which she explored the family album as a repository of signs that if taken seriously and worked through in a dialogic manner could lead to ‘unconsciousness raising’ about class, work, social mobility and illness. As is typical of much of Spence’s writing, she uses a personal voice to connect to social and political issues, an approach we might now refer to as auto-ethnographic. To exemplify this style of writing, we have selected a text by Rosy Martin who collaborated with Spence on the phototherapy workshops in a cultural context in which therapy and art were perceived as democratic forms of knowledge dissemination and empowerment. Martin’s text uses the first-person to recount a personal life story about her father’s death, the social address of the story relating to how illness is played out in terms of class relations. Susan Butler’s text addresses the reception of the photographic image. She situates her analysis in terms of how photography differed from the tradition of painting, which, rightly or wrongly, was considered as being burdened by the legacy of modernism and thereby being alienating to women’s experience. Butler charts how artists as varied as Susan Hiller and Katharina Sieverding used the ‘multiple image’ to emphasise difference and process, while the decentring of the viewer in photographic installations by artists such as Susan Trangmar can be seen as a critique of the unified subject of phallogocentric discourse. Butler’s and the following texts by Anna Douglas and Val Williams were published in a special photography issue of Women’s Art Magazine, no. 59, Jul/Aug 1994, which we can only partly reproduce here. Douglas delves into the muddy terrain of photographing children and analyses how the law situates this photographic practice in relation to the pornographic gaze. Due to what is perceived as photographic verisimilitude, photographer Sally Mann’s images of her children were deemed as both insinuating and being capable of inciting abusive adult/child relationships. Douglas looks at how other women artists tried to side step this issue in their desire to make photographs of their children. Women’s desire and/or interest in photographing men are the subject of Val William’s text, which charts the shift in the rise of erotic photography of men by women in the context of the 1990s phenomenon of the New Man. While the latter is largely a media fantasy, it is the case that men at this time were beginning to question

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traditional masculinity due to a myriad of reasons that includes the impact of second wave feminism. Women photographers, in turning the lens on men, explore the possibility of a mutual exchange of gazes in the act of looking. Sadie Plant aligns Luce Irigaray’s philosophy of touch to the forms of tactile communication afforded by digital images which for Plant operate in contrast to the specular economy of perspectival space. As opposed to the statistics in Shirley Read’s earlier text that computer technology is male-dominated, Plant’s manifesto-like meditation maintains that the digital arts are conducive to a feminine space of production which incorporates the body, technology acting as a second skin. The embodied approach to new technology is taken to an extreme in ORLAN’s ‘Carnal Art’ as described here by Rachel Armstrong. In her direct use of her body to perform the kinds of mutations that an avatar might execute virtually, ORLAN’s intervention is an implicit critique of innate Nature, the latter of which has long been argued against in feminist discourse. Liz Wells questions whether in the ‘contemporary fin de siècle digital context’, there is a paradoxical perversion of the utopian ideals of the 1910s. Her analysis is situated in relation to ‘women’s cinema’ which she sees as a depoliticised term by contrast to the feminist film collectives of the 1970s and early 1980s. Wells refers to the problematic term ‘postfeminism’ which became a media sound bite at this time, although the term first appeared in The Magazine in issue no. 6 of the Newsletter in 1985. While suggesting that feminism is over, the term simply referenced the fact that certain strands of feminist thought had been incorporated into the mainstream to such an extent that it did not seem to warrant the separatism that had been necessary in the beginning of its history. However, while, as Wells concludes, there is much to be positive about in terms of mainstream representation, there is also a case to be made for the specialisation of organisations such as Cinenova and the Women Artists Slide Library in focusing on and promoting women artists’ work. Catherine Elwes charts a history of video art by British women artists in relation to feminist consciousness-raising. While early video artists experimented with duration and repetition, narrative returned to video in the early 1980s with storytelling being used to revise Laura Mulvey’s categorisation of the male spectator and to include specifically female perspectives. Again, ‘post-feminism’ is referred to in an implied critique of the individualism of artists such as Georgina Starr, Gillian Wearing, and Tracey Emin, a generation of yBAs all of whom Elwes sees as being disconnected from a wider social culture. Has the desire to be liberated from phallocentric oppression been transformed in celebrity culture into the desire for individual liberation? The complexity of this question takes on renewed urgency in liberal capitalist structures of domination that might be said to oppress us all, albeit unequally, as can be seen in Ursula Biemann’s videos which are analysed in Yvonne Volkart’s text. Volkart, via Biemann, demonstrates that new technology offers more sites and occasions for the subjectification of women, e.g. the global trafficking of sex workers and the globalised bride industry. The internet erotic that allows those with access to find love and intimacy through online dating is the same technosphere that enables the increase in trade in women. Biemann’s strategy of combining critique and collusion in her images of the exoticised and the oppressed female worker expose the problematics of representation that continues to inhere in the spaces of ‘new’ technology.

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A R T, S O C I E T Y, A N D T H E WOMAN PHOTOGRAPHER LINDA WILSON GREEN

Figure 22 Linda Wilson Green, Male Photographer with Signifiers. Courtesy of WAL archive.

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A recent conversation with photography volunteer Heather Vickers at W.A.S.L confirmed for me some of my personal anxieties as an independent practising woman photographer. According to Heather, there are few photographers registered with W.A.S.L. – a fact which does not surprise me too much, but one which nevertheless has certain important implications for women photographers in general. For the apparatus of photography has always been associated with the masculine tendency. Photographic language itself is elaborately codified to such an extent that ‘loading’, ‘shooting’ and ‘touching up’ are part and parcel of the hard sell aimed primarily at men, in a society which endorses and endlessly reproduces its ideology of power politics. But this simplistic observation is by no means the only explanation as to why women feel excluded from the mystique surrounding photography as a legitimate means of expression and creative energy. Indeed, many fine artists consider the practice of photography a purely technical means of reproducing images which already exist, thus demeaning the photographer’s intent to create original impressions. Sadly, this attitude has become deeply enshrined within Western culture, ultimately threatening our basic concept of the possible functions of photography as an independent and legitimate creative discourse in its own right. This brief essay, then, is intended to widen the debate among women artists – not only photographers – in the hope that the issues raised might serve to highlight some of the contradictions inherent in working within such confined parameters. That we, as women, have never fixed these for ourselves, goes without saying. What is revealed, however, is the fact that we are working – by virtue of necessity – from a very marginal position as practitioners of a form which has become so popularised that practically every family in the West owns, or has access to, at least one camera. This cultural phenomenon then, underpinned by the rise of capitalism since the latter part of the last century, might be said to engender a two-fold nature: on the one hand, high streets and shopping precincts abound with camera centres and instant-print bars; photographed images in magazines and on hoardings promise us either a glamorous new lifestyle or a glimpse back to nostalgia – largely non-existent memories of a nation as it used to be, a disappearing way of life, the ‘good old days’. Conversely, the antithesis to this popular cultural form of visual representation serves merely to perpetuate yet another kind of status-quo ideology, that of the art gallery and museum bureaucracy. The space between the two poles then, of the commercial market-place and the equally male-dominated but more traditional world of ‘serious art’, might therefore be said to be occupied by those who perceive society from a somewhat marginal position. Yet it is from such a position that some of the finest art has emerged – whether literary or visual, in all ages past, as well as now. It is tempting to remain firmly in the past when it comes down to our attitudes to art, work, and the definition and position of the ‘artist’ within society. For it is our resistance to change which maintains the status quo. The question remains: does this resistance arise from without – from advertisers, museum curators and art gallery directors alike? Or is it simply that we, as artists, photographers, or whatever titles we choose to adopt, are reluctant to face up to the fact that the technically reproducible nature of our work

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in the twentieth century forces us to think how we might live by it, rather than to simply survive?

Reference Women Artists Slide Library Journal, no. 20, Dec/Jan 1988.

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GLASS CEILING IN CYBERSPACE? SHIRLEY READ

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he linkage of hardware to the penis is often made in jokes by computing students. This is witnessed in face-to-face interactions: ‘My machine’s got more megabyte extensions than your machine!’ (thrusting of the pelvis and hand placed upon the groin); and in electronic interactions over the network: ‘What do you call a supercomputer? A memory with balls’.1 A survey posted on the web in November 1994 showed: 72 per cent of users were in North America; 23 per cent in Europe; 51 per cent were in education; 31 per cent in commerce; 29 per cent spend over 50 hours a week on a computer; and 90 per cent were male, 10 per cent female.2 For many people in Britain today, new technology still means word processing. But because new technology is so embedded in our idea of the future, we bring to it our hopes and fears and these expectations colour our attitudes. My attitudes have also been shaped by my experience of entering the arts as a film student and continuing as a photography worker in the seventies. As a student I was the only woman in a course of 50 men and rarely got to handle a camera. Working at Camerawork I experienced at firsthand what it meant to have so few women in photography. Groups like the Hackney Flashers changed photography not just because they dealt with women’s issues but because they helped pave the way for the explosion of talented and successful women into the 1980s art world. Claims for the new technologies talk about access and equal opportunities but the world of computers is not the clean slate they assume it is. It is already male (see the above survey). Deep levels of mostly unacknowledged oppression and discrimination exist. My concern now is that new technology could marginalize and disempower women, that a masculine culture is being created in which women’s art will have very little place and we will once again have to struggle to make space for ourselves and our concerns. In her ground-breaking book, Nattering on the Net, Dale Spender draws a parallel between the invention of print and computers, pointing out that the current new

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technology heralds the end of print-based culture. She claims that the power that women in the Middle Ages wielded was formed in convents, centres of learning and healing. The Reformation, which was in part due to the print revolution, disempowered women by closing these religious foundations and thereby cutting off resources and educational centres with long-lasting effect. Education, training and access are key. Researcher Ann Wickham states that ‘training maintains a narrowly conceived form and as such retains all the aspects which mitigate most strongly against women’s effective participation’.3 At this year’s National Photography Conference in Derby, the cybercafé was packed with punters tentatively surfing the net. There I talked to Jayne Murray, a recent graduate from the University of Derby, who had become involved in the internet after seeing ‘Walk on Buy’, an internet exhibition. Her subsequent college work included digital imaging which was exhibited on-line. She taught herself Photoshop, needing to pester others constantly for training. She feels ‘access is made easier for men because for years computers have been a man’s field. A male dominated environment isn’t always easy to enter’. This is underlined by Dale Spender’s statistics which reveal that technological discrimination starts in school where 49 per cent of teachers sampled believed that technology subjects are highly important to a boy’s general education compared with 40 per cent to a girl’s.4 Jayne Murray’s Cyber Launderette (sponsored by Lever Brothers who produce Surf washing powder) integrated new technology into the community. Sited in a Derby launderette, Murray gave people the opportunity to question the hype. ‘The internet isn’t about computer science’, she explains, ‘it’s about using technology more freely and being able to use it as easily as you pick up the phone’. While men still outnumbered the women using the launderette, the difference lay in the way each approached the computer. Women were more hesitant about taking control of the machine. * * * Where computer-training is a matter of choice, women are less likely to achieve the levels of competence they could if they were able to approach computers with greater confidence. The reasons for this lack of confidence are deeply embedded in our social fabric. Men and women have different relationships to machines. Dale Spender’s research claims that ‘women use computers while men are ensnared by them’. The theme of the 1995 Photo Biennale in the Netherlands was ‘Obsessions From Wunderkammer To Cyberspace’. The 35 artists exhibiting at the Rijksmuseum used photography, video, manipulated and computer-based imagery. The exhibition was eerily compelling, redolent of the wonder of early photography’s magic lantern. [ ... ] But only two of the new technology pieces were produced by women. Lynn Hershman (US) addressed guns and violence head-on with an installation of an M-16 rifle which is focused on scenes of atrocity. To engage with the piece viewers have to pull the trigger. They become complicit with the nexus of power and economics which produces military interventions. This was a difficult work which challenged my comfortable sense of militarism as ‘other’ and male. From the UK, Jane Prophet produced TechnoSphere, a 3D virtual world of forests and mountains where the viewer can design an artificial life

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Figure 23 Jane Prophet, TechnoSphere, 1995. Courtesy of the artist.

from body parts supplied on site. The viewer’s choices define the creature’s behaviour which is then let loose into the virtual world. The interactivity of this piece breaks down the divide between the creator and user since the virtual world will be changed by the behaviour of these creatures (for example, if they fight or over-graze) and the interventions of its users. Like the work of Jayne Murray, TechnoSphere is about the sharing of knowledge, experience and ideas and demonstrates an arguably feminist approach to the making of art using new technology. New technology can undoubtably empower women. The current question is whether the strong position claimed by women in the arts over the last 15 years can be maintained in the changing world of electronic art. What can women do individually and collectively to ensure that the future art world is open to their daughters? Clearly the problem is deeper and more complex than a simple male monopoly of technology. There are many women already operating in cyberspace. Eminent women researchers and theorists are working from a feminist position. The solution is not to urge more women to venture individually into cyberspace. Women need to change the very parameters of cyberspace as they have changed and adapted other technologies to suit their own needs. Crucially, too, the cycles of history have so speeded up during this century that perhaps this particular battle for a woman’s place out there, somewhere, in the invisible terrain of cyberspace will be fought and won in the blink of an electronic eye.

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Notes 1. Lynda Davies quoted by Dale Spender in Nattering on the Net: Women, Power and Cyberspace (Melbourne: 1995). 2. Atlas web site: http://www.rhythm.com/bpowell/atlas/toc.html. (Editor’s note – URL no longer active.) Dale Spender also quotes a survey which shows that 94 per cent of net use is by men. 3. Ann Wickham, Women and Training (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1986). 4. A. Cole, T. Conlon, S. Jackson & D. Welch quoted by Spender: Nattering on the Net.

Reference Women’s Art Magazine, no. 41, Mar/Apr 1995.

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I POSE A PAR ADOX ROSY MARTIN

Fading fragments, traces almost lost, I turn these fragile pages in search of you. Who is this young man I never knew? This playful young couple “Brighton pier and on board”. Only a piece of paper, I hold now a certificate of presence, I know only That has been. Your gaze fixed by chemicals. I can no longer touch you, change your expressions by my interactions. I have now only the evidence that one day, in the garden, you held me, protectively when I first learnt to stand on my own two feet, and walk away from you.

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Figure 24 Rosy Martin, The Site of Death; In Loving Memory of James John Martin. © Rosy Martin. Courtesy of the artist. I reach down the utility cardboard suitcase, and find it again. The leather binding is disintegrating, the photos tiny and faded to sepia, some now barely there at all. I had always been entranced by this particular family album, containing photographs of my parents when they were courting, aged 16 and 20. Who was that laughing couple on the beach at Felixstowe and Brighton? Who was that young man, with his carefully studied resemblance to current matinee idols, always posing, in every image, with cigarette in hand? My father was said to look like Ronald Colman, and wore that neat moustache, so fashionable in the thirties, all his life. In 1986, I’m checking for evidence. In every picture, at least up till the 1960s, he is smoking. Later, much later (1990), I am searching for something unique to him, something ‘essential’ of that particular man, my father. But, of course, it cannot be there. The closest I come to it is the recognition of my father’s ability to encapsulate the style of his times, through the clothes he made, the poses he struck and his selection of snapshots. How is an autobiographical, self-reflective practice affected by changed outside realities, and how can it be responsive to such changes? How to create an artwork drawing from a huge collection of images generated by a process-based practice that takes as its starting point unresolved emotions and issues that are of primary importance to that specific culturally and historically formed individual? How to speak with a range of different audiences? Since 1983, Jo Spence and I have been evolving and developing a new photographic practice: phototherapy. Linking the discourses of representation and the notions of conscious and unconscious identities, we added therapeutic skills to the creation of images,

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taking turns to be sitter/director and phototherapist. All our work is about process, change and transformations. Bringing theories, issues, ideas and intuition to exploring personal stories, through re-enacting tiny details and fragments of memories, has enabled me to unpick the complex web of distress, pain and trauma from my past. Working with Jo Spence enabled me to make visible aspects long repressed or denied, and to set behind the screen memories, the simplifications and myths of others, to at last tell my own stories from my point of view. I also took up the positions of my mother and father, both in relation to myself as a child, to explore their own histories. I found, on reflection, that I was also exploring aspects of my own psychic reality, which I had absorbed from and projected on to them. A sudden disjunction. I was catapulted into new realities by events outside of my control.

INDEPENDENCE DAY? Extract from my diary: 4 July 1990 I have been with my father for weeks now, spending my days at the hospital, as he struggles and rasps through either the nebuliser or oxygen mask to keep breathing. Inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale. His hands held tight in fists, all his willpower and energy focused down, day and night, to holding onto life. Inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale. Slowly and relentlessly his body is depleted, as each breath requires more and more effort than the one preceding. Inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale. The doctors had gathered round to stare at his X-rays in disbelief, how could he have lived so long with only 10% lung function? Inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale. But today is different, today there is no hope, today the Doctors finally admit defeat, although they have trouble with the word death. Too late now for admission to the hospice that we had petitioned for, I demand a decent, more private place for him to die than the barren, open, 30 bed ward of peeling paint, of bustling activity. When he could still speak he’d accused us of taking him to a workhouse, that residual fear and threat from his childhood mythology. The ward sister called me aside. Did I want him to have an extra dose of morphine? I check with her, is it true that the morphine will give him the sleep that his tenacity has denied for so long, is there a risk that he will relax so much that he will stop breathing? Yes. Yes, it’s his time to let go. Can I let go? Outside at last, into this heavy late afternoon. I contemplate the sharp edge between life and death, this greatest burden of responsibility. I reach in my bag for my tobacco, and slowly roll a cigarette. I inhale deeply. I have to suppress my tears as they well up, my fears as they paralyse me, I have to hold myself together to support my mother through this, the worst time in her life. In sharp relief, as my father lies dying in the respiratory ward, I inhale the selfsame poison. I must separate from these dependencies. Today this process begins ... Although I had my camera with me, I could barely allow myself to take photographs of his decline, out of respect for him. The images, however, remain with me, the pathos of his impotent anger, unable to affect decisions, or the final outcome. With the finality of death, I did take up my camera again, to create an alternative diary/family album. Death is a taboo subject in late twentieth-century Western culture, now almost bereft

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of ritual. I needed to use photography to help me deal with this crisis, and my on-going healing process. I had to mark this loss for myself. I photographed his belongings collected from the hospital that stood in for all those hours of patient hoping and waiting. I photographed the house, from my point of view as a child, his clothes, his things and his personal space – the shed at the bottom of the garden. I took responsibility for all the administrative work that surrounds death, which I documented. I asked, in exchange, for one hour with ‘my father’, or rather his corpse, in the undertakers. Here I conducted my own ritual of reparation, separation and grief. I took objects which symbolised different aspects of him, of his life, and the phototherapy work which I had already done about him and my relationship to him. I placed these objects on his body, and photographed ... How anxiously I took these rolls of film to the developers, knowing, they were unrepeatable, my subject now was only ashes. It has been said that in experiencing the death of a parent the individual comes face to face with their own mortality. In Autumn 1991, I was offered a commission by Rochdale Art Gallery for the show ‘Breaths: Art, Health and Empowerment’ curated by Jill Morgan and Maud Sulter, from an initial idea proposed by Sarah Edge. The piece was called ‘I pose a paradox: a discourse on smoking’. In generating this artwork, I had to face my own resistances. My aim was to trigger debate, discussion, identification and to highlight the contradictions that surround smoking. I chose to draw upon images from a range of different genres to contextualise the phototherapy work. Like a detective, I searched for traces and clues, making linkages between my own smoking history and that of my father. I juxtaposed pages from the family album with contemporary popular culture, film stills, scripts and music scores which encapsulated the notions of smoking as glamour and sophistication. Using phototherapy, I explored what lay behind these images. My experiences of class shame, of being silenced by stuttering, in response to the humiliation I received as a working class scholarship girl in a middle class school form part of this history. I took refuge in becoming a rebel, and adopted the social prop of sophistication and bravado, and found along with that a group I could belong to: ‘You’re never alone with a Strand’. Gleefully burning money, and set historically against the changing mode of address of advertising which becomes more obscure and subtly more seductive, my response moves from pleasure to fear. In the final section, I selected images from my ‘alternative diary’. Those which made sense together were a series of triptychs of hands: my father’s in the coffin which I had carefully staged, my mother’s shucking peas, which evoked a vivid memory from childhood, and my own, dealing with the materiality of death and the feelings that engulfed me. This piece was not consciously pre-planned, but arose as a distillation. Images within images refer back to the earlier sections, reaffirming the linkages and challenging the taboos that surround public and private representations. This network of images offers different points of entry for different audiences: different pleasures including recognition, social history, identification and refusal. Such a close exploration of feelings and facts is no instant cure, rather a recognition of contradictions. These photographs offer a means of thinking through feelings, feeling through thoughts.

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FRAGMENTS OF MY FATHER In the family album I find you – elegant, stylish, tall, dark and handsome, Hollywood’s romantic hero. Always smoking a cigarettette, ‘Passing Cloud’. Your creativity was contained in the prescribed perfection and correct rigidity of tailoring. The cost, by the time you were forty, and had fathered me, was asthma and emphysema. You hated the stiff smart collar you had to wear to work, the choking that restrained your emotions. Your cough racked the house. Your struggle for breath dominated. Keeping the feelings in, control, control, keeping it down, swallow your emotions, swallow the medicines, 30, 40, 50 a day. Your anger of resistance was doped so you could continue to be a slave to work. To provide for the family you hardly saw, you no longer had the energy to relate to. I too well understand the act of self-silencing.

Reference Women’s Art magazine, Issue no. 45, Mar/Apr 1992.

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SUBJECT TO CHANGE SUSAN BUTLER

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hotography is widely acknowledged and assumed to have a central relationship to the idea of the subject in our culture. Not least because since the mid-nineteenth century the photographic portrait has been the predominant visual form for the representation of personal identity. This usage, typically conceived and circulated as the single image – whether as a formal studio portrait, the picture on an ID card or the newspaper obituary photograph – has thus tended to reinforce dominant notions of the unified subject. But in addition to inscribing this representation of the subject viewed, photography also inscribes the subject as viewer. And in this connection it has been seen as providing the cultural and technical paradigm of the viewing position of the unified subject, in the idealised ordering of the world through the mechanics of single-point perspective. Here photography presumably functions in the present to preserve and extend a structure of seeing inherited from the camera obscura and from Albertian perspective in painting. Lyotard likens this vision to ‘the eye of the monarch’ which registers ‘a well ordered universe all the way to the vanishing point’ (Artforum, April 1982). This is in line with comments by other critics characterising perspectival vision as cold, abstract, embodying a gaze of detachment or, more ominously, of surveillance. Given such associations with the notion of the unitary subject – a concept taken to be a mainstay of patriarchal phallogocentrism – photography hardly seems a promising or appropriate medium for women artists. Nevertheless, photographic practices have constituted a conspicuous area of achievement for women artists over the past 15 years or so, particularly in a post-modernist context. So much so that it might be difficult indeed to discuss or characterize post-modernist practice in the visual arts without reference to works that are both photographic and by women. The reasons for women artists taking up photography are doubtless many, complex and not subject to clear consensus. But some reasons are more obvious than others, – not least photography’s comparatively lower authorship quotient as an indexical medium, and its according distance from a painting tradition which celebrates the mark of the

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hand as the guarantee of (usually male) artistic genius. Another often cited reason is photography’s referentiality (again a function of the index), that is, its intrinsic dependence upon subject matter, in contradistinction to the elimination of content within High Modernism in favour of a purist, formalist aesthetic. Other factors may be attractive, too, such as its ability to circulate outside the gallery, its capacity to reproduce the look of other contemporary media, its availability to non-specialist users. Photography is also important in contexts relevant to women’s experience, such as representation of the family and fashion photography, although its functioning in these contexts is never unproblematic and is often overtly, even systematically, oppressive. Yet perhaps precisely because of its incriminated status with regard to certain functions and paradigms which it is in the interest of women to challenge, photography provides fruitful ground. And in this way the photographic also becomes liable to redefinition, to being refunctioned – shifted into the creation of new models, for example of the self and of itself. It would be too ambitious here to attempt any thorough going catalogue of works by women which call into question the interlocking paradigms of the self and the photographic, but I would like to discuss a limited number of examples, and some of their visual strategies. One area addressed by women is the portrait, or some form of self-imaging.1 Photographic self-images have been reconstructed in various ways by contemporary practitioners, but often share recurrent features, particularly the use of the self image as multiple, in contrast to the single portrait image.2 Frequently these multiples are presented as composite images in some form of grid, or as a series, or both. One thinks here of Susan Hiller’s photo booth self-portraits of the early eighties and the extended serial self-portraits of Katharina Sieverding, dating from the early seventies through to the

Figure 25 Katharina Sieverding, Transformer, 1973/74, multi channel slide show, installation ‘Just Different’ at the Cobra Museum of Modern Art, 2008 © Katharina Sieverding, VG Bild-Kunst.

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nineties. The multiple image may also appear in some structure of narrative, such as Jo Spence’s collection of self-portrait snapshots published in her book Putting Myself in the Picture (1986) which juxtaposes a series of photographic moments in her history, accompanied by text. A visual narrative is evident in Helen Chadwick’s series of photo sculptures Ego Geometria Sum (1984) where the artist uses the image of her body to re-enact stages of growth from infancy to adulthood.

Figure 26 Jo Spence, How Do I Begin To Take Responsibility For My Body, 1985. Copyright the Estate of Jo Spence. Courtesy of the Richard Saltoun Gallery, London.

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In all these works there is a refusal to reduce self-image to a single photographic moment, and often there is a significant doubling of the roles of artist and model. Barthes refers to the photographic portrait as a paradigm of doubling, speaking of his own as ‘the advent of myself as Other’.3 For the photograph always pictures a self that is past, ‘othered’ at the moment it emerges as recorded image. Self portraiture in particular, where one is both looker and looked at, is a more obvious dramatisation of doubling, and could be read in effect as a re-enactment of the splitting of self in Lacan’s mirror stage -but with the difference in the use of the multiple image that a resistance is maintained against any resolution into an idealising singularity (as in Lacan’s account). Further, the multiple image moves beyond simple doubling or dualism, holding open a space of differencing and process. Resistance to a collapse into the unitary is asserted in Hiller’s Midnight, Baker Street (1983) and Gatwick Suite (1984) which foreground the fact that photo booth images are actually produced as multiples, and only later circulated as the single image, as if somehow they had repressed the conditions of their origination.4 Process is emphasised in the gestural quality of the images, as the artist evades the classic iconic space (the head and shoulders ‘bust’ format) of the portrait, to appear decentred in the frame. These evasions, coupled with the gestures of closing the eyes, and tilting the head back as if in dreaming also signal other resistances, a refusal both of the male gaze, and of the photographic, a medium of surface description, as having privileged access to subjective interiority or ‘character’, such as traditionally assumed in the portrait. Helen Chadwick’s Ego Geometria Sum insists on a density and multiplicity of selfimages. The tactic of posing her adult body in reenactments of postures of previous life phases (in an incubator and a baby carriage, playing the piano, etc.) on each of the ten sculptural shapes in the piece suggest the incorporation and continued vitality of these ‘past’ moments of self within successive stages of development. Chadwick’s postures also refuse the typical poses of the traditional nude displayed for the male gaze, asserting an idea of a lived history (individual but situated in culturally-shared circumstances) against any spectatorial projection of voyeuristic fantasy. While Jo Spence’s series of personal photographs, ranging from babyhood to middle age, present multiple images of self, they also present an anthology of photographic stylisations, again raising questions about photographic transparency. As visual stylisations, they perhaps express more about photographic stereotypings of feminine identities rather than anything to do with Spence’s experience at the time. This is underscored by her juxtaposed commentary introducing information that the photographs cannot convey, as well as her comments on the photographic styles in question and the nature of her participation in them. The issue of photographic stylisation has several implications, not least that photographs tend to refer to other photographs, as is implicit, pre-Baudrillard, in the very notion of genre. Photographic reference to any ‘real’ is complicated both by this, and by the stylisation of actual appearances, particularly feminine appearances, often modeled on photographic or cinematic ones. Aspects of Diane Arbus’s work point to this, and it is the ground so effectively explored in Cindy Sherman’s work, particularly in the Untitled Film Stills (1977–80). Because Sherman’s work has been extensively discussed elsewhere, I will not dwell on it here, except to underline Judith Williamson’s observation (in Screen

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Nov/Dec 1983) that it is not simply the masquerade of the feminine protagonist, but also the total stylisation of Sherman’s photographs, that produce the particular feminine identities projected in them. Aspects of Katharina Sieverding’s extensive self-representations could be seen to bear some relation to the deconstructive practices of Sherman and others in using the photographic to project or dramatise appearances that suggest a notion of feminine identity as masquerade and yet she also repeatedly deploys images that are decidedly selfreferential, although not self-expressive in any traditional humanist sense. In some works, for example, she juxtaposes the image of her own face to those of others, creating uncanny resemblances, sometimes in part due to make-up, pose or dress, across boundaries of gender, race and culture. This tends to suspend a notion of personal identity, as the artist seems to discover a possible advent of self in Others, and vice versa. In the extended serial self-portraits, which use dozens of images of Sieverding’s face close-up, her appearances often seem mask-like, especially in the use of gold paint, or rather masculine depending on lighting and angle. Yet the frequent recognisability of her image, and the production of these multiple composites at monumental scale lay strong claim to a persona; a significant move in the light of Sieverding’s position as an artist in Germany, working after Beuys (her teacher), and as a woman. Sieverding thus deploys the multiple as a differencing across several registers – from masquerade to self-reification, destabilising (feminine) identity and asserting it as an artist at the same time. This dramatizes yet again a dilemma for women artists generally implicit in all the self-portraits previously discussed, around the questioning of the unitary subject, the linchpin of traditional authorship, while also attempting to lay claim to an historically-denied feminine authorship.5 Turning now to the spectator, strategies such as these described above also have implications for the viewing process. The use of the multiple image necessarily creates multiple points of recognition and identification, actively demanding that the viewer work across and through a field of possibilities, rather than settling on a single, expected location. Just as there is a temporalisation of the idea of the subject pictured in the multiple image, in tension with the freezing of a particular instant usually ascribed to the photograph, there is accordingly a clearer temporalisation of the art object and of the spectator’s experience. The spectator’s relation to the image becomes a central concern of Susan Trangmar’s Untitled Landscapes (1986). Shown as changing sets of eight to 12 images individually framed in a grid format, each image features the figure of a young woman in a variety of settings, always pictured with her back to the camera. Again, the turning away of the face frustrates any expectation either of personal revelation, or of the disclosure of woman as object-to-be-looked-at. And because the direction of her presumed but unseen gaze seems to determine the direction of the camera, and thus the spectator’s view, there is a breakdown of the usual relation of the spectator as (male) viewing subject and the figure (of woman) as the object of spectacle. This female figure is in possession of looking, both for herself and for the spectator whom she effectively directs and links into the image. But her looking remains undecidable, with the changing scenes (car park, museum, zoo, a river bank, etc,) around her suggesting variable inflections, from anxious searching, to

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Figure 27 Susan Trangmar, Amidst, 1994, black and white installation shot. Courtesy of the artist. observation, to contemplation, to daydreaming. A possible model of feminine agency in looking is arguably ventured here, but in terms which resist those ascribed to the unitary male subject, through insistence on the multiplicity of the figure and the implied shifts in the modes/moods of her visual apprehension of her world(s). Further displacement of photographic envisaging away from a mode of observation is evident in Trangmar’s later projection installation works where, as projection, the image is dematerialised, taking on qualities of fantasy, memory or dream. In Amidst (1994) the spectator’s role is made central through his/her own shadows being cast into the image by the beams of the projectors. Surrounded through 360 degrees by images of a forest, the viewer and the act of looking cannot be separate from, but are immersed in the ambient circumstances. Other artists such as Barbara Ess and Astrid Klein also relocate photographic vision, while doing so within the context of the photographic print – often presented large-scale, emphasising the address to the spectator through a more encompassing visual field. Choosing unconventional means, they approach representing unpresentable states or worlds. Using a pinhole camera, with its soft focus and exaggerated perspective, Ess, in her work of the mid-eighties, pictures scenes reminiscent of childhood. This dreamlike quality places the photographic image ambivalently between perception and memory. And if as viewers, we seem to be looking into a dream or memory, the question arises, whose might it be? In this way, Ess effectively blurs and questions the boundaries between individual and shared subjective states. In some of her more recent pinhole photographs, Ess

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abandons a narrative scenario in favour of picturing something shown vaguely (a sleeve, a piece of cloth) but at close range. The photograph in this instance seems to function like processes of recognition and memory as an attempt to catch, at the moment of its disappearance, something only half-recognised yet poignantly felt as significant. Astrid Klein’s images from the mid-to-late eighties effect the most radical dislocation of the photographic from a descriptive function in relation to a knowable world, creating atmospheres imaginable only through her chosen processes of generation. Yet these processes are specifically photographic, with the emphasis shifted to darkroom techniques that may include radical enlargement, solarisation, and piling of negatives. Klein challenges definitions of the photographic that depend on privileging one particular set of technical possibilities used in a way restricted to supporting a recordative function. She does not so much discard the index as compound, multiply and magnify it, obscuring any clear relation between features of her imagery and those of an observable world. The images obliterate a sense of smoothly enterable space, often reversing figure/ground relations, and reducing indications of the human figure to no more than shadowy ciphers. Deprived of the usual terms of identification through spatial placement and gender recognition, the viewer cannot support via the photographic relation confidence in a knowing self and a knowable world, Klein here precisely reverses the photographic function as a supposedly transparent vehicle of knowledge between self and the world. * * * [T]he expanded range of photographic languages generally over the past several years gives an opportunity to compare and consider more carefully what kinds of relations the photograph draws us into. For the contrasts in practice and the particular use, dismantling or re-fashioning of conventions help to reveal that such conventions are not merely formal, aesthetic or neutral considerations. Structured through formal features on the one hand and linked audience expectations on the other, visual conventions engage relations of power and sociality within and beyond the visual field. They therefore comprise in effect social contracts in and through seeing, which artists may propose to change and we as viewers may embrace or reject.

Notes 1. As Abigail Solomon-Godeau has pointed out in a recent essay on Katharina Sieverding, the artist’s self-portrait has a particular (male) history allied to the projection of notions of male creative power. See her essay ‘The Face of Difference’ in the catalogue Katharina Sieverding Eine Installation (Regensburg: Museum Ostdeutsche Galerie, 1993). 2. For a reading of self-portraiture historically (by both men and women) as a doubling or multiplying effect, see the catalogue of James Lingwood’s exhibition Staging the Self, Self-Portrait Photography 1840s-1980s (London: National Portrait Gallery, 1986). It is also important to acknowledge certain male practitioners who have worked with multiple or serial self-portraits more or less contemporaneously with the work I discuss, notably Urs Luthi, Jürgen Klauke and Lucas Samaras. 3. James Lingwood, Staging the Self. 4. For further examples of Hiller’s photo booth self-portraits of the early eighties, as well as her use of others’ photo booth portraits from as early as 1972, see the catalogue Susan Hiller 1973–83 The Muse My Sister (Derry: Orchard Gallery, 1984).

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5. Some of these observations reflect Abigail Soloman-Godeau’s detailed discussion of the contexts relevant to a reading of Sieverding’s work.

Reference Women’s Art Magazine, no. 59, Jul/Aug 1994.

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CHILDHOOD: A MOLOTOV COCK TAIL FOR OUR TIME ANNA DOUGLAS

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The tradition of children featuring in fine art is a long-standing one. They are the nymphs of idyllic allegories, the newborn Christ and angels of religious scenes and symbols of well-being and status in the contented family portrait. They represent purity and innocence, a foil to an adult world of perceived corruption and, in times of danger and conflict, they are the hope for the future. And in the lives of women artists they are close to hand subjects. From the beginning of photography ideas concerning children’s symbolic function were inherited from painting. Yet the acceptance of photography’s verisimilitude was to bring children into a new ‘objective’ focus, one which would prove extremely controversial decades later. Photography was accredited a unique capability, an authority and a context in which to probe the ‘mysteries’ of childhood for an adult audience – in family photography, in medical experiments, social reformism (progressive and reactionary), photojournalism, advertising and the production of erotica. For more than a century the visual structuring of childhood remained relatively trouble-free until the burgeoning fears of child abuse and child pornography. On both sides of the Atlantic child abuse has become one of the most heated issues of our time with childadult relations being overhauled and analysed. And drawn into this Molotov cocktail of cultural introspection has been photography. Both the left and the right have scapegoated the issue of the structural subjugation of children so dependent upon notions of property rights and gender relations, proclaiming instead that child pornography encourages child abuse. The unique properties and history of photography are central to this conclusion. With definitions of pornography being at best slippery, its one consistent feature is the medium through which it is coded, the so-called realism of photography. Child protection legislation and pornography laws have been used to investigate and arrest professional and amateur photographers working with their own and other’s children under suspicion of paedophilia or child abuse. In America child pornography laws refer to the ‘lascivious exhibition of children’s genitals’ without a precise definition

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of ‘lascivious’. And many states have their own laws proscribing nudity, semi-nudity or any photograph that might sexually stimulate the viewer as enough to send a photographer down. In Britain The Protection of Children Act (1978) states that ‘It is an offence to take, or permit to be taken, any indecent photograph of a child’, but nowhere in the Act is there a definition of indecency, and despite a quasi-definition ten years later to include ‘what right-minded people might conclude’ it remains entirely ambiguous. When convictions for child abuse are a legal priority, it is easy to see how the production of any naked, semi-naked or for that matter clothed image of a child could be deemed ‘sexually provocative’, (the meaning hidden behind the term ‘indecent’). In principle at least, the law could identify virtually any photograph depicting children as worthy of investigation. In practice it has stayed clear of commercial and media images with their known functions, concentrating instead on the more ambiguous areas of domestic and fine art photography, where not without coincidence child nudity is a longstanding tradition. While the rationale behind child pornography law is undoubtedly the protection of minors, its convergence with concerns over children’s rights has led to a moral panic, paradoxically resulting in a climate of fear. Women photographers, amateur and professional, have always focused on the family and children, through family photography, commercial work, social documentary and photojournalism. As a new generation of women fine art photographers emerged during the 1980s so this legacy was given a critical and public focus. Photographers explored the concept of family structure and family members to each other, and brought to this enquiry a new focus which concentrated on issues of history, identity and sexuality. The intense social and political focus on the family of recent years has brought to this work an incisive urgency. However the recent moral panic has set alight a disturbing new context for viewing this work. In 1984, in the United States, Sally Mann began photographing her three children, Jesse, Virginia and Emmett in and around their Arcadian summer house in southwestern Virginia. The children wear bathing suits, light summer clothes or no clothes at all and their self-assured posturing is bewitching. Mann’s photographs transform the ordinary things every mother has seen, a wet bed, a bloody nose, young girls posing as women, into sinister yet alluring narratives exemplifying parental fears and the vulnerability, as well as the defiance, of children. Since the publication of her book Immediate Family in 1990, Sally Mann has found herself at the centre of an ongoing controversy over how and when we should represent (our) children. This controversy stems from the problematic status of photography with its specific and unique appearance of, and basis in the ‘real’ world. The misguided interpretation of Mann’s work as documentary photography, in the present moral climate, has undoubtedly influenced and circumscribed viewers’ understanding of her photographs, fuelling endless speculation as to her ‘actual’ family relations. Sally Mann’s work emanates from her ‘real’ family, but it is misguided to approach these meticulously composed iconographies as ‘family photographs’. Critics who recognise and applaud Mann’s challenge to the sentimentality of the family album draw on a formal and cultural history entirely inappropriate to this work; Mann herself disputes the suggestion that her photographs come closer to her’s or anyone else’s real family. Yet neither is she seeking to comment on the condition of contemporary domesticity, as we might understand other socially motivated work.

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Mann’s photographs are ‘fictions’ and tell us no more about her children’s lives, nor the state of ‘the family today’ than did the literary and religious allegories of Julia Margaret Cameron, a photographer similarly engaging her children as symbolic actors some 100 years previously. Mann’s photographs acknowledge nineteenth century traditions of childhood symbolism. However she brings to this Arcadian vision the chanciness and edginess of American photojournalists like Weegee and Diane Arbus. Of course it is precisely this stylistic hybridity that has confused the viewer: quite literally we are not sure how to read Mann’s work in relation to the ‘real’ world. Out of this confusion viewers have searched for something tangible; these photographs have some basis in a ‘truth’, the children in the photographs do exist, and we know they are ‘her family’. Even critics, who view her work as fictitious allegory, paradoxically demand that the ‘greater truths’ of Mann’s narratives describe her ‘actual’ (yet presumed) relationship with her children. Reviewers of Immediate Family, and of the exhibitions that preceded its publication, either praised her images for speaking ‘volumes about her bond with them (her daughters and son)’, or harshly rebuked Mann for her un-motherliness, pitying her children’s exploitation. Whether Mann’s images are any more exploitative than all photographs, with their innate objectification of the image and voyeuristic gaze, is questionable – could it not be that Mann’s style merely highlights photography’s innate exploitativity? Speculation over Mann’s motives and relationship to her subject far outweighed the usual critical questions asked of documentary practice. Here the perception of exploitation should be understood in the context of anxieties concerning adult-children relations. But more specifically on to this anxiety have been mapped radical feminist theories of pornography, Mann’s photographs being understood simultaneously as an image representing (adult) exploitation and an act of exploitation with fears that consumption of her photography would engender child abuse. The intensity of Mann’s work is, without question, disturbing. Her starkly contrasted use of light, tightly framed images, and cropped-down bodies (often though not exclusively naked) offers the viewer no easy way out of looking. It is hard to know whether the imminent danger and predatory fear that pervades Mann’s photographs, and which so many critics cannot see without referring to child abuse, is only there in our imaginations today because of the ongoing moral panic. Photographs are read and understood differently depending upon their context. In ten years when fears have moved on, will the words ‘child abuse’ even be whispered in connection to Sally Mann’s photographs? Over the years British photographer Diane Baylis has produced a portfolio of work exploring her relationship with her children and cultural attitudes towards male sexuality. The fact that she has only exhibited one piece of work from this portfolio is not that she considers it inappropriate for the public arena, but that she severely doubts it will be understood outside of a pornographic discourse. The kinds of issues she undertakes, emerging from the good mother/whore dichotomy, are explored not from a critical art historical perspective, but from a personal and lived one, and have been ‘suppressed’ as much by feminism as by middle-class propriety. And she also has self doubts: does she, as she sometimes thinks, produce the kind of photographs that she should be ‘protecting her children from’? The Mother and a Whore series involves the recontextualisation of different kinds of photographs which Diane Baylis is permanently engaged in taking. These

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‘records’ are produced outside of any knowingness of their future use and function as fragments of visual information to be catalogued and stored away. Later, sometimes years later, she brings these ‘records’ together juxtaposing them in photographic dialogues which express the ‘darker’, unacknowledged sides to being a mother. She investigates the kind of worries that are psychological, that go endlessly around a mother’s head. Am I a good mother and what does this mean? Through her photographic juxtapositions Baylis asks the kind of questions which is exceptionally dangerous, some might say irresponsible, right now. But she is adamant that women must challenge the symbol and the myth of the heroic virtuous mother. Thrills and Spills is the only part of the Mother and a Whore project that Diane Baylis has attempted to show. Consisting of four photographs, including a colour holiday snap of a small child playing on the beach, and three surreal keyhole photographs revealing an erect penis, it was meant to be exhibited in ‘What She Wants’, a photographic exhibition which offered women the opportunity to turn the female gaze onto the male body.1 Baylis contributed the work, but the image of the child was later removed with her permission. The curator believed that any reading

Figure 28 Nancy Honey, The Apple of My Eye, 1991. © Nancy Honey. Courtesy of the artist.

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of the photographic series would be influenced by the context of child sex abuse, and would therefore jeopardise the future of the exhibition. For the present, a public dialogue concerning children and male sexuality seems impossible. A central theme in Nancy Honey’s photography is a maternal concern for her and every other mother’s daughter growing up in a patriarchal society. Through her photographs she asks the question, how do mothers on the other side of adolescence help their daughters into the masquerade of femininity? It is a question driven by personal circumstances, but it is not important to know this, for it is one that every mother, indeed our own mother, has pondered on. Honey’s depictions of girls growing into womanhood are not audacious and demanding like Sally Mann’s. Her camera waits for time to unfold, as the girls she portrays seem to wait on life changing too. Nowhere is this more manifest than in Entering the Masquerade a study of girls approaching ‘womanhood’: two girls look out beyond the photographic frame, not to Honey, but out to their futures, futures which we can only speculate on. [ ... ] Honey seeks to challenge what she perceives are the male images that structure female sexuality. Her work acknowledges that this is contingent upon empowering girls to have a positive image of their own bodies, and ‘consequently their own futures and identities’. While Honey’s work explores the burgeoning sexuality of her young subjects, she is simultaneously aware that the teenage body is a site of anxiety and apprehension. Nancy Honey photographs her subjects, not so much with caution, but with respect for their privacy. The photographic projects of Sally Mann, Diane Baylis and Nancy Honey seem so different as to render futile a comparison, yet this issue of sexual and physical empowerment in fact concerns them all. *

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Note 1. See Anna Douglas, ‘Faceless Full Frontals’, Women’s Art Magazine, no. 55, Nov/Dec (1993) for an account of this exhibition curated by artist Naomi Salaman.

Reference Women’s Art Magazine, no. 59, Jul/Aug 1994.

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WHERE WOMEN DARE TO TREAD? VAL WILLIAMS

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hy do women photograph men? There is of course no easy answer to this question; the agendas are differing, difficult, and changing by the minute. We all think we know why men photograph women, and their reasons have been open to challenge for a decade or more. While it is accepted that, in some photographic circumstances, women have become fetishised objects, subjects of the male gaze, the motives of women who look at and photograph men are far less clear, less often or easily discussed. Looking is a perplexing and problematic business; we all do it, without perhaps pausing for long enough to ponder our own motives. Photography cannot be anything other than an inquisitive gaze, and photographers are often cited as voyeurs. Women have been looking at men through the lens of the camera since the invention of photography, but their feelings about gender have often been disguised by an antiquarian attitude which interprets the photographs without considering gender politics. Two of Britain’s most distinguished Edwardian photographers, Olive Edis and Eveleen Myers, both admitted their preference for male sitters. Women, they both believed, were too preoccupied with the demands of fashion and too aware of their own appearance. While Eveleen Myers (whose photographs were inspired by the work of Julia Margaret Cameron) was content to photograph men ‘in what is their usual dress’ believing that ‘a man’s clothes, and above all his collar, become part of his individuality’, she grew increasingly impatient with her women sitter’s dislike of the flowing, pre-Raphaelite dresses she preferred them to wear: ‘I very much object to the high collars which have been so long in the fashion; they destroy as nothing else can do the value and artistic beauty of a portrait’ . When Julia Margaret Cameron pursued famous men like Alfred Lord Tennyson in the hope of a portrait, she was more in danger of being accused of lionisation than of sexual curiosity. That she portrayed poets, scientists and inventors as wild male beings, with flowing hair and burning eyes has not yet become a focus of attention for the photographic historian. Yet Cameron’s portraits of men are as objectified as any which we

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may glimpse now on the pages of fashionable male magazines. Only the theoretical framework was absent. Women war photographers perhaps came as close as one could get in the 1940s to fetishisation of the male. For Life magazine photographer Margaret Bourke White, the US soldier became the epitome of masculinity. Bourke White’s photographs, taken throughout the second world war, noted how uniforms reinforce notions not only of strength and virility but also of a corporate identity. The idea of maleness became for her the symbol of war. Writing about the American pilots she encountered during her assignment she admitted: ‘Some of these men have meant more to me than either of my husbands. Perhaps fliers have meant the most, particularly certain of the seasoned ones whose early work meant pioneering in one way and another, and called for great daring and imagination. With men like this, there was always a quick understanding and, if the work meant danger shared, that was always a bond’. In Britain in the 1950s, Ida Kar carved out a career in photography by photographing the up-and-coming talents of the British art world. Many of her photographs of women artists and writers – Sandra Blow, Gillian Ayres, Bridget Riley and Iris Murdoch – are now icons of their times. But for Ida Kar, these were less favoured subjects, for she too looked, through photography, for an essence of male virility, for that tantalising essence of the Other. ‘I photograph famous people’ she told Queen magazine, ‘and famous people are mainly men’. Feminist photography of the 1970s was, in part, an inevitable refutation of these kinds of statements. Women photographers became deeply interested in other women’s lives, producing work which became a metaphor for social struggle of a very particular kind, against a patriarchy and an uncaring social and political system. When the body became a site of concern, it was customarily the female body, and artists like Jo Spence and Anne Noggle began, through self-portraiture, to question and explore the notion of female sexuality. But during the eighties, a period of intense self-questioning for both men and women using photography, agendas began to change, the foci to shift. When Jo Spence photographed her partner David Roberts in a painful retreat into infantilism, it was a signal for women to enlarge or change their field of vision in a fundamental way. The rise of erotic photography by women was perhaps a result of this shift. Women like Grace Lau and Robyn Shaw began to photograph men in ways which, though open to challenge, provided a new and important channel for women to express their views about sexuality. Lau’s work on bondage, first exhibited in the late 1980s, was a strong statement about permissibility. The taboos which had encircled women’s photography for so long began to be lifted. At the same time, the emergence of men’s magazines like GQ and Esquire helped to formulate the concept of the new man. Noone knew if new men actually existed, like phantoms, they were everywhere, but one never met them face to face. New men most often appeared in advertisements with babies, they were caring yet strong, virile yet sensitive. But there was also a deep crisis emerging around the whole notion of masculinity. Women had agendas, media spokespersons, publishing companies and a strong oppositional infrastructure. Men, on the contrary, seemed lost and bewildered; the collapse of the consumer boom of the 1980s and the ensuing recession of the 1990s took away some of the power of patriarchy. An emerging group of women

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photographers began to photograph men as more vulnerable, chaotic beings. Anna Fox, Moira McIver and Susan Lipper are three artists using photography who, in very different ways, have explored ideas of masculinity in contemporary society. Anna Fox came to public attention through her photoseries Workstations, which looked at office life in the 1980s. Her photographs of salesmen and managers emphasized both aggression and crisis. Here were people in control but also abandoned in a crazy whirlpool of jargon and ambition. After completing Workstations, Anna Fox decided to look at the manic world of weekend wargames, played out in the derelict landscapes of post-industrial Britain by bands of off-duty executives, garage mechanics and salesmen. Her photographs of men playing at war give us pertinent glimpses of what it is like to be male in a society where gender has itself become a battleground. Her statements are pessimistic yet fascinating, satirical yet compassionate. Moira McIver has taken men in uniform as the major topic of a project which she has been expanding since the early 1990s. Her photographs of Falklands’ veterans revealing their bodies to the camera’s gaze explore ideas of fetishisation and objectification in more complex ways than the late eighties portraits by women like Grace Lau or Robyn Shaw had attempted. McIver’s photographs ask important questions about the nature of eroticism, the focus of the woman’s gaze. Her artworks have a glamour and a richness which take one beyond the political, which explore fantasies of a deep and almost holy nature. Studies of flesh and blemish, they touch upon raw nerves about the relationships between men and women, question the propriety of the act of looking.

Figure 29 Anna Fox, Weekend War Games in Britain in the 1990s, From the Friendly Fire series, © Anna Fox. Courtesy of the artist.

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When men look into the lens of a camera held by a woman, remarkable things can happen. Susan Lipper’s photographs of young men living in the remote Appalachian township of Grapevine in the United States signify a meeting of looks and encapsulate a situation in which both the photographer and the subjects were highly aware of a gender divide. There is a competitiveness in this mutual exchange, a sense of barter. Like Anna Fox, Susan Lipper seems to be both fascinated and repelled by the men she photographs. Photography in the mid 1990s is in a state of flux. The decline of modernism has enabled both men and women to use photography in a multitude of different ways, as record, as autobiography, as satire, as political gesture. Feminism is no longer an easy concept to assimilate – it is still there, but we perhaps are no longer sure of exactly what it is, or what it should do. When women photograph men in the way that Grace Lau, Anna Fox, Moira McIver and Susan Lipper have begun to do, they are not supplying answers about the conundrums which gender creates, but rather asking some very pertinent questions. As photography merges into a post-feminist, post-modernist era, many of the truisms of the 1970s and early eighties no longer apply. Women using photography are breaking rules which were once thought inviolable. They are looking at men not just as representatives of the patriarchy, but as fathomable, sexualised beings. Their gaze is clear as they survey what is, inevitably, a muddled situation. The photography of Anna Fox, Moira McIver, Grace Lau and Susan Lipper suggests a particular empowerment, as does the profound and complicated work of women like Helen Chadwick in the UK and Annette Messager in France. By asking dangerous questions these women are setting the agenda for a new and provocative debate on women’s photography, a debate which is no longer grounded in the sterile area of ‘women’s issues’ but which ventilates into a new aesthetic and a new politic.

Reference Women’s Art Magazine, no. 59, Jul/Aug 1994.

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COMING INTO CONTACT SADIE PLANT

Much of Luce Irigaray’s work – and that of many of her readers – is steeped in an idealism which takes the edge off her darker, more materialist moods. But when she gets into the matters of red blood, viscous membranes, wet touches and contacts, her writing takes on the haunting and dangerous tone of a materialism which might really disturb the ideas and ideals of the specular world and sends out plenty of feelers on the way. * * * If blindness and castration are interlinked, Irigaray’s sight is the sense of the male gaze and the penetrating eye, the organ which pierces, inspects, and captures whatever comes under its scrutiny. All that matters, flows and feels – not least the female pleasure zone of lips closer than representation can know – has been overlooked by a culture invested in the phallus and, by implication, the priority of that which can be seen. There are moments in Irigaray’s work when the full force of these claims hits home: the specular economy which keeps the patriarchal show on the road comes sharply into focus as well, in the same moment, as the feeling that some excess remains beyond the sights and scenes of this reality; a presentiment that there is something yet to be explored. There is, of course, nothing to be seen of it. There is no thing to be captured by the gaze, no flow slow enough to be observed. But there is a feeling, a sense, a ‘carnal knowledge’ which resists expression and runs beyond even the imagination of the specular. ‘Behind the screens of representation’ lies the dark side of the mirror in which the male member of the species comes to know itself, the bleak side of the canvas on which the classically male artist overlays his genius, the wrong side of the veils and cloths which the ‘female’ offers as its interface. As in the case of taboo, the principal prohibition, the nucleus of the neurosis, is against touching; and thence it is sometimes known as ‘touching phobia’ or délire de toucher. The prohibition does not merely apply to immediate physical contact but has an extent as wide as the metaphorical use of the phrase ‘to come into contact with’.1 If sight has been the sense of security, touch is the feeling that nothing is safe. Touch is the sense of communication. A matter of getting in touch and a coming into contact,

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a question of opening channels and proliferating links between trade routes, lines of migration, vectors of disease, teeming telecommunications nets. Sight depends on a distance which tactility renders obsolete. Touch is the sense of proximity, a nearness that never quite fuses the touchers into one, but simply allows them to get in touch. That which is seen has no say in the matter. That which is touched will always touch, not even in return, but in the same moment. There is no distance between touch itself. It was supposedly his phallic hotline to an all-seeing God which gave the male artist his inspiration. Brought under the regime of a specular economy, women’s ‘creativity’ becomes almost a contradiction in terms. Like her ‘sexuality’, which is already bound to be male. Like her subjectivity, her identity, her life, her death ... everything already defined for her. But still the excess, the frustration, the anger, the unnameable more that never leaves her alone. The exploration that has to go on. Which is why her images, like her texts, are so often so much more than meets the eye. Even in its purest form, the image functions as a tactile event: not just because of the neurochemical switches and connections of which vision is composed, nor simply because of the action of light as it impacts on the open eye, although these are all moments of contact, and proliferations of links. Images touch all over the place, sometimes as imperceptible brush strokes, sometimes as bloody, painful blows. They are complex systems of communication, loops of transmission and reception beyond either the artists’ or the viewers’ control.

Figure 30 Linda Dement, Scar and Cloth, (from ‘Typhoid Mary’ interactive digital work, 1991). Courtesy of the artist.

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Is it for his own protection that the gallery visitor stands back from the picture as though to get a better view, or else makes the detail of the close-up gaze a matter of inspection and scrutiny? Is this why images are supposed to be safely framed and pinned to the wall? Even so, something of art has always refused to play the specular game. And no matter how tight the security, there is always the risk that images will leap from the wall and grab the spectator; infecting, mutating, or drawing him in. Digitisation makes this tendency increasingly unavoidable. Multimedia confuses the channels and puts all the senses into unprecedented contact with each other: it is because of this that Marshall McLuhan describes touch as the sense of the electronic age. Already there is an Irigarayan multiplicity of women making images, texts, music, and endless other configurations of the digital and analogue arts: Linda Dement’s Typhoid Mary and Maggy Roberts’ vampire machines ... Computers melt the senses and their organs into a convergence fatal to a world in which they have been isolated and hierarchically arranged; amongst the terminals and touch-sensitive screens, images become unmistakably interactive and increasingly entangled with immersions and synaesthetic mixtures of multimedia. Wrap-around digital clothing that fits where it touches, like a second skin. Its tactility is merely one strand of the tendencies which feminize the digital arts and, with them, an old male conception of all art, all creativity, sexuality, life, death ... There is always a point at which the computer-generated image becomes as intolerable to the male ego as cyberspace is to specularity. Touch cannot be captured by the gaze. The tactile is prior to its representations: all speculation comes after the event. You can look at the past, but the future is felt. Impact. Contact. The broken taboo. Send out the feelers, the exploratory probes. Make the connections, and keep in touch.

Note 1. See Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo.

Reference Women’s Art Magazine, no. 63, Mar/Apr 1995.

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‘...WOMAN WITH HEAD ...’ RACHEL ARMSTRONG

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fter her opening of the photographic exhibition, This is my Body ... This is my Software ... at the Zone Gallery and her conference given at the Art Historians Conference on the theme of Beauty, in Newcastle, April 1996, Orlan was invited to make an opening conference and performance at the Totally Wired season at the ICA. Lois Keidan, Director of Live Arts and initiator of this festival, considers Orlan’s work to be representative of a new genre of artists who are establishing a contemporary relationship between their bodies and new technologies in performance. Contrary to the expectations of another operation/performance, the audience was introduced to the live performance of Woman with Head ...Woman without Head.

Figure 31 ORLAN, Woman with Head…Woman without Head, 1996. (Still from). Photo: N. Sinclair. Courtesy of ORLAN and WAL archive.

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As the lights went up, Orlan’s disembodied head appeared in conversation with an enormous synthetic projection of her face. This juxtaposition of her ‘real’ head and the virtual image created by Dean Brannagan, which had been scanned using a medicallaser system at University College, London by Dr. Alf Linney, reinforced her position as an artist who is working in a truly binary mode; sometimes on her real body and at other times as a body-object in emerging new technologies. Orlan’s manifestation revealed her to be of a Cyborg identity, according to Donna Haraway’s definition as ‘a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction’.1 The artist’s current project, Images/New Images or The Reincarnation of Saint Orlan, was conceived in May 1990 to create a new identity for herself. During a ten year period, she proposed that a series of new self-portraits would be designed using the latest computer technology and re-translated into her flesh-canvas, using the most up-to-date surgery. This evolutionary process has involved nine surgical operation/performances to date and has been successfully achieved without the need for pain, for suffering. This artistic technique she calls Carnal Art. In this way I can see my own body open and without suffering ... a new look, I can see myself at the bottom of my entrails...a new mirror stadium! It is in this look on the depths of our old bodies that our contemporary one is legible [...]

The recent advances in modern anaesthetic techniques and surgery have allowed Orlan to adopt this cyborg identity. The avoidance of pain allows her to move freely between computer image, body-object and a healing, ageing body in an evolutionary process which differentiates her work from that of the 1960s body artists such as Gina Pane and Chris Burden. The 1960s movement sought transcendence through repeated assaults on the artists’ bodies, incorporating the obligation of physical suffering as an integral part of their work. Orlan does not believe in this need for suffering and is able to achieve this by using medical technology to anaesthetise her skin and tissues so that they may be manipulated, quite literally, like a costume. In this case, the medical technology provides a kind of magic in the operation/performance, allowing the body to be transformed beyond its expected limitations. Orlan is able to create disturbing images of her open body while she reads aloud from key texts. Images are generated by virtue of the locally anaesthetised but active body which allows the artist to freely interact with the spectators. The audience is able to see and believe that this woman is alive and not suffering, contrary to expectations. My work is a struggle against: the innate, the inexorable, the programmes, Nature, DNA (which is our direct rival as far as artists of representation), and God! My work is blasphemous.

In collaboration with the illusionist Paul Kieve, Orlan used the ancient illusory techniques of the Fête Foraine, or Freak Show, to create the illusion of the bodiless woman, a phenomenon which the audience was able to completely believe in. It was the artist’s preference to work with traditional illusory techniques as it is currently the most effective strategy to create the illusion of a de-materialised body.

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The artist began a conversation with the enormous virtual head, on which the now infamous real and virtual implanted ‘bumps’ or ‘horns’ were clearly visible. This monstrous image demanded: ‘.... Orlan, where is your body?’ A good question, because although the spectators looked around the intensely lit stage, her body was not visible. Her ‘real’ head chanted repetitiously, like a viral code or a fragment of language software: ‘... Magic, Illusion, Simulation, Virtuality’. She presented the case of her missing body as a riddle through a series of readings, turning from time to time to reply to the provocations of her virtual self. The head, suddenly and mysteriously accompanied by a real hand, turned the pages of her book so that the artist could read aloud from key texts which form the literary element in Orlan’s operation/performances: The Third Lesson by Michel Serres; extracts about the Body Without Organs from Antonin Artaud; Powers of Horror by Julia Kristeva and other poems and stories all of which provided clues to the reasons behind and the nature of the artist’s de-materialisation. Orlan, it seemed, had discarded her body as the ultimate statement against its obsolescence. She had thrown away the deceiving skin and banished the concealed contaminating organs, leaving the spectators with her head ... and increasingly powerful voice. The head carried the face and the voice that had already challenged multiple surgical knives and defied the non-interventive body regulations of God and psychoanalysis nine times before. This beheaded Orlan also continued to read aloud despite its predicament. Her body had been virtually and literally replaced by text and sound, having become language itself. The audience supposed that this unattached Orlan head ought to expire, without even an open body to support it, according to any natural law ... so, they waited. Orlan had successfully exposed the belief systems linked with their expectations of the body, and their need to know the ‘true’ nature of her image.

Note 1. Donna J. Haraway, ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology and the Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century’, in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (London: Free Association Books, 1991).

Reference make: the magazine of women’s art, no. 70, Jun/Jul 1996.

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MEMORIES OF DEMOS, DUNGAREES AND BADGES – SO WHERE ARE WE NOW? LIZ WELLS

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ella Grace proposes a third gender; Orlan invites us to witness the carnal art of bodiIy reconstruction; Katherine Bigelow offers us virtual rape. A coming of age of feminism, in all its diverse aspects? Or paradoxical perversions of the utopian ideals of the 1910s? Women have figured prominently in recent lens-based practices. How then to describe women’s photography, video and film-making in the contemporary fin de siècle increasingly digital context? Given the word limit, I shall focus upon the changing contexts of women’s cinema. What do we mean by women’s practices? Personally, I never felt entirely comfortable with the 1970s notion of sisterhood, nor did I subscribe to the illusion that because women did it, it was somehow superior, and, by extension, feminist. The depressing essentialism of the back-to-matriarchy strands within the 1970s women’s movement have, happily, been superseded or sidelined. But the desire to stress the positive contribution of women within visual culture, historically and now, still belies difficulties in engaging critically with certain areas of practice and with the oeuvre of some practitioners. For instance, Leni Riefenstahl1 was undoubtedly a remarkable director in terms of modern camera aesthetics, but with highly offensive political alliances. What then constitutes women’s cinema? In 1982, Annette Kuhn described her first encounter with women’s cinema: One sunny Saturday in the spring of 1974, I drove the forty or so miles from Sheffield to Nottingham to attend a screening of women’s films ... they were certainly the first overtly feminist films I had ever seen. What remains in my memory of that occasion, more than the films themselves, was the unpretentious setting in which they were screened – a small room in a community centre or some such place, with a 16mm projector set up on a table at the back – and the fact that what I saw were films that were not just about women, ordinary working women, housewives, mothers, but were

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also by women. Most, perhaps all, of them came from the London Women’s Film Group, a pioneering feminist film-making collection that had already, by 1974, been in existence for two years.2

I have a similarly potent memory from 1983, when a number of women gathered in an empty city space in Bristol, stretching a white sheet on a rope tied between two pillars, to enjoy films made in the 1940s by Maya Deren, whose work first signalled the foundation of the American avant-garde.3 In the 1970s and early 1980s, the acknowledgement of women within cinema seemed urgent, innovative, and politically significant. In common with other fields of practice, women’s cinema was concerned with reclaiming pioneers, including, in Britain, the documentary work of Ruby Grierson, Jill Craigie and the poetics of Margaret Tait, as well as wanting to claim space for films about women, and for women practitioners. Reclaiming documentary was relatively simple politically; it was less easy to see where feature films directed by, for instance, Wendy Toye or Muriel Box, chimed with feminist priorities of the 1970s. Nonetheless, the patriarchal myopia of film history was challenged, and the need to address questions of gender reframed the relatively new academic enterprise of film theory. In the spirit of the Soviet constructivists, feminist film theorists sought to forge links between politics/theory and film-making practices in order to establish women’s cinema within ‘counter-cinema’.4 Indeed, women’s cinema was increasingly identifiable as an influence within the more general set of understandings and practices associated with independent cinema. Writing in 1978, Sylvia Harvey noted that in reality only the wealthy are ‘independent and that it was cultural rather than economic independence which was at stake’.5 Unlike some areas of art practice, film-making is expensive. Even the lowest of low or no-budget films is dependent upon cameras, film stock, laboratory costs, access to cutting facilities, and so on. No filmmaker is independent. Rather, state support for the arts in Britain had established a system of dependence upon public funding, and upon protection from the commercial exigencies of distribution and exhibition. This, of course, not only brought with it sets of aesthetic expectations and accountabilities, but also tended to isolate the radical film-maker from the popular audience. Furthermore, the materialist and structuralist tendencies of counter-cinema of the period – with Brechtian premises of critical distanciation as one key formal tenet – tended to underpin the marginalisation of the experimental. Many of the debates relating to the experimental versus the popular were fought out through the struggle to establish women’s cinema which, however radical, did claim to seek the wider audience. We thought film (and the arts more generally) could and would contribute to social change. My memories (albeit selective) are of demos, dungarees, and badges. The personal was political and the action centred on the urgency of challenging patriarchal structures and ideologies, individually (through consciousness-raising) as well as institutionally. The media, as influential arenas of representation, figured centrally. Organisation was collective and anti-hierarchical – including shoots wherein, even if there was only one director, auteurist notions were eschewed. The 1970s witnessed the setting up of women’s film collectives and distribution agencies including Leeds

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Animation Workshop, Sheffield Women’s Film Co-op, London Women’s Film Group, Circles and Cinema of Women. The undermining of patriarchy was to be achieved in part through putting women and women’s issues into the frame; in part, through tackling sex discrimination within the arts and media establishments; and in part through developing collective modes of organisation. Naive, perhaps, but exciting and challenging! I don’t want to imply consensus. On the contrary, debates raged relating to film form and content – for instance, political realism versus the alleged elitism or exclusivism of the experimental avant-garde. The point is that, not only were they stimulating or infuriating intellectually, they mattered because they seemed significant politically. Twenty years on, what has changed? First, video has made its mark especially in gallery practices, offering relatively low cost possibilities in screen arts whilst offering a domestic aesthetic. The market of video as the new home-movie mode has also influenced a revival of interest in Super 8 for experimental usage. Second, nowadays, as Libby Anson has succinctly noted, ‘feminism, advocacy of women’s rights on the ground of equality, is usually misinterpreted to mean exclusively female, probably radical and, more than likely, shaven-headedly lesbian’.6 The hijacking of feminism to refer primarily to lesbian politics and perspectives has led to increased stress on the more descriptive and arguably depoliticized – albeit assertive – phrase, women’s cinema. Third, equal opportunities legislation has forced major film and broadcast companies to open up to women. In the 1960s, the BBC, then the principal television training provider, refused to accept women applicants for camera training (I know – my application was refused outright with the suggestion that I become a secretary or study stage management if I wanted to work for the Corporation!). Now, affirmative action, in combination with 1980s (Thatcherite) individualism, have contributed to a number of women with backgrounds in, or benefiting from, feminist movements of the 1970s attaining influential positions within cinema and broadcast media in technical roles as well as in production and direction. What would once have been viewed as selling out, or perhaps justified as entryism, is now reconceptualised as negotiating – no longer struggling – from within. Fourth, broadcast TV programming profiles have changed to incorporate not only feminist viewpoints and role models (difficult to believe that there was a fuss when women first got to read the news) but also diversity in terms of multiculturalism and sexuality (for instance, Gay time TV on BBC2, DykeTV on Channel Four). Furthermore, zoning and streaming models introduced by Channel Four have opened up more flexible broadcast possibilities for short films (not possible when television is organised in series, or prescribed slots). But plurality to some extent remains masquerade: whatever spaces have been opened up on the margins of established systems, they still seem elusive. Besides which, aside from occasional opportunities such as 10 × 10 (SBC Bristol/ACE) or 11 o’clock High (Carlton/LFVDA), radicalism has tended to lie more in content than aesthetics; television expects strong narrative structures and visual experimentation is more likely to be found in the adverts than in the programmes! Why this concern with television? One key shift from the 1970s has been in relation to the popular, and to concern with audience. This does not stem from the political activist project of reaching a wider public so much as from the post-modern

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fascination with media and globalisation, diversification of exhibition sites (from cinema and broadcast television to the internet, and plurality of forms and discourses). Queer theory productively reframes the camp of the everyday and media and cultural studies have expanded dramatically within the universities. Interest in the everyday has also been ref lected through parody both within the broadcast mainstream (for instance, obviously, Absolutely Fabulous) or in gallery based video. One broader context for this is the post-feminist theoretical ref lexivity which eschews over-simplified notions of representation, stereotyping and role modeling – whilst not discounting the importance of the politics of representation – in favour of more complex understandings of the relation between representation, spectatorship, identity, fantasy and pleasure. What, then, defines women’s cinema now? Kathryn Bigelow is one of a number of high-profile, successful female practitioners who view the idea of women’s cinema as a ghetto.7 The woman director remains central to the notion of a women’s cinema. Whilst not all films directed by women fall within women’s cinema, no film can be included unless directed by a woman (a sort of residual auteurism despite acknowledgements of the collective nature of film-making). The woman director may work with other women writers, producers, etc. but not always. To get beyond auteurism, it is more useful to think about the majority of influential decisions being made by women practitioners. Secondly, women’s cinema is commonly equated with low – or no – budget film and video, it’s commonly produced and distributed outside of the mainstream and is, crucially, concerned with women’s issues or with themes and situations viewed from a woman’s perspective. Personal documentary is a characteristic mode, although many forms of story-telling also feature. Thirdly, specialist distribution is of central importance. Cinenova (founded in 1991) now acts as the principal specialist agency for women’s film and video. It includes many short films on its lists. This is important, as shorts tend to be limited to the festival circuit or specialist venues. These are notoriously uneconomical yet creatively crucial. They should not be constrained by television programmes and feature-length films or prescribed by the traditional narrative structures of these. Also filmmakers learn their craft this way so, without distribution, first-time opportunities for those who go on to make features would not be possible. Cinenova’s title is significant as it obviously translates into English, yet implies internationalism and retains its reference to the Latin American source of new critical debates within Third Cinema, that is, a cinema of opposition. It does reflect the broader context of counter-cinema and radical creativity. As with the Women’s Art Library, the most powerful argument in favour of separatism is that of specialisation: concentration of resources and knowledge, and commitment to the promotion of women’s work. In conclusion: I think we can afford to be optimistic not only about the gains of the last twenty years but also about our ability to maintain a profile in future. As course leader for an MA which offers critical and contextual studies for practitioners, I receive significantly more applications from women than from men. This might reflect insecurity – a perceived need for paper qualification. It certainly reflects the fact that many women are constrained from flexible freelancing by the demands of young children (but so are some men). Ultimately, however, I see an independence, determination, and self- confidence

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on the part of a younger generation of women filmmakers for whom many of the problems which seemed such hurdles a generation ago have largely disappeared.

Notes 1. The Body and the State, a conference on the work of Leni Riefenstahl, will be held in Falmouth, September 6–8. It remains to be seen to what extent the reinstatement debate, that is, the question of overlooking her political affiliations in order to reclaim her contribution of filmmaking and photography, takes centre stage. (This conference was subsequently cancelled). 2. Annette Kuhn, ‘Preface’ in Women’s Pictures (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982). 3. The film tour and notes on Maya Deren were organized by Judith Higginbotham of Exeter Film Workshop for South West Arts. 4. See Claire Johnston, ‘Women’s Cinema as Counter-cinema’, in Notes on Women’s Cinema (London: Society for Education in Film and Television, 1973). 5. Sylvia Harvey, Independent Cinema? (Stafford: West Midlands Arts, 1978). 6. Libby Anson, Untitled, Issue 7, Winter (1994/95). 7. See Anna Powell ‘Blood on the Borders’ Screen 35, Summer (1994).

Reference make: the magazine of women’s art, no. 71, Aug/Sep 1996.

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IN VIDEO VERITAS: A FEMINIST PERSPECTIVE ON WOMEN’S VIDEO ACROSS TWO DECADES CATHERINE ELWES

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he adoption of video as a creative medium coincided with a widespread disenchantment with easel art in the late 1970s. In the UK, artists such as Tina Keane, Rose Finn Kelcey, Hannah O’Shea and Tamara Krikorian saw the fledgling disciplines of video and performance as fertile ground for female creativity where painting and, to a lesser extent, sculpture locked them into modes of representation that reduced ‘woman’ to the status of model and muse, or excluded any overt reference to the feminine in a sea of abstraction and conceptual language games. Although new media made it possible to sidestep the domineering influence of male traditions in painting, video artists now had to contend with the new representational codes evolving in television and the older traditions of film narrative on which the younger electronic medium was founded. Some women solved this problem by relegating the video image to a subsidiary element in a live performance and offered it as a mediated point of view and a counterpoint to the live presence of the artist. Sally Potter pointed out that all forms of live art contained within them the contradictory elements of stereotypical female roles: the stripper, the dying diva, the harridan, which all militate against the disturbing reality of the artiste’s embodied presence. Within the live performance, ‘the ballerina’s physical strength and energy [ ... ] the burlesque queen’s apposite and witty interjections transform the meaning of what she is doing and reveal it for the “act” it is’.1 In the art performances of Tina Keane or Sonia Knox the mediation of the artist’s persona as a live video image displayed on a monitor was simultaneously undermined by the reality of the artist’s flesh and blood appearance, the process of objectification being both demonstrated and undermined by the evident inability of the mediatised image to embody the complexities of the whole woman. Artists such as Tamara Krikorian and Marceline Mori working purely with the video image used duration and repetition to

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avoid reproducing conventional representations of women that were enshrined in the narrative structures and entertainment formats of broadcast television. By fragmenting the image of woman, putting her at a distance, and by suggesting her presence not by means of a gendered, eroticised body, but through voiceover, gesture and written text, these artists explored the deeper structures of representation and simultaneously challenged the power of the putative male viewer and the expectations inscribed in patriarchal regimes of spectatorship. In the early 1980s, narrative returned in the form of the personal testament and rediscovered histories in the work of women identifying with an established feminist tradition of recuperation and the search for a feminist aesthetic.2 Here the personal became political and individual testaments were seen as part of a process of consciousness-raising whereby a woman might understand her particular experiences in the wider political context of women’s oppression under patriarchy. This was part of a feminist project to validate women’s private experience in the public arena of art. This tendency produced art around the experience of motherhood, as in my own work with my son Bruno Muellbauer and Katharine Meynell’s lyrical tapes made with her daughter Hannah Kates Morgan.3 The artist as daughter as well as mother came to light in Jayne Parker’s extraordinary Almost Out (1984) in which the artist overturned the cultural meaning of a middle-aged woman and by means of duration redefined conventional readings of female beauty. Louise Forshaw made a short sharp tape called Hammer and Knife (1987) in which she stands in the middle of a field and addresses the male viewer with a devastating account of her fear of strangers following a rape attack. All these works revised Laura Mulvey’s famous characterisation of the audience as consisting of male spectators and women taking up the masculine position in relation to the image and thereby denying their gender.4 These new works addressed either female spectators in a feminist context of women’s exhibitions, festivals and screenings or, as in the case of Louise Forshaw, the address was made direct to the male members of the audience with the knowledge that women spectators might identify with her position as victim and witness. This is a necessarily sketchy summary of British women’s activities in video in the early days and the different tendencies did not always happily co-exist. Some commentators took women artists to task when they tried to intervene in the field of sexuality by using body images, which were easily recuperable by patriarchal culture and the male members of the audience. As Lucy Lippard wrote in 1976: ‘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’.5 I have an enduring memory of the Slade Professor Lawrence Gowing whispering to his neighbour that I was better when I took my clothes off – I was performing Voice Over in the dark by torchlight for fear of giving the chaps what they wanted. However, women performers and videomakers working with the body refused to return to the darkness of their enforced representational banishment and tried to become visible on their own terms. Many resisted the intellectualisation of feminism, which artists like Mary Kelly and Susan Hiller came to represent and insisted on the female traditions of storytelling and the pleasures of direct realist imagery. Other criticisms were levelled at such ‘personal’ feminist video, work that was seen to rely on the transparency of

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dominant realist forms. Not only were they said to be ignoring the inbuilt meanings contained in established linguistic traditions but, by emphasising the individual, the works reproduced the hierarchical male star system that conferred what Linda Nochlin called ‘the golden nugget of genius’ on some but not on others.6 Artists recording autobiographical outpourings were also accused of narcissistically indulging in public therapy. Sally Potter described this phenomenon at a conference at the lCA in 1980. The personal is not political, she said, ‘when the attention narrows to the privileged tinkering with or attention to one’s solely private sphere, divorced from any collective struggle or publicly conjoined act and simply names the personal practice as political. For art this can mean doing art that looks like art has always looked, that challenges little, but about which one asserts that it is valid because it was done by a woman’. In these so-called post-feminist days, it is tempting to see the work of personalities like Georgina Starr and Tracey Emin as the direct inheritors of the feminist traditions of the personal testament in women’s video, but the context has changed and the accusations of narcissism and exhibitionism are less easy to deflect. A work like Dancing in Peckham (1990) by Gillian Wearing features the artist bopping aimlessly in public places like a Top of the Pops punter who couldn’t find the television studio. The eccentricity of the action, the almost pathological repetition compulsion of the dance, shows the artist not only disconnected from the people around her, but from all social and economic realities. Heidi Reitmaier has described how those young women artists representing what she calls ‘the hard stare of British femininity’7 have been taken up by commercial art dealers and their work

Figure 32 Georgina Starr, Crying, (video still) 1993. Courtesy of the artist.

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validated by the popular art press. She berates their mostly male apologists for characterising their bad-as-the-boys aesthetic as the contemporary face of British feminism and the culmination of 20 years of feminist struggle in the arts. However, there are moments when contemporary video avoids the pitfalls of both narcissism and the temporary attentions of a youth-addicted press. The last few years have brought to light the extraordinary works of Annie Sprinkle who confounds all our preconceptions about the sex industry and sexual liberation.8 Duration and the performative are the key to the radical trauma she induces in her audience. Who could forget her demonstration of a multiple orgasm with a helpful graph superimposed to quantify the seemingly endless verbal and bodily convulsions that constitute the height of female pleasure? Other artists like Stephanie Smith have worked in partnerships, and explored the tensions between male and female within a metaphorical, performance-to-camera tradition. In Mouth to Mouth (1995) her partner, Edward Stewart, lies submerged in a tubful of water. He holds his breath. When alerted by escaping bubbles, Smith periodically leans over and performs an underwater kiss of life. His helpless dependency on her life-giving breath is both a return to the mysteries of the womb and an allegory of heterosexual coupling in which the loss of boundaries may sometimes be experienced as one breath, one heart, and one will, driving two individuals. If I was asked to offer a recipe for current women’s video practice, I would point to the lessons of early radical feminists that insisted on the importance of the individual experience as a key to the workings of the wider culture. Similarly, it is beneficial to learn from the explorations of representation and language that was the project of film and videomakers from the Marxist/

Figure 33 Smith/Stewart, Mouth To Mouth, 1995. Courtesy of the artist.

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psychoanalytic camp. Language cannot be taken for granted, they said, nor expected to reflect the artist’s intentions without consideration of the deeper structures of meaning embedded in their formal organisation. An understanding of the viewing position, the reception of images in different contexts and by different groups is an essential part of any structural analysis. And finally, a young videomaker should be a sceptical and clever manipulator of the socio-cultural machinery that could so easily appropriate her art for some purpose other than her own.

Notes 1. Sally Potter, ‘On Show’, in Catherine Elwes (ed), About Time; Performance and Installation by 21 Women Artists, catalogue, (London: ICA publications, 1980). About Time was one of three landmark exhibitions of women’s work at the ICA that year, beginning with Women’s Images of Men, curated by Jackie Morreau, Catherine Elwes, Pat Whiteread and Joyce Agee, with guest curators Sarah Kent and Lisa Tickner. About Time, curated by Catherine Elwes and Rose Garrard followed and the season closed with Issue, curated by Lucy Lippard. 2. See Catherine Elwes, ‘Floating Femininity: A Look at Performance Art by Women’ in S. Kent and J. Morreau (eds), Women’s Images of Men (London: Writers & Readers, 1985), reprinted in Video loupe, a collection of essays by and about the videomaker and critic Catherine Elwes (London: KT Press, 2000), pp.71–84. 3. See Video loupe, ibid. for discussion of my videos made with Bruno. Katharine Meynell’s Hannah’s Song, 1986, as well as other video works by women are referenced in Catherine Elwes, Video Art, a guided tour (London: I.B.Tauris, 2005), especially chapter 3. 4. See Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Screen, Vol 16, No 3 (1975), p.20. 5. Lucy Lippard, ‘The Pains and Pleasures of Rebirth: European and American Women’s Body Art’, Art in America, 64:3 (1976). 6. Linda Nochlin, ‘Why have there been no great women artists?’, in T.B. Hess and E.C. Baker (eds), Art and Sexual Politics: Women’s Liberation, Women Artists and Art History (London and New York: Collier MacMillan, 1973), pp. 1–39. 7. Heidi Reitmaier, ‘Who are you looking at? Moi?’, in Occupational Hazard – critical perspectives on recent British art (London: Black Dog Publishing, 1998). 8. See Annie Sprinkle, Sluts and Goddesses, distributed by http://anniesprinkle.org/ (Accessed 12 February 2014).

Reference make: the magazine of women’s art, no. 81, Sep/Oct/Nov 1998.

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GENDER MAT TERS T O C A P I TA L1 YVONNE VOLKART

‘I would like to share my future with a man who would understand me completely and help me in my life and my work’.

Figure 34 Ursula Biemann, Writing Desire, 2000. Courtesy of the artist.

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These hopeful words, placed by a Russian woman on a marriage agency’s website, end the 20 minute video Writing Desire, 2000, by the Swiss artist Ursula Biemann. A woman’s body presents itself to our gaze: blonde, slim, split evening dress and long legs. Her movements are abrupt and awkward because the QuickTime movie underlying this video recording is unable to translate its erotic gliding quality. Writing Desire is the attempt to trace the multiplicity of desire in the computer age. The first strand of the video explores theoretical reflections formulated by privileged culture-producers, like Biemann herself, about the genuine excerpts of erotic e-mail. Although this e-mail correspondence suggests a high degree of sublimation and reflection, there is a sense, as in the case of the Russian woman, that it is about romantic fantasies of unity and intimacy, even when motivation and articulation are so clearly irreconcilable. The voices of intellectual gender-theoreticians are overlaid – such as Rosi Braidotti who talks about the meaning of writing, desire and disembodiment. A second strand takes issue with the globalised bride market. We see the digital images or QuickTime movies of women from Thailand, the Philippines and Eastern Europe offered by agencies, such as china.doll or tigerlilies.com on the internet. These women can get to know their future husband beforehand via email and their dialogue follows a uniform pattern. Biemann also shows that, in spite of the particular (intellectual, erotic, economic and subjective) interests characterising the North South divide, the domain of computer and internet harbours a media-produced mutuality which is constitutive of desire in the globalised world. Thus it is implicitly understood that a certain degree of education and internet access is necessary in order to express wishes and fantasies electronically. A further mutuality exists in the complete de-contextualisation of the participants and the absorption into unrealistic dreams. These fantasies are heightened through the swiftness of transmission and the pseudo-proximity of the glaring screen which lead to a corresponding engagement with an undreamed-of intensity. ‘Suspended realities that simulate a permanent state of being in love. A fantasy forever unfulfilled in its enactments. A sense of always approaching but never reaching’ says the female voice off-camera. Accompanying this we see a desirable and desiring woman dressed in a black bra at the computer, typing. This is the artist herself who, unlike the Russian woman, does not need to make herself more attractive to marry but can lose herself in the script’s erotics and in the intimacy and physicality of this pleasure-orientated writing scenario. Change and frontier crossing are inherent to new technologies, they write the body and its desire anew, but the commercialisation of the female body as a moveable, transnational commodity has a history: the step from thick catalogues to ostensibly personal e-mail communication is merely gradual. The occupation of a country and its bodies is being perfected by means of cyberspace; and the images of sandy beaches with palm trees (which we also see in the video), are now even bluer, even more intense. Biemann considers these intensifications – the hopes and deceptions produced by the union of new technologies and global capitalism – implacably side by side. At the beginning of Writing Desire we hear an elderly feminist academic from Mexico speak about how she found a fantastic man, a US Marine Corps lieutenant, via the internet. She says that she could hardly believe that she was able to fall in love with someone like that. But as she did not know who he was in ‘real life’, proximity was possible. This maxim offers more

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than just praise of romantic love. It rather shows that, with the aid of new technology, everything is becoming interconnected, that bodies and genders are becoming codes and that what happens in cyberspace has real consequences. These codes are against the dominant definitions, not immaterial but, on the contrary, highly fleshy and physical. We see the digitised photographs of the happy family; pure information streams in interchangeable (desire) economies. These questions have already been raised in Biemann’s first video Performing the Border, 1999, about Mexico’s border with the US, and are now being further developed in her new video, on the trafficking of women, which is still in progress. One could read: what does the current cyborgisation of being a human – and respectively being a woman – mean for women? What kind of relationship is in force between trans-national capitalism and women’s work, especially sex work? Seeing her newest video, Remote Sensing, about the trafficking of women from developing countries, you reach the subtle conclusion that the trade in women has not only increased but has also become a significant factor of global capitalism. This video, like the two preceding it, is mainly based on interviews with women who are seen speaking in close-up. In this case we listen primarily to NCO women talking authoritatively about the historical and economic connections between trans-nationalism, colonialism and trafficking. Interspersed among the clips of women we see home-made or found material of brothels and clubs, US military bases, slums in Manila and streetwalkers in Mexico. As in Performing the Border and, as I see it, Writing Desire, we hear of touching stories, but

Figure 35 Ursula Biemann, Remote Sensing, 2001. Courtesy of the artist.

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always textualised, reflexively broken or mediated (for example, a perfect American accent is overlaid with the image of a Filipino woman speaking). Although Biemann deals with terrible and, in the latest video seemingly clichéd themes, she does not construct stereotypical images of victims. For her it is rather a matter of creating a theoretical distance, and of seeing immediate themes – such as the trade in women or women working in Mexico’s Maquiladoras – as symptoms of a new capitalisation, in which gender plays not only a constitutional role but also has identitychanging effects. She stages this through a highly reflexive, sympathetic documentary, theoretically speculative and artificial aesthetic. This seems, on the one hand, to relate to a politically engaged ‘Docuaesthetic’ but, on the other hand, she is not afraid of ‘beautiful’, monumentalising, sometimes almost epic, images. For example, with an easy listening soundtrack we see girls of breathtaking beauty racing on Vespas through the streets of Chiang Mai (North Thailand). We can enjoy this perspective as the camera dwells on it, we can delight in these ‘icons’ of Asian beauty and freedom. Or, instead, we can criticise this representation, as a female artist does in the next shot. With this integration of critique Biemann does not destroy her representation, but opens it for discussion. She uses this as a vehicle to expound the question of how to produce ‘different’ images, which possibly do not exist yet and therefore can only emerge through re-coding. Yet, in order to be able to re-decode and subvert and not just simply to affirm the existing, she supplies a broad range of information and ‘enlightenment’ material. Through her hybrid strategy of ‘mimetic traversing’ (Luce Irigaray), Biemann shows how the economisation, culturalisation and sexualisation of ‘exotic’ women affects everybody: her camera gaze also is gendered and racialised. An offensive approach could also thereby lead to an emptying and remodelling of codes. Biemann’s last three videos have to be understood as articulation of an artistic aesthetic which tries to unite theory and engagement. Her approach is a way of performing theory in the field of art and to extend it via video. This cannot always succeed without speculation, yet it is, today when the aesthetical and the political need to be thought out anew, a fruitful and still largely untravelled way. Translated by Tatjana Gretschmann.

Note 1. This sentence appears as a caption in Ursula Biemann’s video Performing the Border and emphasises the sexist tendencies of multinational companies in the Global South.

Reference make: the magazine of women’s art, no.91, Mar/Apr/May 2001.

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INTRODUCTION

C

ritiques of invisible whiteness and implicit middle-class orientation were evident quite early on in second-wave feminism particularly from Black and ethnic minority feminists in the UK and the US. Whereas sexual difference had been argued as an (universal) ontological concept, issues of race, ethnicity and class were seen as divisions imposed by cultures onto sexed bodies as contingent categories: one experiences one’s race, class and ethnicity as sexually differenciated. The Magazine charts how these struggles are problematically experienced within a sexed body as oppressions, adding further layers and challenges to a white, Euroethnic history. Black feminist theory became particularly focused on issues of the body and the gaze in the 1990s, with an interconnecting of issues of race with gender and class further challenging the (white) feminist discourse of the role of the racially unspecified female body in visual representation. Referencing the well-known early feminist reassessment of art history by Linda Nochlin ‘Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists’,1 Chila Burman gives a further twist by asserting that: ‘There Have always Been Great Blackwomen Artists’ in the first article in this section. In this synopsis of her talk at the Black Visual Artists Forum at the ICA in 1986, she describes the difficulty – and the necessity – of Black women’s art as a practice challenging the ongoing racial, sexual and class oppression which, she asserts, must be done outside the established (male) black liberation movement and the white-dominated feminist movement, claiming that both groups failed to recognise the particular oppression of Black women. With funding bodies marginalizing them further, channelling them into work as community artists, Burman advocates Black women only exhibitions in order to explore their own diverse individual concerns which would challenge this oppressive discriminatory culture. The Women Artists Slide Library housed The Women of Colour Index (1985–1995), which was established by artist Rita Keegan working in collaboration with the AfricanAsian Visual Artists Archive, and The Magazine regularly documents Black women’s exhibitions as a political and a radical challenge to a singular account of Western art. Questions of how Western culture marginalizes the Black female body as ‘exotic, knowing and promiscuous’ is addressed by Janice Cheddie in her article where she describes

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Figure 36

Rita Keegan in her Studio, 1980. Courtesy of the artist and the WAL archive.

how Chila Burman’s self-portraits challenge and resist the usual ‘anthropological gaze’, (the photograph as historically surveying and classifying the racial and sexual ‘other’), to contest notions of racist stereotyping. The point is again made in the review by Carole Enahoro of the exhibition ‘Intimate Distance’, where work by five Black women photographers at the Photographers Gallery, London 1990, is described as breaking with the usual use of photography – more related to documentary referencing – in consisting of works which go beyond the politically intended collective identifications by exploring a wide range of personal experiences. The concern then is not to identify a homogeneous category of Black women artists but rather to acknowledge the diversity of their individual experiences as Black women in a white patriarchal culture.

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The question is raised though, by Janice Cheddie in her article ‘Storm Damage’, as to whether, in 1997, Black Art is still a valid category. She considers Niru Ratnam’s proposal that race could be understood not just as a ‘contingent identity’ but also used as a career strategy for artists to get their work exhibited. She gives examples of works by Black women artists which manage to address issues of Black subjectivity without resorting to employing these ‘ironic or contingent’ strategies; in so doing she proposes that they successfully avoid the possibility of reducing the Black woman to the usual exotic object. In repeating the question of whether Black art is still a valid category she reminds us of Griselda Pollock’s assertion that there is no such thing as ‘feminist art’ – only ‘feminist artistic practices’ – which demands a shift from the object itself to a consideration of its production. Cheddie is concerned that the ongoing marketing by galleries of Black art contributes to its marginalization rather than acknowledging the diverse contribution made by these artists to contemporary practice. The problem is further highlighted by Carole Enahoro in her criticism of the decision by the curator Rasheed Araeen to have included only four women out of the 24 selected Black artists in the important exhibition of Black British artists at the Hayward Gallery, ‘The Other Story: Afro-Asian Artists in Post-War Britain’. Araeen’s intention for the exhibition was to engage with the idea of modernism and post-modernity. The gender imbalance in the show was, he claimed, because Black women had been largely absent from this canon until the 1980s. Though very respectful of Araeen and his intentions, Enahoro argues that this attempt to locate Black art ‘inside’ this history (the selected works would challenge any ‘static and exotic’ relation to Black art) would not necessarily help with undoing the restricted bounded and elitist views of Western art but would merely reinforce old hierarchies. Enahoro is arguing then that in the intention to write Black art into this history it nevertheless will remain a white history (Euroethnic); it fails to address the differences within Black art practices. Confronting stereotypical views on Black art in a white culture, Enahoro argues, remains even more complex for Black women. Similar concerns of othering and exoticising are addressed by Fionna Barber in her review of two exhibitions on Irish art in Liverpool in 1991. Barber is critical of them both, claiming that they project a sense of the Otherness of Irish culture for their (British) audiences. Though Penelope Curtis, in her curatorial role for the Liverpool Tate exhibition, had selected predominantly female artists and consciously addressed issues of gender, Barber describes its failure to address the problematic relationship between Britain and Ireland and an unacknowledged history of colonialism and exploitation. As in other articles in this section, there is an idea that works should and can ‘speak for themselves’. Barber is critical of such notions, pointing out that artworks are always mediated by their context (in the first case here, the Tate as the custodian of British culture) and the problematic idea of the neutral white space of the gallery where artworks might well be reduced to being read as objects of an exotic culture. Again, the issue of which audience is being addressed and the desire to move away from the local to a more ‘universal aesthetic’ is proposed by Joanna Krysa in her article on Polish women artists. She describes Poland’s history of totalitarianism and its projection of itself as a homogeneous country untouched by multi-cultural and multi-national

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influences and its lack of engagement with issues of identity and sexual difference. In her review ‘Poles Apart: The Irreconcilable Process of Ageing’, she describes the work by Polish women artists as challenging these superficial myths. This concern with deconstructing myths is an issue that is repeatedly addressed in The Magazine in texts such as Ruth Ward’s ‘Lifting the Veil’, issue no. 62, addressing the romantic image of the Arab woman in the West as veiled and silenced; and Evelyne Jouanno’s article on the Paris exhibition ‘The Flower’s Power’, issue no. 92, which continues the concern of confronting and dismantling ‘exotic’ readings of work by non-Western women, in this case, Asian women. Unfortunately we have not enough space to reproduce these articles here. Constructing universally valid analytical frameworks for exploring the possibilities for transnationalist feminist practices in the arts became more evident in the later issues of The Magazine. Exploring the histories of women’s art both locally and internationally become important in an attempt to engage critically with the global marginalization of women in a patriarchal world. However, consideration of how Western feminism has affected other cultures with different histories of repression (social, economic etc.) does not necessarily translate easily. The Magazine continued to address how feminist discourses (initially Western) could be brought to bear in avoiding the dangers of constructing universally analytic frameworks to address work by women artists in different transnational locations especially where work is shown outside of its original location. This is noted as especially problematic in Asian locations where women’s marginality and gender inequality might be inadequately addressed through Western feminist concerns. In these contexts ‘feminism’ might still be seen as a Western concept where notions of individualism and selfexpression and different relations to the body are vastly different in patriarchies that have a strong family basis.

Note 1. Linda Nochlin, ‘Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?’, Art News, 69:9 (1971), pp.22–39, 67–71. Reprinted in Women, Art & Power & Other Essays (Boulder: Westview Press, 1988), pp.147–158.

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T H E R E H AV E A LWAYS BEEN GRE AT BL ACK WOMEN ARTISTS CHILA BURMAN

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e face many problems when trying to establish the very existence of Black women’s art and a strong social and political base from which to develop our study of it. Firstly, we have to struggle to establish our existence, let alone our credibility as autonomous beings, in the art world. Secondly, we can only retain that credibility and survive as artists if we become fully conscious of ourselves, lest we are demoralised or weakened by the social, economic and political constraints which the white-male art establishment imposes and will continue to impose upon us. This paper, then, is saying Black women artists are here, we exist and we exist positively despite the racial, sexual and class oppressions which we suffer. But first, however, we must point out the way in which these oppressions have operated in a wider context not just in the art world, but also in the struggles for black and female liberation. It is true to say that although Black women have been the staunchest allies of Black men and white women in the struggle against the oppression we all face at the hands of the capitalist and patriarchal system, we have hardly ever received either the support we need or recognition of our pivotal role in this struggle. Black women now realise that because of the specific ways in which we are oppressed by white-male dominated society, we must present a new challenge to imperialism, racism and sexism from inside and outside the established black liberation movement and at a critical distance to the white-dominated feminist movement. It is this realisation which has a lot to do with many second generation British Black women reclaiming art, firstly as a legitimate area of activity for Blackwomen as a distinct group of people, secondly as a way of developing an awareness (denied us by this racist, sexist, class society) of ourselves as complete human beings, and thirdly as a contribution to the black struggle in general. Having said this, Black women’s ability to do any or all of these three things is restricted by the same pressures of racism, sexism and class exclusivity which we experience in society in general. The bourgeois art establishment only acknowledges white men as truly creative and innovative artists. Whilst recognising art by white women only as a

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homogenous expression of femininity and art by black people (or, more accurately, within the terms of reference used, black men) as a static expression of the ritual experience of the daily lives of their communities, be they in the Third World or the imperialist hinterland. In this system of knowledge Black women artists quite simply do not exist. Nevertheless if we look at the way in which these assumptions have been challenged to date particularly by white women, we can still see nothing that acknowledges that Black women exist. Art History is an academic subject studied in patriarchal art institutions and white middle-class women have used their advantageous class position to gain access to these institutions by applying pressure to them in a way which actually furthers the exclusion of black artists in general. White women’s failure to inform themselves of the obstacles faced by black artists and in particular Black women artists has led to the production of an extremely Eurocentric theory and practice of ‘women’s art’ work. It seems that white feminists, as much as a woman in general, either do not attempt to or find it difficult to conceive of Black women’s experience. Some of those who do not attempt to may claim that they cannot speak for Black women, but this is merely a convenient way of sidestepping their own racism. The fact remains that in a patriarchal and sexist society, all black people suffer from racism; and it is quite possible for white women to turn racism, which stems from patriarchy, to their advantage. Black men are unable to do this and, theoretically, are unable to turn sexism to their advantage, although they can do this for short-term gains which in the long term will never benefit black people as a whole. This has happened to a certain extent in the art world, where black men have failed to recognise Black women artists or have put pressure on us to produce certain kinds of work linked to a male-dominated notion of struggle. However, because of their race and class position, black men have been unable to use the resources of art institutions in the same way that white middle-class women have.

THE STRUGGLES OF BLACK WOMEN ARTISTS The first stage of most Black women artists’ encounter with the art establishment is their entry into art college. There are hardly any Black women attending art college in Britain, and those who do, according to a survey of Black women artists I carried out, seem to have experienced a mixture of hostility and indifference from their college. Because their white tutors work within an imperialist art tradition, using the aesthetic conventions of the dominant ideology, they are unwilling to come to terms with Black women students and their work. This resistance manifests itself in many ways – some Black women art students have found themselves asking why they as individuals found it easy to get into art college, only to realise that they are there purely as tokens, and in general it appears that Black women’s very presence in white-male art institutions is frequently called into question. Apart from denying us the support and encouragement that white art students receive, art colleges make us feel as though we don’t belong inside their walls by the way in which our work is looked at. Those of us who have done more overtly political work have made white tutors very uncomfortable and, as a result, hostile, whilst students who have done less obviously challenging work have been questioned for not producing the kind of work which tutors expect black people to produce. Class differences amongst Blackwomen are significant here, for working-class Blackwomen have generally been quicker to reject the ideology of the art establishment

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and have therefore found it difficult to accept any kind of token status or to produce work of a more acceptable nature. Those who have not taken such an oppositional stance have still suffered from having their work analysed within a very narrow framework because their tutors have expected them to produce ‘ethnic’ work which reflects their ‘cultural origin’ using, for example, ‘bright carnival colours’, and white tutors and students alike have expressed confusion when such work has not been forthcoming. Another tendency of white tutors, irrespective of the type of work they are presented with, is to discuss art from the Third World with Black women in a patronising and racist manner. Of course, the assumption that Black women will produce work with ‘ethnic’ or ‘primitive’ associations is one that white tutors make about black men as well, but it is important to point out that male and female white tutors are more inclined to see black men as having a more prominent role in this misconceived tradition. One Black woman student at Bradford Art College commented: ‘Funny how they always refer to you as some sort of bridge or crossing point between two things. Black meets woman. That’s handy. As if you don’t have an experience which is your own, but borrow from the brothers and sisters in struggle’. This system of oppression and exclusion extends well beyond our time as art students. There are no full-time lecturing posts at art colleges and universities filled by Black women in the entire country, instead we are offered ‘freelance’ work as visiting lecturers, which will never be enough to initiate a critique of contemporary art practice which is so desperately needed in every single art department in the country. In addition, Black women artists are denied the opportunity to develop their work as individuals in the same way that white artists can through grants from sources such as the Arts Council, the Greater London Council, regional arts associations and the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. Even though some of these sources such as the GLC and the Greater London Arts Association have recently begun to realise how much they have neglected Black visual arts, on the only occasion that a Black woman has received funding from the GLC as an individual, this has still been on unsatisfactory terms which differ significantly from the terms on which the only black man in this position has been funded. The man in question has been funded without any preconditions except that he produces a certain amount of work, whilst the woman was funded by the Arts and Recreation Department of the GLC for a year on the condition that she was attached to a community arts centre as a ‘community artist’, and the stipulation was made that the work she produced should not reflect her desires as an individual but ‘the interests of the black community’. The GLC had ignored the importance to the black community of the experience of individual Black women and had funded her on the basis of an a historical notion of ‘community’ or ‘ethnic minority’ arts, but when it came to applying to the Arts Council, it appeared that the role she had been pushed into was not individual enough. The rejection of her application to this body read: ‘We do not think that your proposed project fits the terms of reference for this training scheme which is specifically aimed at developing the individual’s skills, and is not to assist with research projects’. If even the GLC funded a Black woman artist only as a ‘community artist’, this illustrates our position in a kind of funding no-woman’s-land, because the Arts Council, racist and sexist as it is already, will continue to see our work as unfundable research projects and, as was the case with the application mentioned, refer us to bodies such as the Association of Commonwealth Universities, further relegating us to the marginality of the ‘ghetto artist’, completely outside the mainstream British art world.

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BLACK WOMEN ARTISTS FIGHT BACK The resilience of Black women in the face of oppression has manifested itself in the art world through our ability to produce and exhibit work despite all the social, economic and political constraints described above. The first all-Black women’s show at the Africa Centre in 1983 was not just a beginning; Black women artists have been actively involved in exhibitions with white artists and Black men artists for several years, but this all-Black women’s show and the ones that have taken place since then Blackwoman Time Now, 1985 International Women’s Day Show, Mirror Reflecting Darkly, etc. represent a significant new direction which has much to do with the development of what Barbara Smith describes as ‘our own intellectual traditions’ . It is obvious that the majority of Black artists see their work in opposition to the establishment view of art as something that is ‘above’ politics, and Black women artists see their work as integral to the struggles of Black women and black people in general, but although Black women’s own culture plays a large part in determining the content and form of our work, we often concentrate on different issues to black men, who, as one Black woman artist points out, often believe that ‘artists who are making through their works a collective, aggressive challenge to cultural domination are ‘real’ black artists and making Black art. But some male artists fail to understand or comprehend the struggles women artists go through to assert their identity and survive’. Alice Walker illustrates the difference between these two ideas of Black art in In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens and goes on to put forward an alternative way for the black artist to operate: ‘I am impressed by people who claim they can see every thing and event in strict terms of black and white but their work is not, in my long contemplated and earnestly considered opinion, either black or white, but a dull, uniform gray. It is boring because it is easy and requires only that the reader be a lazy reader and a prejudiced one. Each story or poem has a formula, usually two-thirds “hate Whitey’s guts” and one-third ‘‘I am black, beautiful and almost always right’’. Art is not flattery, and the work of every artist must be more difficult than that’. ‘My major advice to young black artists would be that they shut themselves up somewhere away from all the debates about who they are and what colour they are and just turn out paintings and poems and stories and novels. Of course the kind of artist we are required to be cannot do this (our people are waiting)’. Alice Walker’s advice is important here, for she is not suggesting that we cut ourselves off from the outside world, because we cannot forget the mark our oppressions as Black women have made on us, or the fact that ‘our people are waiting’. The point is that what we need as artists is the opportunity to create the situation she describes so that we are allowed to develop an understanding of ourselves and of the struggle we have to wage within British society for recognition and respect. If we are able to do this by having adequate resources put at our disposal, we hope to share our experiences with, awaken the consciousness of and impart our strength to the whole society.

Reference Women Artists Slide Library Newsletter, no.15, Feb 1987.

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INTIMATE DISTANCE1 CAROLE ENAHORO

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t is an extremely rare event to see the work of Black photographers at the most famous photographic gallery in London, despite its internationalist reputation. The Photographers Gallery is currently featuring the work of five Black women photographers and not before time. The victims of their patronage are not stars in the usual sense of the word, but they are typical Photographer’s Gallery fodder as they are perhaps the most prominent Black women artists working in photography. And it is probably because of this that the most immediately striking feature of the show is its diversity, both of form and of representation. I was very excited by the show for two reasons. Firstly, the factor that links their work is the exploration of personal history. The intimacy of the subject matter is an area that is only recently being explored by Black artists. Previously, the emphasis was on documenting the reality of the political situation in collective terms. However, the groundwork has now been done. Therefore the strength of their approach is that it begins to explore the varied range of personal experiences that must be acknowledged as surely as the collective experience. Secondly, I was impressed by the range of experimentation. Black photography has long been considered only in terms of pure documentation, as if the camera were not an interpretive tool: ‘artifice’ was deemed unnecessary. At last the two can co-exist peacefully. Zarina Bhimji displays transparent photographs of a woman, a man’s body, muslin and cut hair suspended from the ceiling. The space is far too confined to fully appreciate the effect of this. In the piece accompanying her work, Bhimji writes: ‘... I am drawn to the challenge of my own people. I fight them and I fight for them.’ This fight is manifest on one hand in the fierceness of her cultural affiliation as evidenced in the photographs and on the other in the sense of unease that is evoked (most powerfully by the words accompanying the work and also by the detail of the body) by intimations of the loss of sexual innocence.

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The catalogue is most excellently written and in part explains the brevity of this review. There was, however, one comment I found particularly inappropriate in connection with Bhimji’s work. ‘The particular significance of women’s hair in Indian culture is eclipsed by the universal significance of cut hair as a symbol of powerlessness, articulated in the biblical myth of Samson and Delilah.’

This is an interpretation that I find particularly Eurocentric. However women’s hair in many cultures represents the ‘feminine’ and thus the rejection (cutting) of it infers rebellion. Rebellion connotes power. The symbol of power via the Samson myth is part of male symbology and this cannot be automatically superimposed on a female object. However, I think that these arguments reveal the problems that Bhimji’s work poses. She has always worked with highly metaphorical subject matter (at times verging on gimmickry) and this has often led to misinterpretation. This is in part a result of the execution of the original idea. Metaphors must be fully understood as they can often connote the opposite of that which the artist intends to communicate. In contrast to the expansiveness of Bhimji’s work is the cosy intimacy of the always brilliant Ingrid Pollard. She presents a series of photographs from her family album of a trip to the seaside. These are placed next to reconstructions of seaside scenes. The isolated scenery has an unsettling effect and the sea immediately communicates the concept of migration. This notion linking the seaside to the Black experience (with its associations of leisure as well as displacement) is currently also being explored by Lubaina

Figure 37 Ingrid Pollard, Oceans Apart, 1989. Courtesy of the artist.

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Himid and Reece Auguiste (filmmaker). Pollard’s work is enhanced by hand-tinting with its associations with postcards and with history. Using the traditional medium of documentary photography, Maxine Walker explores the domestic environment and the relationships within it also suggesting its public meanings. Her work is not documentary in its pure sense as the scenes are reconstructions. In them, she shows a series of a wedding and the tensions that underlie family relationships. Biswas also uses her family as subject matter, using a photograph taken during her cousin’s naming ceremony. Instead of displaying a print, she uses the negative as an antiphotograph – a representation of the historical moment as captured but unrepeatable. Lastly, I come to the work of Mona Hatoum. She has been working in the field of film and video for many years and has been central in bringing to view the work of the more experimental wing of Black arts. Her work explores the experiences of Palestinian refugees (again, a personal experience) although this is not immediately obvious. She presents two pieces, both of which move from order to discord through fracturing the sense of unity initially presented at the beginning of the videos. The effect on the viewer is very disturbing, which produces the sense of unease and melancholy that she is without doubt attempting to communicate.

Note 1. INTIMATE DISTANCE was at the Photographer’s Gallery, London, 21 July-9 Sept, 1989.

Reference Women Artists Slide Library Journal, no. 30, Oct/Nov 1989.

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THE OTHER STORY: AFRO-ASIAN ARTISTS IN POST WAR BRITAIN CAROLE ENAHORO

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he Hayward Gallery will be presenting the work of 24 artists of Afro-Caribbean Asian origin in November. It is one of the first major exhibitions of Black-Asian artists in Britain to be hosted by so prestigious a gallery. The event is bound to attract a great deal of attention due almost more to the status of the gallery itself than to the eminence of the assembled artists who number amongst the most distinguished of this century. It is an opportunity to make visible work that has for decades been overshadowed by the dominance of white artists. Categories that have for some years served to contain and, by extension, constrain the work of Black practitioners, such as Black Art (with its implications of political radicalism) or Ethnic Art (associated with the conservative, the retrospective), have been rejected in favour of more dynamic structures which embody the sense of process that has so long been denied the Black artist. These have, perhaps of necessity, been set within the Eurocentric framework of modernism and postmodernism. The retrospective thus ‘starts’ with the work of Ronald Moody (1920s) and charts the changes through to the late 1980s. It is inevitable that, faced with a major exhibition of this nature, these works will constitute the definitive, monolithic category of ‘Black British Art’ for some years to come. Catalogues, press reviews and other documentation that span time and space ensure that these works will survive the exhibition on more than a purely personal level. To embark upon a project of this nature is a fearsome task. One inescapably faces the wrath of individuals or communities who may feel that, as a result of the necessarily ruthless selection process, their work has not been sufficiently represented. It is also inevitable that one will face accusations of collaborating with and participating within an elitist structure (‘fine art’ and all that it entails). Indeed, as the project centers around living artists, the issue of selection will almost instinctively become charged with emotion.

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Nevertheless, with reliance on sound judgment, a consciousness of the objectives of the project and the implications of selection, it is hoped that as many sections representative of a diverse body of people will be duly presented in a fashion to give credit to the whole wealth of black creativity, and this gesture is thus, in essence, political. The avantgarde artist, Rasheed Araeen, who conceived of and initiated this project, has been one of the most powerful voices in the Black avant-garde in this country. He researched his material for a number of years and submitted the original proposal to the Arts Council in 1978. It took two more approaches to the ACGB (interspersed with two unsuccessful submissions to the GLC) and eight more years eventually to secure the funds and support. In the postscript to the catalogue, Araeen states: ‘My selection of the artists was based on multiple factors: historical, ideological, aesthetic, as well as personal. My main consideration has been that the work must engage with the idea of modernity or post-modernity), with its historical formations as well as its socio-cultural constraints and contradictions.’

What is initially surprising, given the political convictions of Rasheed Araeen who has been a stalwart of the radical movements of the 1970s, is that there is so little

Figure 38 Mona Hatoum, Roadworks, 1985. Performance, Brixton, London. Photo: Patrick Gilbert. Courtesy of White Cube.

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representation for women in the show. Out of 24 artists, only four women. These are Mona Hatoum, Lubaina Himid, Sonia Boyce and Kumiko Shimizu. As practitioners, they represent some of the finest artists of the decade. Mona Hatoum is one of the foremost avant-garde artists in Britain, well known for her performance art, installations and experimental videos. Kumiko Shimizu, although perhaps less well known, has also worked within the avant-garde for a number of years and has been specially commissioned to create some work for the exterior of the gallery. Lubaina Himid and Sonia Boyce, both featured at the ICA exhibition State of the Art, have gradually built up formidable reputations for their work which explores the realms of female experience and cultural identity. This is indeed a good selection but not necessarily representative of the wide range of work that black women artists have created in the 1980s. Some artists, such as Kim Lim and Veronica Ryan, declined to participate in this show, perhaps not wishing their work to be identified purely in terms of their ethnic origin or having their position threatened by the dangerous tag of ‘political’ or ‘exotic.’ However, the exclusion of women such as Sokari Douglas Camp, Sutapa Biswas, Rita Keegan, among others, suggests that the criteria for selection was not as strictly trussed to women’s contribution to modernism and post-modernism as the organizers imply. Araeen is keenly aware and particularly sensitive about the issue of representation: The issue of gender representation remains unresolved here. We have included only four women artists, which IS regrettable. But this must be understood in terms of socio-historical factors, rather than through a continually repeated rhetoric of mythical ‘blackwomen artists’ who have been ignored. It seems that ‘black’ women artists in the 50s and 60s who came here from Africa, Asia or the Caribbean, returned home after they finished their education, unlike men artists who have stayed on. On the other hand, Black women artists who have recently emerged were either born or brought up here in Britain, and they had nowhere else to go but assert their presence here. They are an important part of our Story.

Given the framework around which the show is constructed, these assumptions may indeed be correct, although, despite Araeen’s protestations to the contrary, this has never been conclusively proven. (I would also argue that long before the 1950s, women from Africa, the Caribbean and Asia exerted a continued presence in this country.) Is the solution then to accept those boundaries and reinforce the notion of Black women as lacking in creativity, only breaking out of this limbo through the benevolent patronage of institutions which had so far served a limited selection of (white) men. Or is the solution to break down barriers that deny a proper consideration of the contribution of Black women to cultural history? In order to investigate the claim that women’s contribution to mainstream art effectively began in the 1980s, I think it is necessary to consider the process by which the works are identified and to examine the criteria for selection. The show was set up to challenge the notion of the absence of the Black artist from mainstream cultural history,

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to question values by which art is judged and to counter the ‘fascination with the exotic’ that Black art still holds. ‘Racism is en-trenched in ideas and attitudes towards other cultures – no matter how fascinated they (Westerners) are with the work, it is considered outside history.’ [Araeen]

The format of the exhibition itself will no doubt contribute to locating this work ‘inside’ history. It shows a progression of concerns (from early works exploring style and representation, through to the radicalism of the 1970s, the directly confrontational work of the 1980s and the later concern with reclaiming identity) which proposes an intellectual and cultural development which may force the viewer into reassessing any static or exotic view of Black art. Araeen relies on the assumption that at any given time there are a number of art centres which dominate art production and, in this era, these are inescapably identified by Western art practice. Thus the notion of difference within Black art practices is explored superficially. The focus of the exhibition is on those artists working within those restricted parameters defined by the West and thus excludes ‘indigenous art’, ‘craft’ (even photography) which involves, (not exclusively), women’s work and the work of the black nations and communities. Modernism and post-modernism are not universals – they are artificial constructs that many use to categorize their ideas and undermine the validity of other types of practice. These categories and their meanings can be broken down by the assimilation of other work/ideas. Araeen states: ‘... if prevailing artistic criteria are based on the sensibilities of a white society which is no longer exclusively white but multi-racial, then these criteria must be challenged and changed.’

However, rather than directly challenging the legitimacy of the press, the art market and other institutions which formulate criteria, Araeen endorses an elitist view of art practice; not explicitly (he acknowledges the value of indigenous art and ‘craft’) – but implicitly, by exclusion. Indeed, Araeen endorses a whole range of strategies which legitimate and reinforce not only the status of his own art practice, but the hierarchy which embodies it. Undoubtedly, the project has been frustrated by the fact that parameters have already been defined. Rejecting them is a long and sometimes unsuccessful process. One can choose whether to work within or outside them. Major exhibitions are, however, not only based on personal choice but a consideration of potential sponsorship, audience, press coverage and so on. Araeen is an artist of considerable intelligence, integrity and vision and, for his purposes, his choice of strategy is valid. His means of justifying his exclusion of women is, however, not. It may not be possible to ascertain through the traditional avenues of research which Black women artists existed and the extent of their work. The notion of ‘professionalism’ might have had to undergo reconsideration, linking it less to career and the market than to commitment or skill.

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Nevertheless, there is a basic contradiction faced by all those who delve into these areas. Through the channels of written, aural and visual information (press, catalogues, slides or films, recordings, interviews) the researcher can paste together an idea of the history of a period or of the work of an artist. These are the channels to which blacks have traditionally had little access. Consequently, the search for ‘famous’ Black artists can be very frustrating. Some would argue that the artists who do surface through this method of research conform to the stereotypical view of Black artists. And yet, some do not. The problems encountered in the search for prominent Black artists are magnified in the case of women. Firstly, one is confronted with the ‘socio-historical’ factors to which Araeen make reference i.e. access to institutions such as art academies, art galleries, the press – traditionally elitist, conservative, proscriptive. This is coupled with the familiar problems which all women face in the employment arena. Secondly, it rests on the assumption that, having gained access to exhibition space, the interest of the press will be aroused. An exhibition of 17 Black women artists in Brixton Gallery in 1985 received three reviews. If Black women exhibit together, it seems like a political statement of the most radical kind – people shun the exhibition as divisive and separatist. If Black women exhibit with whites, their work is seen as naturally inferior. They have had less access to the institutions in which they would serve their apprenticeship, less sense of the cultural baggage of British art. They are disadvantaged on both accounts. If Araeen’s purpose is to challenge the ‘supremacy of the Western/ white male artist in the paradigm of modernism’, only half of the equation will have been served. It is an area of such hot debate that Birkbeck College (University of London) will be hosting a conference devoted almost exclusively to this issue in the light of the Hayward exhibition. On the other hand, Araeen has much to be proud of. The amount of effort and enthusiasm that he has devoted to the project is considerable and cannot be overlooked. There is absolutely no doubt that his show will be one of the most stunning of the decade. It is a visually exciting, ambitious exhibition which will excite those both familiar and unfamiliar with the work.

Reference Women Artists Slide Library Journal, no. 31/32, Jan/Feb 1990.

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IRISH ART IN LIVERPOOL FIONNA BARBER

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hroughout the spring of 1991, a number of exhibitions of Irish art and photography have been taking place in Liverpool, a city renowned for its historical links with Ireland. However, in these two group shows there was little consensus on issues either of Irishness or gender, both of which are problematic areas at the best of times. Of the two, it was Strongholds, curated by the Tate’s Penelope Curtis, which had consciously taken on board the issue of gender.1 As a result of several visits to Ireland and extensive discussions with artists, critics and curators, Curtis had put together a show in which five of the eight artists were women. In one of the two essays by Irish commentators concluding the catalogue, meanwhile, Ailbhe Smyth specifically identified the problematic of a country where the idealization of Woman as both nationalist and religious symbol – and the debasement of women in actuality – has so recently been challenged by the election of Mary Robinson as the Republic’s first woman President. Yet despite the importance of the contextualization of the work, neither Smyth nor Fintan O’Toole (the other commentator) have any specific involvement with the visual arts. This meant that it was Curtis – an English representative of a British institution – who not only selected the work of Irish artists but mediated it through the catalogue’s introductory essay. Nowhere is there any acknowledgement of the problematic relationship between Britain and Ireland underpinned by hundreds of years of colonialism and exploitation. Despite Curtis’s cautious hopes to the contrary in this essay, the works on the walls of the Tate can never ‘speak for themselves’ but are continually mediated through both the practices and spaces of an institution identified as a prime custodian of British national heritage and culture. The two main exhibition spaces focused around areas of public and private space were linked by a small room dominated by Kathy Prendergast’s Land – a large tent-like structure engaging with both the mapping of territory in its outer surface and the containment of a secure space within. In the first gallery Deirdre O’Connell’s series of large charcoal and pastel drawings entitled No Fire in the Hearth, No Sun in the South can be read

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on one level as engaged with the landscape of Northen Ireland as a site of political struggle. Despite its origins in response to a particular situation, O’Connell’s work is also concerned with architectural features as embodiments of power; her imagery derived from a number of sources including military fortifications is also highly encoded. However, lacking a visual vocabulary with which to reconstruct the works’ significance, a viewer unfamiliar with this terrain is more likely to read these as hermetic, or at best imbued with a general sense of displacement. Decontextualised within the supposedly neutral space of the gallery, the references have been excavated which are necessary to make these works meaningful in relation to the imperative of a contested territory. Instead, ironically, the drawings and O’Connell’s two accompanying sculptural pieces become objects of an exotic culture. In the final gallery these readings of the Irish as an alien race are reinforced by the first group of paintings by Jacinta Feeney. Originally from Donegal but now resident in London, much of Feeney’s work has in the past been dependent on a heavily romanticised Yeatsian view of the North West. There is a dilemma here in that the representation of a place with strong emotional ties for the artist can become overlaid with nostalgia

Figure 39 Alice Maher, Thicket 3, 1991. 112 × 140 cm. mixed media on paper (Private Collection). Courtesy of the Purdy Hicks Gallery.

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– which is part of the stock-in-trade of tourism, the economic mainstay of rural Ireland. Although paintings such as Blood of the Air do little to challenge the effects of nostalgia, an alternative would seem to be suggested by a group of four untitled works whose centralised imagery is curiously reminiscent of Georgia O’Keefe. The viewer is tipped into the domain of the sexual – more explicitly the domain of Alice Maher and Dorothy Cross whose installation Locker beds suffered from its positioning in a kind of indeterminate space midway through the gallery. However, it is with a group of new drawings by Maher that the question of gender becomes more firmly returned to the territory of rural Ireland. Collectively entitled The Thicket, there are similar concerns in these works to Paula Rego’s investigations of the repressed desires of the female child. In comparison with the institutionalised curation of the Tate’s show, Parable Island, was very clearly one man’s choice.2 Brian McAvera is well-known in Ireland as an independent writer and curator, so the Bluecoat exhibition did at least have the benefit of being selected by someone who should be more familiar with the ideological terrain. Yet the question of gender (still) proves to be a stumbling block for this curator; out of some 31 artists selected for the two shows, which ran consecutively, only nine were women. Indeed, if the catalogue essay is any indication, the crucial foregrounding of issues of gender in Ireland throughout the last decade would seem to have passed McEvera by. Women painters and sculptors feature in this show only as isolated individuals, their work severed from any supporting discourse on feminism which on one level certainly informed the Tate exhibition. Much of the work in Parable Island seems to have been selected on grounds of its subject matter rather than through any explicit concern for its means of representation. As a former playwright, McEvera tends to operate from a more literary basis, evidenced also in the titling of this particular exhibition. The result is an implicit acknowledgement of the prevalence of expressionism within contemporary Irish work by both male and female artists – yet this is never interrogated or its problematic relationship with gender investigated. Similarly, the absence of any forms of abstraction, such as paintings by Mary Fitzgerald, helps to confirm the stereotype of Irish modes of representation as tied to the literary rather than the visual. From time to time the curatorial presence would seem to withdraw, as with a group of works by Marie Barrett, six small mixed media drawings and her Green Madonna, an assemblage piece which draws upon the familiarity of religious images and reliquaries for part of its effect. In comparison with Jacinta Feeney in the Tate show, Barrett’s primary concern with the deconstruction of conventional representations of the North West of Ireland has expanded through the continuing use of irony to become a more inclusive critique of the power relations of Church and State. Rita Duffy’s The Marley Funeral, one of three large charcoal drawings, uses similar pictorial strategies of expressionism for a more direct political commentary which also raises issues of gender. In 1987, Larry Marley, a former IRA member, was shot dead in his home by loyalist gunmen. Duffy, who had been teaching in a girl’s school nearby, was struck by the incongruity of attempting to teach domestic science with its intentions of equipping pupils for ‘normal’ roles as wives and mothers while just up the road mourners and police battled for two days over the funeral.

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In Parable Island, it was as if a tantalising glimpse of the present concerns of women artists in Ireland has slipped through almost by accident. In Strongholds, on the other hand, the issue of gender was clearly present throughout the entire project, although mediated through the institutional constraints of the Tate. Yet both shows are predicated upon a sense of Otherness of Irish culture for British audiences, and it will clearly take more than just the two exhibitions for the implications to be effectively challenged.

Note 1. STRONGHOLDS, Tate Gallery, Liverpool, 20 Feb – 7 April 1991. 2. PARABLE ISLAND, Bluecoat Gallery, Liverpool, 2 March – 6 April 1991.

Reference Women’s Art Magazine, no. 40, May/June 1991.

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BODYRITES: THE SELF PORTRAITS OF CHILA BURMAN JANICE CHEDDIE

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ithin Western culture the body of the racial ‘other’ is inscribed as the locus of a dangerous, violent, predatory, exotic and perverse sexuality. A body that exists within the discourses of pleasure and domination – a sexuality of fear and fascination, that Western culture has sought to subjugate and dominate. The black female body, within racist iconography is reduced to the sum total of its sexuality: defined as exotic, knowing and promiscuous. A key element in these processes of subjugation and domination has been the classifying and defining of racial and sexual difference, through the use of the photographic anthropological gaze (referenced most recently in the Benetton advertising campaigns), the photograph within these discourses is posited as a document of empirical truth. These photographs have sought to survey and classify the body of the racial ‘other’ for signs that signalled its ‘innate physical, mental and moral inferiority’ (David Green ‘On Foucault’ in Ten.8, Magazine, No. 14). The recent ‘self-portrait’ work of multi media artist Chila Burman, positions the image of black female body as a site of resistance, construction and contradiction, challenging the representations of the black female body, within Western culture. Burman uses representations of the self to examine questions around race, gender and sexuality. In Chila Burman’s self-portraits, the body of the Asian woman is located as being irreducible to simplistic and one dimensional racist stereotyping, whilst simultaneously challenging the idea of an essential racial and gender identity outside representation. Burman’s self-portraits position the construction of racial and sexual identity as a process that is crafted and fluid within the process of representation. Burman’s manipulation of the photographic image questions the idea of the photograph as a document of the empirical reality, revealing ‘an image of oneself’. Seeking to resist the use of the photograph as a tool of surveillance and classification of racial and sexual difference, Burman

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Figure 40 Chila Kumari Burman, Fly Girl Watching the World, 1993. Courtesy of the artist. positions the body as one that is constantly in the process of production. Within the selfportraits, the photographic processes become tools whereby the artist is able to mould and form her own images. The artist’s body emerges actively resisting and struggling against the racist iconography that surrounds the imaging of the Asian woman.

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Burman’s photographs reclaim the image of the Asian woman, moving the image away from the object of the defining gaze, towards a position where the Asian woman/ artist becomes the subject of display. Her self-portraits construct a femininity that resists the racist stereotype of the passive, exotic Asian woman, imprisoned by her male patriarchal culture. Rather the Asian woman becomes the maker and definer of her own image. Femininity becomes a fun, liberating force rather than an oppressive force, allowing Burman to constantly challenge the viewers’ preconceptions of Asian femininity. Using all available means, make-up, earrings, hats, jewellery, framing, colouring of the skin and hair – the key signifiers of racial difference, in an array of vibrant psychedelic colours – Burman emerges, chameleon like, with new and differing images of her racial and sexual identity, while remaining recognisable and knowing. The ease with which Burman moves between the multifarious and diverse femininities of Asian and Western cultures, challenges the notion of the Asian woman ‘caught between two cultures’. For Burman femininity is a site for constructing racial and sexual identity, allowing the Asian woman to construct and define her own forever-changing self-image. The self Burman presents to us is that of the postmodern subjectivity, fractured, fragmented, multi-layered, vibrant and dynamic. Burman resists notions of the ‘self-portrait’ as a revelation of the ‘real hidden’ self, hidden under the facade of everyday interaction. Burman positions the body and the self image as one that is constantly being fashioned and remade.

Reference Women’s Art Magazine, no. 49, Nov/Dec 1992.

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STORM DAMAGE JANICE CHEDDIE

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lack art, like feminism it seems, is to be declared irrelevant – passé. Much of these proclamations centre on an emerging, predominately male canon of artists, Chris Ofili, Yinka Shonibare and Steve McQueen and their diverse and differing approaches to their cultural and artistic practice. A practice which can be called an ‘ironic/contingent’ position. The work of these artists directly addresses how we begin to foreground the black subject in a way which is not overburdened with meanings that centre solely on ‘conceptions of race’. Coupled with an admirable refusal to countenance the premise that the Black artist must engage with the burden of representation – a ‘struggle for invisibility’1 and a firm eye on the dealer. This raises uncomfortable and unsettling questions about the ways in which the agendas of the 1980s failed a generation of cultural producers. A struggle which in 1997 has still failed to deliver, as Eddie Chambers in his delicious rant ‘Whitewash’ (Art Monthly, April 1997) points out, even though there are Black people in curatorial, administrative or directorial roles in mainstream galleries, funding bodies or institutions. A cultural agenda seems to have had the effect of isolating and marginalizing the diverse practices of Black artists into a quagmire of curators and galleries who have only sought to place their work into the stifling straightjacket of educating and enlightening gallery audiences. I am wondering whether this ironic/contingent position is the emergence of a generational shift? A response by those who have been educated within the whirl of Thatcherism? Or is it the emergence of a confidence which places the Black subject centre stage while seeking to place difference within the framework of irony, excess, desire and re-examination of the look without any recourse to the cultural agendas of visibility and diversity? So pervasive is this position, that the critic, in order to talk about any artists of a nonwestern origin, must refer to it regardless of the cultural context of the artist.2 However, it strikes me that this contingent and ironic position is emerging within cultural criticism. Not so much as a strategy by individual artists, but one which is

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increasingly expected by critics and galleries as the predominant way in which Black artists must rehearse or discuss the issues of difference in order for some limited entrance into mainstream spaces – the emergence of a new paradigm. A position which appeals, seemingly, for a notion of colour blindness and one that refuses to look at the diversity of this art and its engagements with contemporary visual and theoretical practice. A critique by Niru Ratnam of this in ‘VA Colouring Book’ (frieze, April 1997) cites Ofili’s and Shonibare’s use of race as a contingent identity. Ratnam addresses the seeming call from many quarters that the term Black art is dead and that we should view artists regardless of the origins as artists, ignoring the process of production, contexts, audiences and multiple readings. He analyses these arguments and claims that the notion of contingent identity is one which itself is full of potholes and is premised on notions of denial, forever pushing for the most extreme example, which demonstrates how close the non-white subject can get to the heart of the mainstream essentialism/exclusion without being consumed and damaged. A position which bypasses the continuing reluctance of galleries to deal with difference. Ratnam notes that in an ideal society, this may be possible, that race like other factors are too complex to be dealt with by ‘the simple solution of not looking for them’.3 Neither is ‘race’, for Ratnam, a recreational identity to be taken up and dropped at will. But, race can be not only a contingent identity, but also a career strategy as demonstrated by Steve McQueen: I am not speaking for anyone I’m just speaking for myself. I am doing what I am doing and that is it. Of course, there is my experience of being political. Just like everyone else I want people to think beyond race, nationality and all that kind of crap. The only reason I did Mirage4 was because no one else would give me a show other than an all black show. Now I am in a situation where (I am not saying I can choose) but I don’t have to choose to do shows I don’t want to.5

In these comments McQueen, like other artists before, refuses the burden of representation. He simultaneously signaled to Black curators that he was prepared to use the mantle of race to get his work shown at the ICA, but that has served its function and they and others like them should make no further approaches to him. A highly individualist strategy which neatly bypasses the continuing references to McQueen’s own blackness and Black critical theory within the critical reception of his work. So is Black Art still a valid category? I wonder as I approach Shifting Terrains and Eastern Edge.6 Is the only way to critically engage with these diverse works through the dualism of this debate? Maxine Walker’s and Laura Aquiler’s work in Shifting Terrains are self-portraits which address issues of landscape, commodification and beauty – but through the placing of the black subject centre stage. While it may be useful to focus on the work primarily in terms of blackness, by ignoring the other issues, is to reduce the impact or relevance of the work or the possibilities of multiple audiences. While neither artist focuses on the irony or contingent strategies, both bring a fresh eye to the issues they choose to address through the Black subject.

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Figure 41 Laura Aquilar, Nature, Self Portrait, 1996. Courtesy of the artist. Aquiler’s work is reminiscent of Jo Spence’s Industrialisation (from the series Remodelling Photo History, 1982). In each of Aquiler’s untitled photographs, she is naked, lying or sitting at the centre of the desert landscapes in processes of quiet contemplation. Her photographs are clearly engaging with a dialogue with landscape photography. By placing the Black woman at the centre of these landscapes, Aquiler succeeds in negating both the Black woman as the locus of confrontation or as a figure of exoticism. The photographer’s body becomes rather an aesthetic object – for contemplation and beauty. These qualities are emphasised by the ways in which Aquiler’s accomplished photography has managed to convey a similarity and continuity with the lights and contours of her body and the surrounding landscape, inviting the viewer into quiet pools of reflection. Maxine Walker’s series of photographs reflect on the boundaries of public and private, with varying degrees of success. Walker focuses very much on the concept of ‘masquerade’, both as concealment and as a rehearsal of difference. Performative gestures focus the viewer’s attention on two predominant classification of racial difference – skin and hair. Notions of contemporary urban Blackness are constructed through artifice – wigs, jewellery, cleansing agents. Walker wears a blonde wig, a performative gesture which transforms blondeness from an icon of white femininity into an accessory of urban Black club wear. This highlights the artifice of female identity and the ways in which symbols of femininity and beauty have been commodified, a process which removes it from its associations with ‘whiteness’ to one of artifice and display, reinforcing Julie Burchill’s assertion that ‘all the best blondes are brunettes’.

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The continuing quagmire of curatorial premise of education/enlightenment in relationship to non-Western artists is highlighted by Eastern Edge, a thematic exhibition billed as contemporary women artists from India and Pakistan which contains some haunting and powerful work: Nilofar Akmut’s Siriso, Lubna Agha’s Final Journey, Naz Ibramullah’s States Of Mind. Bewilderingly, this exhibition also contains work by a male artist Ali Zaid, the Indian born but British educated established artist Sutapa Biswas and a selection of uncontextualised Bollywood posters. These elements seem to bear no relationship to the premise of the exhibition of highlighting women’s work from the Indian subcontinent, but rather on a curatorial selection on some notion of ‘Indian-ness’. Both exhibitions interestingly highlight some of the problems and issues that arise around the relevance of the term Black Art. Griselda Pollock reminds us there is no such thing as ‘feminist art’ – only feminist artistic practices. This shift from the object to the production is crucial in stressing the ways in the circumstances of production, audiences and meanings. Thus, what we are talking about are Black art practices. Not monolithic Black art. But is it still a valid category? This may not be the question. As Shifting Terrains demonstrates, the category Black art does not have to exclude the exploration of a whole range of questions and concerns, but serves to remind us that Black artists don’t exist on a level playing field. Exhibitions such as Shifting Terrains also highlight the lack of imagination mainstream galleries have in presenting and curating Black artist’s work, marginalising rather than presenting the work as valid vehicles by which to discuss relevant issues concerning contemporary visual practice.

Notes 1. Sarat Maharaj, ‘Reinventing Britain’ conference, British Council, SOAS, March 21, 1997. 2. How pervasive this referring of these strategies is within an analysis of any artist who attempts to deal with cultural difference was brought home to me by Sotiris Kyriacou’s review of Japanese artist Yukinori Yanagi, Art Monthly, April 1997, pp.22–23. 3. Niru Ratnam, ‘A Colouring Book’, Frieze, April (1997), p.39. 4. Mirage, ICA/InIVA, London, May 1995. 5. Steve McQueen, in ‘Oh! My God!’, Iwona Blazwick in conversation with Jaki Irvine and Steve McQueen (make: the magazine of women’s art, Feb/Mar 1997), p.7. 6. EASTERN EDGE was at Laing Gallery, Newcastle, 8 March – 8 June 1997.

Reference SHIFTING TERRAINS was at Zone Gallery, Newcastle, 5 March – 20 April 1997. make: the magazine of women’s art, no. 76, Jun/Jul 1997.

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P O L E S A PA R T: THE IRRECONCILIBLE PROCESS OF AGEING JOANNA KRYSA

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n 1989, whilst artists in Britain were responding to the Thatcherite political climate by staging exhibitions in warehouses, in Poland, the year marked the beginning of an attempt to come to terms with a new emerging political and social order that was to shape and influence the development of Polish art to come. For Poland, the 1990s has been a decade of struggle to reconstruct and re-establish national and individual identity. This is particularly evident in the art world where an emerging generation of women artists have been re-routing the Polish art scene and have achieved some success in putting forward their concerns in an international context.1 Poland [ ... ] stages itself as a homogeneous country, untouched by the multi-cultural, multi-national and multi-religious influences that normally characterise an open, liberal and democratic society. This undoubtedly contributes to tendencies towards nationalism, xenophobia and intolerance in the country. Clearly visible in current art practice, these traits manifest themselves as a lack of consideration or debate on elements of ‘difference’ or the ‘other’. On the whole, the current socio-political situation in Poland can be described as a ‘post totalitarian quasi-democracy, where the process of gradual evolution of the whole system has been replaced by the introduction of democratic elements within the old system, therefore constantly resituating it. Moral conservatism collides with Anglo-Saxon influence of mass culture and with the visual language of advertising and desire’.2 What then constitutes the current climate of the Polish women’s art scene? Until recently the general lack of engagement with issues of identity, gender, sexual difference and ‘otherness’ – the ingredients of most current feminist debate – has been particularly apparent. What is promoted instead [ ... ] is a heterosexual model of identity which advocates the rigid division of social roles with a fixed view of femininity and its position in a male-dominated society. These are the ready-made socio-cultural costumes with which female artists contend.

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Women artists are beginning to react to the[se] pressures in Polish society, as is evident from their diverse perspectives and practice. This reaction can be summarised as either a total rejection of the past with its ballast of tradition and history, which positions an artist on the defensive, or, particularly in the case of younger artists, as a search for a universal language to pave the way towards a new internationalism. Only now are women willing to voice their own concerns rather than speaking with the vox populi as did most artists of previous generations. Breaking the superficial myth of a homogeneous culture, women artists are now exploring in an uncompromising manner, a whole range of issues that engage with feminist discourses including issues of identity, female physicality, beauty and the other. The body has become central. Katarzyna Kozyra, Barbara Konopka and Alicja Zebrowska. These three artists in particular utilize a plethora of symbols drawn from a range of existing iconographies. They explore different media in an attempt to broaden cultural dialogue in order to contribute unique perspectives on art that have a rightful place in universal discourse. [ ... ] Apart from practical considerations, it is inevitably the younger generation of women artists who are engaging with universal issues which address a global rather than a local audience. This marks the distinction between the young and old garde, with the latter still looking back to a conservative Polish identity and ethnic symbolism, as if unable to look beyond the Polish history of totalitarian power that paralysed the country for decades. Without disregarding or refusing the artistic and moral value systems at work in

Figure 42 Katarzyna Kozyra, Bathhouse, 1997, video installation, video still. Courtesy of Katarzyna Kozyra Foundation.

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the art of previous generations, it is important to move on towards a more universal aesthetic. Thus the division becomes clear between those women artists who still effectively take part in confirming male-dominated discourses in a fresh and powerful way.

Notes 1. Katarzyna Kozyra, who represented Poland in the Venice Biennale of 1999, also gained international acclaim and was awarded a prize for ‘exploring and controlling the authoritarian dominion of male territory’. David Elliot, ‘Hole Truth’, Artforum, Sept. (1999), p.150. 2. ‘Art and Gender’ in Magazyn Sztuki, No 2, Feb. (1999).

Reference make: the magazine of women’s art, no. 86, Dec/Jan/Feb 2000.

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INTRODUCTION

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ne of the immediate impacts of feminist theory and practices arising in the late 1960s was to challenge the prevailing canon of modernism in which the ideology of the priority of pure vision prevailed. Marina Warner describes, in our first article in this section, the various tactics that ensured the erasure of women from history. Warner claims that it took the ‘new art history’ to begin to recognise, and acknowledge – as a result of feminist challenges – the social and economic conditions in which art is produced. One of the early intentions of the Women’s Art Library publication was to reinstate and re-evaluate past histories of the feminist movement. In 1986, the library hosted an exhibition of banners and posters from the suffrage movement at their offices in Fulham Palace (see Women Artists Slide Library Newsletter, no. 10, Spring 1986). Statistics of the success and (mostly) failure of institutions to fairly represent women artists was published in issue no. 38 (Jan/Feb 1991) in Leah Kharibian’s article ‘Survival in the Arts’. In issue no. 48 (Sep/Oct 1992), Josephine Lanyon also addressed this issue in discussing women artists’ representation in the exhibition ‘East’ (1991); similarly, Althea Greenan explored the history of some key moments from early feminist art practices in the late 1960s to the current day, charting shifting concerns for women artists in her revealing article ‘Domestic Squalor: reclaiming an artless art’, issue no.81, (Sep/Oct/Nov 1998). Feminist histories, however, chart more than a programme of ‘corrective demands’1 addressing gender inequalities. With the need to critique the legacy of official Western modernism, one immediate challenge was to address the important question posed by Linda Nochlin: ‘Why are there no great women artists?’2 and the quest to unearth what was seen as their deliberate erasure from history. In the opening article of this section, on the New Hall Collection of donated works by contemporary women artists and their commitment to women’s education, Marina Warner looks at the necessity of addressing the conditions and experiences of women’s lives as well as the inequality of opportunity. Warner is critical of art history’s fixed traditional concerns which describe art as a purely visual experience devoid of the social, and is supportive of the feminist challenge to this account by insisting on addressing the structures and conventions which govern how meaning is produced through social signs.

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For Griselda Pollock, the introduction of sexuality into the field of vision by insisting that looking involves desire opens up the field so that gender becomes a central consideration of the factors effecting the production and reception of art. In her article, she examines the last 20 years of feminism’s deconstruction of these ideas, shifting the terrain from one in which the term ‘woman’ was used as a prefix to address certain discourses in the early 1970s, to one which acknowledges how we are all inscribed into social systems as sexed subjects. To challenge the archives as ‘neutral storage’, is for Pollock, to make ‘necessary trouble’; in her article here she describes the necessity of re-writing these histories and undoing their ‘masculine inscriptions of omnipotence’ by addressing issues of gender, class and race which have been omitted from this account. She notes particularly the importance of psychoanalysis in its theorising of sexual difference and the feminist interpretations of naturalisations – as producing a radically different concept of subjectivity. Concerns with historical narratives and an aim to deliberately disrupt them were key to Laura Cottingham’s intentions for her role as one of six curators in the largescale exhibition in 1990 of 140 artists, Now Here at Louisiana MOMA, Humlebaek, Denmark. Heidi Reitmaier in her interview reproduced here discusses with Cottingham her feminist (and subversive) concerns to address 1970s politics and to put them into the present moment for this exhibition. Cottingham explains her deliberate political strategy of selecting only women as her curatorial contribution to the show, with the intention to rethink that radical ‘moment’– not just re-stage it – in order to have the possibility of reconsidering what might not have originally been understood at that time. She describes this as a necessary tactic to deliberately disrupt the usual comfortable programmes of such large art institutions and to question their historical accounts. This feminist strategy was vital not just as a corrective strategy but one which would allow a skewing of the historical records which tend towards the powerful and the privileged. Cottingham’s strategy might remind us of the ongoing necessity of reflecting on this history especially in the current (post-feminist) period of a political shift to the right even as women actually continue to be disadvantaged. The question of equal representation is addressed again by Roxanne Permar as she considers the impact of feminism on art school education. Though acknowledging an increase in the number of women teaching in art schools she notes that they nevertheless still do not hold the important positions. She is dismissive of the post-feminist ‘Girl Power’ stance of that time (1997) as lacking the earlier feminist strategies of the 1970s which were based in a sense of collective action. History, for Permar, has proven that women can make powerful changes but she argues the necessity for ongoing creative strategies for empowerment in art education if women are to secure positions in the future; an issue still of concern today. Aoife MacNamara argues for the importance of historical records not simply because they give an account of the past but because they effect what we do now and what might be possible in the future. She claims (like Cottingham) that we need to look back at the archives for a realistic account of what might have been learned. In doing so, MacNamara questions how a particular set of feminist artists (Mary Kelly, Susan Hiller and Alexis Hunter in particular) have come to be as THE exemplars of ‘feminist art’

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arguing that these favoured few might only occupy this status because of their privileged position in the first place in relation to those institutions which they were to take issue with. As highly educated middle class white women they were well able to engage with the discursive fields within which art operates and insure that their work was inserted into those discourses. We also see this point raised in the section ‘Race & Ethnicity’ where the same claim is made by black women artists about privileged middle-class white women and their familiarity with the institution. Like them, she is concerned to address the diversity of practices which operate outside the mainstream art world, engaging with the social, political, economic and cultural institutions in this country. MacNamara asserts the necessity of addressing this inadequate historical account and of re-inserting more diverse interventionist practices to avoid having our feminist history reduced to a simple orthodoxy written by art history. She describes the necessity of attending to those feminist practices which worked outside of minimalist aesthetics, structuralist theory and psychoanalytic inquiry and therefore become largely forgotten though hugely important at the time. This underlines the continuing radical potential for feminist theory and for the opportunities to reflect on past feminist histories – feminism as a radical knowledge project in Western history which needs constantly not just remembering but importantly re-examining. To re-examine this history would hopefully ensure against the necessity of its ongoing reinvention and the repeating of what has already been challenged.

Notes 1. Concerned with equal rights and equal representation. See Griselda Pollock, Encounters in the Virtual Feminist Museum (London: I.B.Tauris, 2007). 2. ‘Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?’ Art News, 69:9 (1971), pp.22–39, 67–71.

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MAKING IT LIKE A WOMAN MARINA WARNER

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n The Book of the City of Ladies, the historian and poet Christine de Pizan defended the cause of female education against fathers, husbands, and brothers who considered that an ignorant woman was a good woman. Christine de Pizan was born in 1365 and wrote The Book of the City of Ladies in 1405; the battle for women’s right to equal education took a long time to win. Colleges such as New Hall, founded in 1954, established comparatively recently a female presence in the universities, which is now taken for granted. As an undergraduate myself in the late sixties, I met two famous pioneer sisters, the Misses Deneke. In their eighties, they were still living in Norham Gardens, the north Oxford avenue that leads to Lady Margaret Hall, the women’s college where they had studied and taught; they had been among the first women students to be allowed officially to take a degree, though women sat the examinations in order to make the point after the college’s foundation in 1878. The proportion of women in higher education has risen sharply in recent decades – one of the most visible gains in the egalitarian struggle – although in practice young female school-leavers are still less qualified than their male counterparts (and this signifies, in this country, a truly parlous state of readiness for adult occupations); while in the teaching profession itself, women have yet to achieve anything like parity at the higher levels, as college heads, directors of departments and university professors. The weather in the streets is clearing, but Christine de Pizan would not find herself entirely disorientated. In her polemical riposte to those scholars and clerics and poets of her time who resisted women’s advancement in letters or other learning, Pizan flourishes a dramatic catalogue of female high achievers and heroines, from Judith to Circe. Among them, she included the daughter of a law professor in Bologna, a certain Novella, who had been taught by her father, ‘not quite 60 years ago’, because he disagreed with his contemporaries’ prejudice against women’s education. Pizan writes: ‘When he was occupied by some task and not at leisure to present his lectures to his students, he would send Novella, his daughter, in his place to lecture to the students from his chair’.1

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Substituting for the father, Novella exemplifies a certain theme in women’s history which can illuminate changing attitudes to the female production of art. Christine de Pizan continues: ‘to prevent her beauty from distracting the concentration of her audience, she had a little curtain drawn in front of her’.2 Novella wasn’t only drawing a veil over her beauty, but over her femaleness, synonymous – in the decadence of Eve – with seductiveness; and, even more fatally, with folly. Christine de Pizan herself would be veiled; when her Book of the Feats of Arms and Chivalry appeared in English in 1448 her name was erased and the text changed to imply the author was a man. A study on the conventions of medieval warfare, from the pen of a woman, would not have commanded the same confidence. Women as authors aren’t veiled any longer; this has been one of the marked developments of the last decade. The curtains have been drawn aside to reveal the female subject as she speaks, writes, paints – making and doing, in the original Greek sense of poiein, from which we derive ‘poet’. In the field of the visual arts, pioneer historians like Germaine Greer shouldered, Sisyphus-like, the great burden of misattribution, neglect, theft and bias in The Obstacle Race of 1989, and heroically retrieved individual figures like Artemisia Gentileschi and Elisabetta Sirani as proper subjects of critical appraisal. Landmark exhibitions, like the one held in Los Angeles in 19763, revealed the extent of women’s practice, the numbers of forgotten artists, many of them wives, sisters, daughters, mothers – who, like Novella, had disappeared behind the veil of a father/ son’s name. The problem was no longer, as Linda Nochlin had famously asked, ‘Why are there no great women artists?’ There were, there are: they have simply been hidden from history. This approach, which rakes the shadows to find great, forgotten ghosts, has however faded in more recent years, and a different line of argument has developed. On the one hand, the new art history’s commitment to the conditions in which art is produced has influenced a strong interest in women artists’ different social and economic position; and on the other, the history of psychology, represented above all by Michel Foucault’s studies of sexuality, has fostered a keen awareness, among practitioners as well as critics, that cultural symbolism informs the language of social exchange beyond material, that it expresses and creates shared ideas about femaleness, about sexual difference; furthermore, these ideas are constantly in flux. The artist who speaks, works, paints behind the curtain cannot be named and labeled and authenticated – pinned down – as tidily as the academic art historian, identifying a drawing, would believe. Draw aside one veil to see the woman, to hear her name, but she’ll still be wrapped – enmeshed – in history, both personal and remote, and in social context, both immediate and distant, which makes her subjectivity relative, her identity contingent. This new consciousness of women’s different material conditions has inspired powerful vindications of traditional female skills: needlework, ceramics, flower-painting, sewing. In the seventies and eighties, artists like Rose Garrard combined homages to women artists, whose works she encrypted in her own, with the use of fabrics, dresses, and textiles in tribute to the quotidian boundaries on women’s creativity. Attempts to develop a peinture féminine, on the lines of the écriture féminine proposed by Hélène Cixous (whose rhapsodic feminism has had much greater impact on the Anglophone world than

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on her own French audience), led to works which sought to represent the very evanescence, immateriality, and ordinariness of women’s existential condition and past works, as in Bobby Baker’s performance art, in which she makes cakes or reproduces her daily kitchen routines, or, Susan Hiller’s cool, barometrically precise account of her own pregnancy, in the graphic work, Ten Months. Hiller, who did some of her early studies in anthropology, adapted a cryptoscientific attitude to create what is in effect a modernist celebration of female fertility. In so doing, she encapsulates the polarity that pulls female artists today: from one magnetic field, the radical difference of the female body tugs at artists’ imaginations, while from the opposite pole, the crucial determining role of material and cultural circumstances cancels that radical difference in its foundations and essence and introduces fluctuating criteria. At one pole, femaleness is determinate, identifiable, clear, marked, and visible (a natural category); at the other, femininity is indeterminate, labile, inspissated, and fugitive (a cultural artefact). The writings of French feminists, rehearsing this argument about the limits of biology and the beginnings of culture, have been inspirational: not only Cixous, with her rallying cries to women to assert their ‘otherness’ but also Luce Irigaray. Rebecca Scott, for instance, a young artist who explores the associative and feminine-identified eroticism of flowers in big, richly coloured, sensuous canvasses, came across Irigaray’s work by chance recently and found that in its characterisation of female interiority, groundedness, concealed sexuality and dispersed sense perceptions, it spoke directly to her and her work. Yet this acknowledgement of perennial and fundamental female difference runs counter to the precept – the knowledge – that women’s inequality results from disparities before the law and opportunity. This conflict ends in theoretical impasse. But it has proved an impasse of exceptionally fertile ground, like the oscillating binary system of a computer, engendering infinite programmes and forms. When Novella – whose name so aptly means new – discloses herself, we find her looking into a mirror where she is refracted and multiplied, clustered and polymorphous, beheld and beholding in infinite variety. Recently, I was one of three selectors of the annual New Contemporaries show, chosen from the submissions of art students and recent graduates.4 The works are entered anonymously, and after looking at more than 2,000 images, we arrived at an exhibition of 22 artists – of whom four were men.5 My other two colleagues on the selection panel were male: the painter and film-maker Derek Jarman and the critic Guy Brett. The result dramatically inverts the usual male-female ratio in mixed exhibitions; needless to say, it was unintentional. What was striking was that the women artists were reshaping an inherited iconographic language and that it had become theirs to stake out as their own: the language of the body. This is not to say the women artists chosen were only figurative painters – they were in the minority; but many were re-interpreting the system of symbols. Iconographically, they were reshaping the inherited mythological lexicon, willing changed meanings onto old images, as Maud Sulter has done, in her photographic and textual pieces, like Zabat and Hysteria, which take possession of past fantasies about muses and madwomen, about Vénus Noires and exotic blackness and immemorial whiteness, and fiercely expose the legacy of such cultural values.

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Procedurally, in their actual artistic practice, many of these artists have also seized the spurned materiality of the body and introduced it into their work. The negative value attached to bodily traces, processes, imprints, and the conventional, derogatory association of the female sex with nature and flesh have been reversed, and become instead a newfound land, a reservoir, a resource. Ewa Kuryluk, in her study of female creativity, Veronica and Her Cloth, focuses on the saint’s veil as a key symbol of the act of representation: she created the vera icon or true image of Christ’s face, when she wiped his face and it was miraculously printed on the cloth in blood, sweat and tears.6 The body of art is born of the body itself, and women have a special relation to this fecundity, through their ascribed – and actual – part in the reproductive cycle. In the eighties, Helen Chadwick’s baroque and phantasmagoric vanitas installations, like Of Mutability, affirmed in Britain the possibility of celebrating the female body’s metaphorical connections with effluvia, fertility, decomposition, cyclicity and transition. The New Contemporaries exhibitors continued to plot this constellation, using mixed media primarily associated with mutabililty, with process: substances like water or pastry, hair or wax, sand and vegetables, oil and light and cloth, which imply change over time. The natural values of such materials were used, in the work of some of the artists, to stir memories of particular female tasks or events: the death of Emily Wilding, the suffragette, is evoked by Josephine Thorn by a rose wreath made of lace and underwear, on a turf sod scored by the hoof marks of the horse that killed her. The New Hall collection, though primarily painted works made for hanging, extends these preoccupations: Laura Godfrey-Isaacs’s Fleshy Face meditates on the feminine-coded colour pink with mordant hyperbole; Judith Cowan’s Skin and Blister (rhyming slang for ‘sister’) transforms a common saucepan into an authoritative sculptural form; Maggi Hambling takes a shocking newspaper image of a Gulf woman in a chador wielding a bazooka and suffuses it again with blooming pink, the garish, violated hue of feminine cosiness. Memory, the dynamic of past consciousness, can translate into resistance in order to shape a new time to come. Traces, records, vestiges of female experience can appear nostalgic in character; but their witness to a common past is often challenged by present irony and by different, contrary desires to erase such relics or reshape the ground in which they were originally made. Hambling’s painting conveys tragic female heroism as well as fury against the nexus of constraints on her subject’s life (as I see it). Mary Kelly has long contested, with cerebral acerbity, current tropes of femininity, from handbags to nappies; she too, has deeply influenced the present generation of women artists. Her work in the refectory of New Hall was bought before the formation of the collection, as a result of her residency at the college and it could be said to have struck a characteristic note of stringent inquiry for the collection. This note is picked up and amplified by Alexis Hunter’s donations, the wry painting Fear of the Intellectual Wife and the photo series, Approach to Fear XI – Effeminacy Productive Action. The images of jeweled and manicured hands working with machine parts challenges presuppositions about ‘feminine’ handiwork, and by extension comments on the supposed limits of women’s art itself. It would be misleading to corral all the donated works into feminist questioning of gendered identity; one of the freedoms women have won for themselves over the last 20 years has been precisely those freedoms from conventional definition by gender. *

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*

*

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Figure 43 Alexis Hunter, Approach to Fear X1 – Effeminacy Productive Action, 1977, 6 photographs with green paint, each 32 × 37.5 cms. Donated to the New Hall Collection by the artist 1991. Courtesy of the artist. Paula Rego’s sequence of prints, inspired by nursery rhymes, actually seizes on language itself as a female domain, originating with the mother, in the nursery, and extended through play and gossip, as depicted in her etching Secrets and Whispers, and the one she has given to New Hall, Encampment, which appropriately has been hung in the Senior Common Room, a place to gather and talk, tell stories, exchange ideas. This transferal of authority for the modes of communication, this claim on the symbolic realm of language, strikes at the core of the psychoanalytic theory of Lacan which has gained great allegiance, as developed by Kristeva, for instance. It seems to me that the growth of women’s art and its imagery wrests a place for female utterance within the symbolic order, from which Lacanian theory on the whole excludes the female. The female ‘imaginary’ which is often counterposed to the phallic code of the symbolic, belongs in history and culture as closely as the law of the father, and it has been the self-elected quest of women’s art to elucidate the character of that interaction, participation and combination. The works in a collection like New Hall’s, while they engage with some of these issues about women’s lack and absence from history, at the same time abrogate the very claim that women have not and cannot command a semantic field which expresses their own meanings and tells their own stories. The collection that New Hall has created reflects the fertility of contemporary women’s art, and in many cases, the artists also continue the time’s characteristic, self-reflexive affirmation of female identity. *

*

*

Notes 1. Christine de Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies. Trans. Earl Jeffrey Richards (New York, 1983), p.154.

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2. de Pizan: The Book of the City of Ladies. 3. Ann Sutherland Harris, and Linda Nochlin, Women Artists: 1550–1950, (Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1984). 4. Cornerhouse, Manchester, 27 June–2 August 1992: Angel Row Gallery and Bonningham Gallery, Nottingham 5 September–11 October, Orpheus Gallery, Belfast, 18 October–25 November, ICA, London, Spring 1993. 5. Tacita Dean was one of the artists straight out of art school who was included. 6. Ewa Kuryluk, Veronica & Her Cloth (Oxford, 1991).

Reference Women’s Art Magazine, no. 48, Sep/Oct 1992.

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TROUBLE IN THE ARCHIVES GRISELDA POLLOCK

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e talk of our field as that of the visual arts. Looking, seeing, these are the key activities of consuming art or studying the history of art. Kenneth Clark wrote guides called Looking at Paintings and John Berger confidently wrote that ‘seeing comes before words’. The staunch defenders of the purity of art against social histories of art or theoretically informed criticism dread the contamination of the visual by the verbal or the sociological. ‘Image’ is set against ‘word’. Conceptual art was an aberration, scripto-visual work a dangerous hybrid. Where does feminism stand in relation to this debate? What is the state of the argument in feminist art history and criticism? Do we have a specifically feminist theory of the visual in relation to art? Do we want or need one? Isn’t feminism itself a critique of the kinds of ideologies that imagine there is a pure realm of vision that exists before gender, race, class and all other social influences have their effects? If the question referred to cinema, the answer would be more easily ‘yes’. Feminist film criticism has developed around spectatorship and sexual difference. Laura Mulvey’s famous article of 1975, entitled significantly ‘Visual Pleasure and the Narrative Cinema’, suggested that there is a gender hierarchy in film not just at the level of the kind of images of men and women, or of the stories and characters. Rather, sexual difference operates through the imbalance between looking and being looked at which narratives orchestrate. Feminist theories of the cinema have drawn heavily on psychoanalysis. It allowed us to show how the field of vision is shaped by the structure of sexual difference. Psychoanalysis suggests that sex or gender are not innate, but are produced. Thus man and woman are not different, but we are differentiated by the different pathways cultures designated for those named women and men. As a result of this structural and not biological process of sexual differentiation, men and women may well experience themselves, their bodies, the world, differently, not just through different social experiences, but psychologically. The term ‘feminine’ will then refer to a position, not an essence; yet it will also signify a possibility of different desires, fantasies, meanings, from what

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patriarchal or phallic cultures define as its norms. Femininity is a psychic space, a space of dreams and imagination, symbols and meanings which we have yet to explore, or which women authors and artists have been exploring, while we, under a rigid patriarchal policing, did not have the means to recognise it. This then poses another question: what of sexual difference in the field of the visual arts? Certain kinds of feminist strategies in art practices during the 1970s and early 1980s were clearly influenced by film theory and its use of psychoanalysis. Writing of an exhibition in 1984 called On Difference and Representation – which showed the work of Barbara Kruger, Sylvia Kolbowski, Sherrie Levine, Marie Yates, Yve Lomax and Mary Kelly – Jacqueline Rose coined the phrase ‘sexuality in the field of vision’ in order to argue that sexuality and sexual difference are involved in all acts of vision and thus of visual representation. She related her analysis to both modernist painting with its ideology of pure vision and its correlate visual perfection at the formal level, and to contemporary feminist work which interrupted that ideology for critical, feminist purposes. Admitting that feminist work interrogates the image for the way in which what is depicted reproduces social stereotypes and limited norms, Jacqueline Rose suggests that this kind of work goes ‘beyond the issue of content to take in the parameters of visual form (not just what we see but how we see – visual space as more than the domain of simple recognition)’. According to psychoanalysis, much of the drama of becoming a subject, i.e. a sexed person who uses language, involves the complex pleasures and displeasures associated with sight – which is not just about perception of the real world, that is recognition. Looking is connected to infantile fantasies about mastery, to curiosity, to dread and to desire, which refer to an impossible longing for what is forever lost. Because sight is so much associated with psychic dramas, looking understood from a psychoanalytic perspective is more akin to the kind of cinematic viewing, the world of dreams and fantasies about bodies in space, than it is like any ideas of direct perception of things as they are. This conjunction, sexuality and the field of vision theorized through psychoanalysis, focuses my problem – in terms of art history and art criticism. Do we subscribe to the idea of the visualness of the visual arts simply, or critically? What is the role of psychoanalysis in developing a specifically feminist work on art – history and criticism as much as practice – today? Does it allow us to re-engage with issues of the image and vision which had to be distanced in the first era of feminist work on the histories and practices of art, in order to get at issues of gender as a social and historical factor affecting the production and reception of art historically and in the present? To answer these questions, I shall have to make a tour through our recent history. Art history is both like and unlike cinema. Despite being concerned with the visual arts, the discipline of art history has never been exclusively defined by the visual object. The making of art, monuments, buildings, sculptures, paintings, prints and all the range of materials which are the topic of art’s histories involve historical, institutional, sociological, economic as well as aesthetic factors. Feminists in this field have to deal as much with issues of training, patronage, access to exhibiting facilities, languages of art criticism, mechanisms of the market, the nature and effects of materials and specific making processes, as well as with the semiotic and ideological productivity of the ‘image’ itself.

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As Linda Nochlin once famously said, ‘the fault lies not in our stars, our menstrual cycles, our empty internal spaces, but in our institutions and education’. But as importantly, when it first emerged as a critical voice, feminist art history and criticism had to challenge one of the fixed ideas which still dominated both contemporary art and art history – namely that art is purely a visual experience, that it is not shaped in any way by language, and that it is independent of all social factors. Whether as formalism or aestheticism, these ideas made it impossible to raise the repressed question of gender. Art has no sex, it was said, and that claim depended on the idea of the purity of vision as non-social, or even as pre-social. Feminists in art history have, therefore, forged alliances with the emerging social histories of art which challenged the exclusive claims of the visual arts by studying the social structures which govern the production and exhibition of art and the social conventions by which meaning is produced through public rather than personal sign systems in which art works must participate in order to be legible to the communities for which they are produced. But now, in the 1990s, because of the 20 years’ work of deconstructing the normal ideas, the ideologies about art’s visual innocence, we are beginning to re-engage, but in ways that are critically, historically and theoretically informed, with what literary critic Terry Eagleton calls: ‘the ideology of the aesthetic’. To get at the political aspects of the arts, we don’t need to separate the aesthetic and the sexual, the artistic and the political, as we tactically had to do in order to open up the field for debates about gender and art. It’s clear now that no substantive feminist analysis of the visual arts could be developed which did not deal with questions of the visual – namely, who is looking and who is looked at, why, and how and with what effects. Feminist analysis has to have a way of discussing what is specific to the procedures and effects of the practices of making objects, images, for people to look at and through that initial gaze to understand, use and be affected by. * * * What does all this mean for actual strategies in the study of art’s histories? More than I can explain in this context, for there are many directions being taken. Here I want to characterise just one area of feminist challenge to the histories of art. In addition to the study of neglected women artists, a lot of current research aims to contest the canon – the received and authorized version of the stories of art. These are often just variations on a theme of heroic individual and masculine achievement. Reading this issue psychoanalytically, we could suggest that the canon inscribes a masculine fantasy in the archives of art’s histories. These masculine inscriptions tell a tale of narcissistic fantasy of masculine omnipotence, freed from the real social and parental constraints to which men have to submit as the price of their privileged status in patriarchy. When feminism questions that canon and contests that fantasy it makes ‘trouble’ in the archives. The use of the term ‘archive’ insists on the fact that what we study as history is not just the accumulated deposit of the past, being kept in libraries for us to study. What is preserved, conserved and classified as the material for historical study and the valued heritage of culture was put there according to selective social interests and the desires of selected classes, cultures and genders. The library and the museum are not innocent sites of storage; they are already texts shaped according to the interests and needs of certain groups. This canonised archive then actively shapes the present for us.

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To define feminists’ interventions in art’s histories as making ‘trouble in the archives’ also represents a break with the natural forms of art historical writing. The monograph and catalogue uncritically elevate the individual author and assume that all the works of one author have a self-evident coherence. The individual is the core of the story and the art the illustration of that life of greatness unfolding through youth, maturity, and revered old age. If we do not see the history of art in terms of the Olympic torch theory of a chain of great individuals, we can use the term ‘archive’ to suggest a more ramshackle, heterogeneous record which can be examined using different lines of enquiry in which what would be studied would be relations between texts, images, events and individuals. A lot of feminist work concerns histories of sexuality which cut across individual artists’ histories to make us look at conjunctions in which images of women and by women can be read as part of the larger discourse of power and ways of contesting it. Other kinds of work insist that colonialism and imperialism structured the cultural products of the West and art historians are asking how the representations of the colonisers, women as much as men, operated to disfigure what they named ‘the other’ while also projecting utterly Western fantasies onto the imaginary ‘other’ their art invented. The term ‘archive’ has yet another implication. It makes us self-conscious as historians, demanding the necessary sense of self scrutiny as we engage with materials which

Figure 44 Sutapa Biswas, Synapse 1V, 1990–2. Black and white photograph (hand printed). 1112.2 cm × 132.5 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

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have several pasts: a historical moment of production, a historical moment of consumption, a historical moment of entry into art historical discourse, into the museum, the canon, the classroom, into our cultural ‘patrimonies’, into a myriad of discursive frameworks, and, into our formations as subjects who make or study art, or just belong to certain cultures shaped by what is in and what is not acknowledged by the archive. The nature of the trouble we cause in dealing non-canonically with the narratives of and about art is created by posing the questions repressed by the archive: questions of class, race and gender. Recent feminist writing has, as I suggested above, moved from the question of gender to formulate the issues through the notions of sexual difference and sexuality. Psychoanalysis provides a different set of terms by means of which to theorise the visual field historically as an archive composed of graphically and manuallyproduced texts – drawn, printed, painted, sculpted, as well as written and enacted etc – in which ‘art’ is treated not as the affirmation of the history of an individual’s vision, but as the trace of embodied historical, gendered, classed, raced and sexed subjectivities.

Reference Women’s Art Magazine, no. 54, Sep/Oct 1993.

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CAN DO HEIDI REITMAIER SPEAKS WITH LAURA COTTINGHAM

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o be invited to participate in Now Here, an ambitious exhibition would flatter the ego as well as fray the nerves. The sheer scale of this show, five individually curated sections displaying the work of 140 artists spread over nearly 10,000 square metres, is equalled by the ambition of the rhetoric of its curatorial mandate. ‘What is contemporary art?’ is the opening question on the general press release. The question persists, echoing our earliest art school struggles to come to grips with the cultural complexities – materialist, connoisseural, aesthetic and so on – of contemporary art. Invested and riddled with power and value systems too complex and metamorphic for any one person to grasp, the question reveals its tautological character. You shelve it. Even if the general press release asserts the exhibition’s visual plurality and diversity as unique to this moment of history (and it does so – unbashfully) while admitting that this question may be impossible to answer, it still sets it as the exhibition’s basic proviso. I recently spoke with Laura Cottingham, a New York critic, lecturer and writer and one of the six curators for Now Here and asked how she approached the job. As my critical work is influenced by and is about expanding the feminist dialogue, my premise was a very 1970s gesture. After visiting the museum, and seeing that it was like any other big, Western museum, where only a few works by women were on display, I decided to take the space and put on a good show, one that is visually compelling. My research is about approaching historically that 1970s moment. I am interested in trying to go back and look at political and economic gestures that can be pulled into the present. Historically specific, this exercise is rooted in Cottingham’s observations about historical narratives and her on-going empirical research. A move to disrupt the comfortable and predictable museum patter was essential. Cottingham from the United States, Ute Meta Bauer from Germany, Bruce Ferguson from Canada, curators Anneli Fuchs and Lars Grambye from Louisiana and Iwona Blaswick from Britain were asked to

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produce a themed exhibition which would ‘find new ways of exhibiting art which no longer fits the given moulds’. Cottingham chose to re-do that ‘seventies feminist artists thing’, by staging an all women’s show. Although this form of segregation as a political strategy is not as disruptive as it might have been in the 1970s, it is a decisive and direct response to the current climate, which acknowledges the need to look at that which seems to have been dismissed or relegated to an historical abyss. Coming out of the 1980s, where the alternative and non-commerical gestures were wiped out by the hyper-commercial world of that period, I found it important to look again. This show isn’t about packaging new and old but about looking at art in a more profound way. The present is more deep. It is important to look at all those things that culture has not yet synthesised, to understand these things. It is true that not everything has yet been digested. For me, it is about an historical flippage, trying to get the present to catch up. It is about looking at what might not have been understood originally. Staging an all-women exhibition is still a provocative move, for it doesn’t just ask questions about the gender of the protagonists but also reveals the kinds of political and stylistic strategies acceptable in the mainstream. So what are these strategies? Political and stylistic tropes rooted in those ‘1970s gestures’ are currently circulating freely, and one can demonstrate that anthropological, ethnological, feminist and other dialogues have expressed anxiety about this during the last ten years. What then does this all-women show say about representation? The work was chosen to attempt to actualise a tension, a dialogue. It was never intended to claim universal symbols or essentialist characteristics, nor to point to a feminist doctrine, but to look at cross cultural similarities and to try to better understand the articulations of gender. There are 31 artists in Cottingham’s section. Works include Gillian Wearing’s video Dancing in Peckham, paintings by Sue Williams and new work commissioned from Janine Antoni, Barbara Kruger, Senga Nengudi, Elin Wikstrom and Cosima von Bonin, amongst others. Cottingham concludes that: You need to look at individual artists and consider individual works to witness the breadth and diversity. In this sense, she is clear about the reasons for including particular artists. Janine Antoni’s work is more formal and conceptual. It is not merely aesthetic but it is more aesthetic, while Sue Williams’ work is more political forcing a dialogue about sexualized violence against women in a painting tradition. These works are as politically aggressive and politically sophisticated as anything done in the 1970s. I wouldn’t say that all the work is empathetically, directly political but is definitely not without meaning. * * * The title, Incandescent, is taken from Virgina Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. The term embodies a modernist yearning for the sublime, the heightened experience which all great artworks are supposed to evoke. Cottingham’s use of the term is subversive in that her selection calls into question a basic assumption of modernist aesthetics. The sublime experience doesn’t constitute a meaningful dialogue. Unless art is allowed to be a part of life it loses meaning, it ceases to have value. It seems wrong to encourage a form of art that is not true. Then it is about denial or sublimation, not truth. Perhaps this exhibition offers a way for feminism to investigate its historical identity. The show on one hand is a documentary; Cottingham has gone to great lengths to select a breadth of Japanese, American and European works that rely on different aesthetic

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Figure 45 Gillian Wearing, Dancing in Peckham, (video still), © the artist. Courtesy of Maureen Paley, London.

histories and visual practices for their production and meaning in order to reveal the complexities in women’s work during the past 25 years. Film and video works from the 1970s and the 1980s will be shown as well as one of the most important film documents of the US women’s liberation movement, Chris Hedegus’s and D.A. Pennebaker’s Town Bloody Hall, which recorded the 1971 panel discussion on women’s liberation moderated by Norman Mailer and Germaine Greer.

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Fully aware of the dilemma of configuring history, Cottingham shies away from grand claims. History is itself a problem. I don’t think there is such a thing as an accurate history. I think it attempts to understand with intrigue. Part of any cultural dialogue is to question what constitutes value. I don’t think there is such a thing as absolute value, but the discussion of what constitutes value within a history of feminism is an on-going discussion. Although the general press release gushes with self-affirmations, Cottingham is aware of the bureaucratic difficulties of putting on an exhibition of this size with such subversive intentions. She freely admits that, ‘few critics actually function like critics. I actually criticise’. She claims Now Here has been an eye-opening experience regarding why museums might choose to put on ‘safe’ exhibitions. She sums up her attitude; ‘I am not just stressed, but I have concluded that I don’t like the process, it’s too bureaucratic’, and she is clear about how difficult it is to set up critical, discursive visual narratives. As her project was about disrupting the popular and comfortable programmes that dominate, she is aware of how bogged down museums and the commercial market are in their own politics and how disabling this is for artists. I used to see exhibitions more at the level of the aesthetic or ideological, but now I see how it is all structured. I see how difficult it is to be independent, to track down independent videos or artists that do not work through solvent galleries. I can understand how the process of exhibitions duplicates because there are those working within and those outside. It is impossible for artists to step in and out. In the US, the work in the 1980s was made for the consumer society. The way the fine art system, the cultural apparatus works, is unless there is money nothing happens. If you have set up alternatives, you also have to take the centre or you keep getting eliminated. As ‘a bit of a wild card’, (she says the reason for her invitation might be as a curiosity and a play for a politically sound ‘lesbian chic’), Cottingham has set herself a difficult task. An exhibition that is both parodic, in the sense that it is questioning its own history and is trying to play off a traditional museum space, is worth going to see. In the end, perhaps, what will be revealed is how impossible it is to locate the borders of inside and outside.

Reference make: the magazine of women’s art, no. 70, Jun/Jul 1996.

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FRAGILE TERRITORIES ROXANE PERMAR

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he spaces women now occupy within the institutions of art education have been won for us by feminist artists who fought hard to gain recognition and create opportunities. They broke the rules. They took risks. Feminist strategies were effective in the 1970s and early 1980s because they grew from a politicised perspective and had clearly defined aims and objectives. Art education provided fertile territory for realising productive change. The educational institutions provided – and still do – professional opportunities as well as the potential to educate whole communities of artists about ideas and issues directly affecting women’s position in art. Feminist practices have fuelled creative change in the worlds of art and art education in a number of significant ways. Feminists have introduced new subject matter and helped make space for a plurality of practices; while female staff have helped bring more supportive and constructive methods of teaching to replace undermining and at times brutal practices. Female and male students and staff have benefited from working with a wide range of women artists. Courses have higher proportions of women students than in the 1970s. And the influence of feminism has helped women artists achieve a higher degree of professional visibility with each new generation. More women are working in further and higher art education now than 20 years ago. They occupy a wide range of positions, including managerial, teaching and technical support roles as well as influential external positions, such as examiners and members of panels for course validation and assessment of research and quality in teaching. While there may be more women in art education now, our numbers are not great and our positions are far from secure. Women’s positions are vulnerable and vulnerability leads to disempowerment. We must be aware of this if we are to sustain our effectiveness as ‘creative agents for change’.1 Discrimination and economic disadvantage still exist albeit in different guises just as women were entering the institutions in the 1980s, the availability of finance for visiting artists and temporary lecturers diminished significantly, thus reducing opportunities. Men hold the majority of full-time, permanent posts

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that favour continuity and decision making; women often hold temporary, fixed term or fractional contracts which generally result in more work and greater responsibility for less pay. All of this expedites uncertainty and instability. It is not particular subject disciplines which act for or against women, but attitudes to women within the power hierarchies of the institutions.2 Thus highly capable women may enter institutions, but they may not have a voice. They are ‘ignored as though [they] are invisible’.3 A woman may not progress within her institution and although she may remain, she experiences increasing frustration and dissatisfaction. Harassment is now less likely to be overtly sexual or racial but takes the form of general bullying (by both women and men). The teaching union NATFHE has published a report on bullying in further and higher education which identifies it as a serious issue, defines it within the educational context and outlines strategies for dealing with it. The timing of women’s point of entry into art education has proved both propitious and problematic. On the one hand, changes may have served to help women by opening positions and replacing the ‘boys’ club atmosphere’ with more formalised structures to which women can more readily gain access. On the other hand, women have undoubtedly arrived at a time of new and increased pressures from heavier teaching and administrative workloads and increasing emphasis placed on research.4 Education is a potent and essential tool in bringing about effective change. Women who have a place in art education need to continue to work towards sustaining the positive changes that have so far taken place. In the 1970s, the women’s art movement provided strategies and a sense of collective activity which for a complex variety of reasons no longer operates in the same way. Ideas such as post-feminism and, more recently, ‘Girl Power’ have entered into public consciousness. ‘Girl Power’ has entered mainstream culture carrying an image of strength and control. Yet does it hold the potential to embrace and sustain the creative changes that feminism has so effectively contributed to art and art education? Although the term suggests power, it is double-sided. Our culture may render it impotent before it has had the chance to find its feet. To fulfill the subversive potential the name implies, ‘Girl Power’ must acquire awareness of what constitutes its strength, the ability to use this knowledge and the courage and conviction to employ the ensuing power productively. Otherwise, ‘Girl Power’ will remain one dimensional, pandering to the superficiality engendered by our quick-fix culture of fashion and seduction. ‘Girl Power’ will be weak and therefore safe. It will pose no possibility of change and prove ineffectual in the long term. ‘Girl Power’ in art education can only fulfill its promise by becoming politicised. This process will require understanding of how power operates within the institutions. It will require an analysis of the meanings of ‘Girl Power’ and a clear strategy for employing it effectively. And most of all, we need to know what we want to achieve. In order to identify strategies, there is a rich body of models drawn from recent histories of feminism, civil rights and the queer movement. The place women hold in art education is fragile. It is relatively new, and we need to nurture it. We need to sustain and continue to create networks of shared information and experience, working across a multiplicity of personal and professional territories;

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across generations, cultures and genders. History testifies to the fact that women can use their power to create productive change. The question remains as to whether we can generate creative strategies for empowerment in art education that are sufficiently open, flexible and responsible in order to secure our positions for the future.

Notes 1. Louise Morley and Val Walsh, ‘Introduction: Feminist Academics: Creative Agents for Change’, in L. Morley and V. Walsh (eds), Feminist Academics: Creative Agents for Change (London: Taylor & Francis, 1995), pp.1–3. 2. Barbara Brown Packer, ‘Irrigating the Sacred Grove: Stages of Gender Equality Development’, in L. Morley and V. Walsh (eds), Feminist Academics: Creative Agents for Change (London: Taylor & Francis, 1995), pp.42–55. 3. Judith Judd, ‘Bias that stops women academics reaching the top’, The Independent, 7 June 1997. 4. Celia Davies, and Penny Holloway, ‘Troubling Transformation: Gender Regimes and Organisational Culture in the Academy’, in L. Morley and V. Walsh (eds), Feminist Academics: Creative Agents for Change (London: Taylor & Francis, 1995), pp.7–21.

Reference make: the magazine of women’s art, no. 77, Sep/Oct/Nov 1997.

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CHERCHEZ LA FEMME AOIFE MAC NAMARA

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f Michael Archer is correct, as I think he is, in stating that the ‘confrontation with past orthodoxies that was accomplished between 1965–1975 was specific to that time’1 then it cannot be surprising that few women, and fewer still black, working-class or ex-colonial artists, have found their way into an exhibition such as Live in Your Head. If 30 years ago, concept and experiment in art was about facilitating different kinds of relations between work and viewer, emphasising the relationship of individual production to larger cultural, social, political or discursive forces, then it must, and of necessity, be local rather than general in its project. It was about enabling already well-placed individuals to make critical and productive forays into particular institutions and discourses. To embark on these intellectual and political projects, it could be argued that one had to already be aware of, and hold a position within, those very institutions with which you took issue. In this way young, educated artists like Susan Hiller, Alexis Hunter and Mary Kelly – although women – were, nonetheless, well-placed to participate. Travelled, educated and politicised, the women active in concept and experimental practices were familiar with the traditional practices, formats, media and definitions of formalist (or traditional) art around which the projects of concept and experimental art were being organised. Acting at a particular historical moment and from specific locations within it, these women, whilst not British-born, were in many ways exemplary of the postwar educated middleclass in Britain: a generation of artists who came of age at a time when young intellectuals witnessed the US invasion of Vietnam, British troops entering Northern Ireland, the deterioration of the colonial empire and demands for equal pay, and participated in the international radicalisation of the student movement.2 What I am interested in thinking about here is whether there might be a danger of conflating the history of concept and experiment art in Britain during this period with the history of the development of feminist art practice in and around the same time. They are not one and the same thing. A review of feminist journals, exhibitions and catalogues from that period clearly demonstrates that ‘concept’ – or theoretically informed – feminist interventions in the institutions of art, were by no means the undisputed voice

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of the women’s movement in visual culture. Since the 1960s, many women have, either as autonomous producers or in collectives, been active in the development of art practices which concerned themselves not with the institution of art per se but rather with the practices and experiences of the everyday and those political, social and cultural institutions through which they are organised. This work is difficult to locate today. In the records of art school, journalistic and exhibition projects that engaged with feminism from this period, one is faced, time and again, with the same exemplars: Mary Kelly, Alexis Hunter, and Susan Hiller. Occasional reference gets made to lesser known women or to ‘essentialist’ or ‘experience’-based practices, but, on the whole, history has decided that feminists were, above all else, interested in the operations of language in the production of gendered subjects. So how is it that this conflation occurs? How have certain feminist practices from that period come to be seen as productive of something known as ‘feminist art’? Why are the critical and activist imperatives of artists like Rita Donagh, the Hackney Flashers, Kay Fido Hunt, Ingrid Pollard, Pam Skelton, or Jo Spence positioned as historically distant records of women’s interventions in the social, political, economic and cultural institutions of Britain rather than as formative moments in the history of idea-based practices in this country? Answering this question might be more important for practice than it may appear. I was once asked to identify the most important thing studio practice students should know about the history and theory of visual culture; a good, if difficult, question. I answered that I would want them to understand how the practice of visual culture is as much constituted by historical and theoretical discourse as it is by the manipulation of space, material or time. Artists – and art – are both productive and produced; produced by complex socially and historically determined systems of meaning and values, productive of equally motivating texts that can, in turn, mark their place as cultural producers. Here we begin to see how important historical records are, not simply because they provide ‘an account’ of what has gone on before but because what we do today is produced out of a discursive field: the narrower the field, the more limited the possibilities. We could say that work like Mary Kelly’s has lasted (and produced such an enormous body of critical, historical and ‘practical’ work) not because it was ‘more important’, ‘better’ or even more ‘innovative’.3 Rather it has succeeded in positioning itself as the centre of feminist art in this country because it used language and conventions that were familiar to the institution. Accordingly, it could be read and recognised as art, albeit with the necessary difficulty of its particular project.4 What is more, an artist like Mary Kelly, armed as she was with a sophisticated understanding of the discursive field within which art operates, understood that any successful intervention must involve itself on many intellectual fronts from the studio to the media, galleries, journals, etc. She thus insured that not only was her work maintained by the archive but the theoretical and historical context for its interpretation is never far away. Like other artists in the exhibition (Burgin, Le Grice, Hiller, Hunter), Kelly is a very new type of artist. She is an artist, writer, teacher and academic. This is where work like this becomes separated from other feminist practices of the time. Collectives like Fenix and artists like Loraine Leeson, although engaged on many fronts, did not participate in the art world ‘proper’.

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Instead of placing their work to be recognised as art by institutions such as the ICA or art schools, many feminist artists identified with political institutions such as trade unions and the labour movement, women’s collectives and publishing ventures, or with health and community initiatives. Partly because of the way archives are organised, this strategy has helped to isolate these, often significant, practices from art history. The Hackney Flashers are, for example, more known to students of communications, women’s studies or politics than to art or art history students, despite their enormous influence on artists at the time. Despite talk of ‘diversity’, what we seem to have organised in our history of feminism and concept art could be seen as an orthodoxy: a conventional idea of what feminist contributions to such debates were. This has had many consequences for both feminist practices in visual culture and for art in general. Work made without reference to minimalist aesthetics, structuralist theory or psychoanalytic inquiry, while hugely influential, has become historically isolated and rendered largely invisible.

Figure 46 The Hackney Flashers, Who’s Holding The Baby series No. 19: ‘Stand Up For Your Rights’. 1978. Courtesy Michaelann Mullen & The Hackney Flashers Collective.

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Writing of the challenges facing teachers of theory to art students, Judith Williamson commented: ‘After a period of learning you need fallow time, as it were, for changes, new approaches, to sink in – and then your transformed understanding informs your productive work, not some external theory you feel you must stick to’.5 One of the consequences of the historical recording of feminism’s relationship to concept and experiment in art is, I would suggest, that it privileges work produced without recourse to fallow time: work that has the external appearance of ideas but not necessarily work that embodies a transformed understanding of them. Perhaps it is because of this difficulty that so many artists whose practices were premised by a concern with the hidden yet determining structures of power and ideology within the art system, have found themselves so easily recuperated by it. The attacks by feminist artists and historians on galleries, the history of art, the collection, the market, and the material product have been seriously weakened by the fact that these artists, in spite of their stance, still defined themselves within the gallery and the broader institution. Perhaps now is a good time to return to the archive and to look at what else was going on?

Notes 1. Michael Archer, ‘Out of the Studio’ in C. Phillpot and A. Tarsia Live in Your Head: Concept and Experiment in British Art 1965–1975 (London: Whitechapel Art Gallery, 2000), p.24. 2. For an interesting analysis of the relationship between global politics and concept or experimental art practices from this period see Luis Camnitzer, Jane Farver and Rachel Weiss, ‘Foreword’, in Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin 1950s-1980s (New York: Queens Museum of Art, 1999), pp.VII-XI. 3. See also Catherine Lupton, ‘Circuit-breaking Desire: Critiquing the World of Mary Kelly’, in J. Roberts (ed), Art Has No History (London: Verso, 1994), pp.230–239. 4. See Griselda Pollock, ‘Art, Art School, Culture’, in J. Bird et al (eds), The Block Reader in Visual Culture (London: Routledge, 1996), p.51. 5. Judith Williamson, ‘How Does Girl Number 20 Understand Ideology?’ Screen Education, Vol. 40 (1981).

Reference make: the magazine of women’s art, no. 87, Mar/Apr/May 2000.

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LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

Rachel Armstrong is Co-Director of AVATAR (Advanced Virtual and Technological Architectural Research) in Architecture & Synthetic Biology at The School of Architecture & Construction, University of Greenwich, London. Fionna Barber is Reader in Art History and Principal Lecturer for Contextual Studies at the Manchester School of Art. Pennina Barnett is a writer and curator and a founding editor of the international interdisciplinary peer review journal Textile: The Journal of Cloth and Culture. Christine Battersby is Reader Emerita in Philosophy and Associate Fellow of the Centre for Research in Philosophy, Literature & the Arts at Warwick University, UK. Monica Bohm-Duchen is an independent writer, lecturer, and curator based in London. Chila Burman is an artist (working experimentally across print, collage, mixed media paint, photographic and mixed media). David Burrows is an artist and Head of Undergraduate Fine Art Media at the Slade School of Fine Art, London, UK. Susan Butler is an artist and writer based in London. Deborah Cameron is Rupert Murdoch Professor of Language and Communication at University of Oxford, UK. Janice Cheddie is the Researcher Development Adviser (postgraduates) at Queen Mary, University of London and Associate Lecturer on the International Business MBA, Greenwich Business School, University of Greenwich, UK. Emma Cocker is a writer-artist operating under the title: ‘Not Yet There’. She is Reader in Fine Art at Nottingham Trent University. Marilyn Crabtree is an art historian.

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Susan Croft is a writer, curator, dramaturge, arts/performance archive consultant and historian. Anna Douglas is an independent curator based in the UK. Catherine Elwes is Professor of Moving Image Art at CCW, University of the Arts London and Founder Editor of the international journal Moving Image Review and Art Journal (MIRAJ). Carole Enahoro is a graduate student in the Department of Geography at University College London (UCL). Simon Ford is a freelance art historian. Rebecca Fortnum is an artist and is Professor of Fine Art at Middlesex University, UK. Lorraine Gamman is Professor of Product and Spatial Design, CSM, University of the Arts London and the Director of the award-winning Design Against Crime Research Centre (DACRC). Pam Gerrish Nunn is an art historian based in New Zealand and currently works as an independent scholar. Judith Halberstam (Jack Halberstam) is the Professor of English and Director of The Center for Feminist Research at the University of Southern California. Gill Houghton is an artist. Janis Jefferies is an artist, writer and curator. She is Professor of Visual Arts at Goldsmiths, University of London, UK where she is also Senior Research Fellow in the Constance Howard Resource and Research Centre in Textiles, and Director of Goldsmiths Digital Studios. Joanna Krysa is a curator and writer. She is a founding director of KURATOR, and also Associate Professor at the University of Plymouth, UK. Kathy Kubicki is an artist and writer. She is Senior Lecturer in Photography at the University of the Creative Arts, Farnham, and an editor of the journal Photography and Culture. Claire MacDonald is an independent scholar and writer on visual arts and performance. She is a founding editor of Performance Research and a contributing editor to PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art. Aoife MacNamara is Dean of Visual Arts and Material Practice at the Audain School of Visual Arts at Emily Carr University of Art and Design in Vancouver. Rosy Martin is an artist/photographer, writer, lecturer, psychological therapist and workshop leader based in London. Marsha Meskimmon is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History and Theory at Loughborough University, UK.

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Sadie Murdoch is an artist and teaches on the Fine Art MA at Chelsea College of Arts, University of the Arts London. Roxane Permar is an artist and Fine Art faculty member at the University of the Highlands and Islands, Scotland. Sadie Plant is a freelance writer in the fields of architecture, the arts, and new technology. She is based in Biel/Bienne, Switzerland. Griselda Pollock is Director of Research and Professor of the Social & Critical Histories of Art at University of Leeds, UK. Nancy Proctor is Co-Chair of the Museums and the Web annual conference and Deputy Director for Digital Experience at the Baltimore Museum of Art, USA. Shirley Read is an independent curator, delivers exhibition workshops, and regularly interviews photographers for the Oral History of British Photography, part of the National Sound Archive at the British Library. Heidi Reitmaier is Director of Education at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Hilary Robinson is Dean of the School of Art and Design and Professor of Visual Culture at Middlesex University. Paula Smithard is a senior lecturer in Critical Practice at Wimbledon College of Art, University of the Arts, London and assistant editor of JCFAR (Journal of the Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research). Yvonne Volkart is a freelance curator, writer, and art critic. She is currently writing a PhD about cyborgs in new media art (University of Oldenburg). Marina Warner is a novelist, short story writer, historian and mythographer. She is Distinguished Visiting Professor at NYU Abu Dhabi. Liz Wells is Professor in Photographic Culture and Convenor of the Land/Water and Visual Arts Research Group at the Faculty of Arts, Plymouth University, UK. Margaret Whitford (d. 2011) was Professor of Modern French Thought at Queen Mary, University of London. She was also a trained psychoanalytic psychotherapist. Val Williams is Professor of the History and Culture of Photography and Director of the Photography and the Archive Research Centre (PARC) at LCC, University of the Arts, London. She is also an editor of the journal Photography and Culture. Linda Wilson Green is a photographer.

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INDEX

access 46, 138 Acting Out: Feminist Performances 21 activism 20, 88 Adams, Fanny 90–1 advertising 89, 105 aesthetics aesthetic practices 120 aesthetic value 73 art criticism 228 definition 76 evaluation 76 gender transformations 54 Guerrilla Girls 88, 89 monsters 41 Poland 213–14 Tate Gallery 77 video art 171 women artists 176–7 women photographers 162 Africa 81 Africa Centre 192 African-Asian Visual Artists Archive 185 agency 20, 50, 151 agenda 85 Agha, Lubna (1949–2012) Final Journey 211 Akmut, Nilofar Siriso 211 Alien Blob 80f14 alienation 124, 126 Almost Out (1984) 175 Amazon 83f15 America see United States of America Amidst (1994) 151f27 analysis aesthetics 73–4 art criticism 228 Black Women artists 191 feminism 107 language 106 politics 79 Western culture 109

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Androskin 54 Antivision 31 Apple of My Eye, The (1991) 157f28 Approach To Fear XI - Effeminacy Productive Action 223, 224f43 Aquiler, Laura (b. 1959) Nature, Self Portrait (1996) 210f41 Shifting Terrains 209 Araeen, Rasheed (b. 1935) 197, 198, 199, 200 Other Story: Afro-Asian Artists in Post-War Britain, The 187 Arbus, Diane (1923–1971) 149, 156 archives 1, 228–30 art Black Women artists 189–92 desire 218 education 235 experimentation 238 feminism 61, 105 feminist history 116 gender 218 Gombrich, E.H. 75 models 199 monsters 40 New York 90 pleasure 126, 127 pornographic imagery 12 pornography 45 viewers 165 women 112, 175 art criticism 3, 227–8, 231 art education 104, 235, 236–7, 241 art galleries 74, 75, 211 Art Historians Conference (1996) 166 art history Black Women artists 190 culture 103 evaluation 73–4 feminism 73, 75, 102, 227–8, 238–9 fetishism 81 psychoanalytic theory 230

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INDEX art practices Black-Asian artists 199 chronology 75 conferences 18 debate 104, 115 desire 31 discourses 95 feminism 90, 97, 102, 187, 226, 235 feminist art 107 feminist history 116 feminist theory 96 ideology 241 influence 31 painting 104 participation 239–40 Poland 212, 213 politics 103 sexuality 218 strategies 101, 227 students 2 textiles 289 theory 115 women 169 women artists 239 Art Space (London) 9 art theory 13, 241 Artaud, Antonin (1896–1948) Body Without Organs 168 artists 46, 75, 80, 113, 135–6, 149 arts 45, 46, 228 Arts Council of Great Britain 45, 49–50, 191, 197 Arts Magazine 47 artworks contexts 187, 202 enjoyment 126 female body 79 feminist projects 125 I pose a paradox: a discourse on smoking 144 interpretation 75 pleasure 80, 123 process 115 representation 128 Tutti, Cosey Fanni 49 Asian woman 205, 207 audience Black art 209 education 221 exhibitions 199 feminist art 104 men 175 pleasure 80 Poland 213 pornographic imagery 48 race 187 Sprinkle, Annie (b. 1954) 177 television 171 Autobiographical Stories 84 Baby (1989) 85

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Bad Girls 18 Bakhtin, Mikhail (1895–1975) 41, 124 Balding Del 54–5 Bare Essentials 18 Barnett, Pennina 9 In An Unsafe Light 11 Barrett, Marie Green Madonna 203 Barthes, Roland (1915–1980) 124, 149 Bathhouse (1997) 213f42 Battersea Arts Centre 4, 131 Bauer, Ute Meta (b. 1958) Now Here (1990) 231–2 Baylis, Diane 156 Mother and a Whore 156–7 Thrills and Spills 157 beauty 109–10, 115, 213 Beauvoir, Simone de (1908–1986) 82 Berger, John (b. 1926) 226 Ways of Seeing 79 Bhimji, Zarina (b. 1963) Intimate Distance (1990) 193–4 Biemann, Ursula 182 Performing the Border (1999) 181 Remote Sensing (2001) 181f35 Writing Desire (2000) 179f34, 180 Bigelow, Katherine (b. 1951) 169, 172 Biswas, Sutapa (b. 1962) 196 Eastern Edge (1997) 211 Synapse IV 229f44 Black art 187, 208, 209, 211 Black-Asian artists 196 Black British Art 196 creativity 197 Diaspora 3–4 female body 205 feminism 185 photography 193 Black Visual Arts Forum 185 Black Women 4, 185, 190–1, 205 Black Women artists exhibitions 192 history 200 landscape photography 210 Live in Your Head 238 Photographer’s Gallery 193 struggles 190–1 visibility 196 Blackwoman Time Now (1985) 192 Blaswick, Iwona (b. 1955) Now Here (1990) 231–2 Blood Pool 26 Blood Sign 19–20 Blood Writing 19–20 body Black feminism 185 iconography 222 ideology 35

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INDEX language 97 metaphor 24 reimagining 70–1 representation 26, 64 women’s art 223 body art 48, 49, 167 Body Politic, The 18 Body Without Organs 168 Boffin, Tessa 18, 22 Book of the City of Ladies, The 220 Book of the Feats of Chivalry 221 boundaries art practices 32 culture 13–14 exhibitions 198 performance art 22 photography 151 transgender 12 transgression 124 Walker, Maxine (b. 1962) 210 Boys Don’t Cry 55 Braidotti, Rosi (b. 1954) 40, 41, 180 Breaths: Art, Health and Empowerment 144 Brixton Art Gallery 4, 200 Broken Lines: More and No Difference 67 Burman, Chila (b. 1957) 205, 207 Fly Girl Watching the World (1993) 206f40 Butler, Judith 22 Gender Trouble 12 Calle, Sophie (b. 1953) 49 Autobiographical Stories 84 Camera Austria 37–8 Cameron, Julia Margaret (1815–1879) 156, 159–60 Campaign Against Pornography 17 capitalism 181, 182 Carnal Art 167, 169 Case, Sue Ellen 17, 21 censorship female body 78 feminism 13, 17 feminist discourse 11 feminist theory 9 Guerrilla Girls 87–8 pornography 49 sexual representations 18 Tutti, Cosey Fanni (b. 1951) 50 Chadwick, Helen (1953–1996) body art 49 Ego Geometria Sum (1984) 35, 148, 149 Enfleshings 35 exhibitions 2 identity 125 Of Mutability 35, 223 Piss Flowers 11, 34f6 reactions 37 viewers 36 Chalkley, Brian Dawn

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I Probably Want Perfection in Everything and a Little More: Maybe That’ll be My Downfall 54f10, 55 Chambers, Eddie Whitewash 208 Chaney, David Fictions of Collective Life 22 change 143, 180, 236 Changing Parts 14 Charcot, Dr J.M. (1825–1893) 63 Charnley, Clare 13, 15–16 Our Clothes 16 Chicago, Judy (b. 1939) 27, 107 Womanhouse 18 children 132, 154, 155, 156, 158 chronology 3, 4, 75 cinema 105, 169, 170, 171 Cixous, Hélène (b. 1937) 24, 30, 124, 221–2 Clark, Kenneth (1903–1983) Looking at Paintings 226 class 185, 190–1, 218 classification 205, 210 Climbing Around My Room (1993) 125 Closed Contact No. 9 53f9 cloth 28–9, 30 Cold Comfort (1996) 117 colonialism 201, 229 Colours of the Flesh, The 111 Coming up for Air 15 communication enjoyment 125 feminism 105 feminist art 99, 104 feminist discourse 96 Hackney Flashers 240 language 224 touch 163–4 computer-based imagery 138, 165 conferences Art Historians Conference (1996) 166 Brighton Association of Art Historians 99 Camera Austria 37–8 Kristeva conference 116 National Photography Conference 138 Performing Sexualities 18 Preaching the the Perverted (1993) 18 Where do we Draw the Line? (1992) 18 Confessions of the Guerrilla Girls 87 consumption 48, 103 contexts artworks 187, 202 Black art 209 fantasy 180 female sexuality 2 feminism 90 masculinity 161 photography 156 Tutti, Cosey Fanni (b. 1951) 49 control 50, 71 Cot (1993) 117, 118f19

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INDEX Cottingham, Laura (b. 1959) 234 Now Here (1990) 218, 231–2 COUM group Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA, London) 49–50 interpretation 49 performance art 45, 48 popular culture 46 Prostitution 47 Tutti, Cosey Fanni (b. 1951) 12 Course in General Linguistics 106 Cowan, Judith Skin and Blister 223 Crabtree, Marilyn Women Artists Slide Library Journal, The 96 Women Artists Slide Library Newsletter, The 60 creative expression 107, 110–11, 114, 135, 164, 198 Cross, Dorothy (b. 1956) 116 Amazon 83f15 Locker Beds 203 Crown Commissioners 49–50 Crying (1993) 176f32 cultural politics 101, 102, 103 practice 105 representations 109 theory 105 culture art education 237 art history 103 Black Women artists 191, 192 boundaries 13–14 children 154 consumption 103 dialogue 213 feminism 105 Girl Power 236 history 198 Irish culture 187 male sexuality 156 performance art 22 phallocentrism 163 photography 146 Poland 212 popular culture 46 pornography 48 race 185 racism 199 representation 127 Sieverding, Katharina (b. 1944) 150 symbolism 221 technology 138 women’s hair 194 Curtis, Penelope (b. 1961) Strongholds (1991) 201 Cyber Launderette 138 Dada 20, 75

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Dali, Salvador (1904–1989) 82 Dancing in Peckham (1990) 176, 232, 233f45 Dearest Art Collector 87f17 death drive 110–11, 112 debate art practices 115 cinema 170 feminism 102 Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA, London) 101 pleasure 124 Poland 212 theory 104 women photographers 162 women’s cinema 171 deconstructionism 59, 95, 97, 110 Dedicated to the Unknown Artists, 1976/7 65 Del LaGrace Volcano (b. 1957) 12, 169 see also La Grace Volcano, Del (b. 1957) Delicious (1994) 84 Dement, Linda (b. 1960) Scar and Cloth (1991) 164f30 Typhoid Mary (1991) 165 desire art 218 economies of pleasure 124 female fetishism 84 images 83 Kristeva, Julia 118 Lacan, Jacques (1901–1981) 124 performance art 21 Poland 212 representation 35, 84 sexual desire 64 technology 180 women’s art 9, 31 digital arts 132, 133, 165 Digital Photography: Captured Images, Volatile Memory (1989) 132 discourses abstraction 60 art 2 art practices 95 explicit body 17–18 feminism 17, 188 feminist history 116 fetishism 82 photography 135 phototherapy 142–3 pleasure 124 power relations 229 race 185 representation 59 restrictions 64 women artists 219 discrimination 75, 105, 137, 138, 235 disease 24, 26 diversity Black art 209

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INDEX Black Women artists 193 Black Women 186 cinema 171 feminism 240 Now Here (1990) 232 visibility 208 Double Labia 30–1 dream diaries 29–30 Duffy, Rita (b. 1959) Marley Funeral, The 203 Dupré, Françoise Liberating Life Drawing 11 Eastern Edge (1997) 211 Ecstatic Antibodies 18 education 138, 180, 218, 220–1, 235, 236 Ego Geometria Sum (1984) 35, 36, 149 Elwes, Catherine (b. 1952) 20, 21 Menstruation II 18, 19f3 Voice Over 175 Emin, Tracey (b.1963) 125, 176 Encampment 224 Enfleshings 35, 36 Entering the Masquerade 158 erotic art 13, 21, 160 eroticism 9, 36, 161, 180, 222 essentialism 59, 97, 116, 117 ethnicity 3, 185, 213 Ettinger, Brachta Lichtenberg (b. 1948) 97, 117, 121, 122–3 Mama Langue Borderline Conditions & Pathological Narcissism (1989–90) 122f20 Matrixial Gaze, The 121 Euridice 15 Eurocentrism 190, 194, 196 evaluation 73–4, 76–7 exhibitions all women shows 232 audience 175 Bad Girls 18 Bare Essentials 18 Black-Asian artists 196 Black Women 4, 185 Black Women artists 192 Blackwoman Time Now (1985) 192 body 31 Body Politic, The 18 British Art Show 117 Brixton Art Gallery 200 Digital Photography: Captured Images, Volatile Memory (1988) 132 Eastern Edge (1997) 209, 211 Ecstatic Antibodies 18 female artists 75 feminist art 2 Fetishism 60, 81–2, 85 funding 199 gender 204 gender blindness 74

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Great Britain 212 Hayward Gallery 196 Hoech, Hannah (1889–1978) 75 Inside the Visible: An Elliptical Traverse of 20th Century Art - in, of, and from the Feminine 97, 120 Interim, Part 1: Corpus (1984–5) 63 International Women’s Day Show 192 Intimate Distance (1990) 186, 193 In An Unsafe Light 9, 13 Irish art 201 Live in Your Head 238 Liverpool Tate 187 Mirror Reflecting Darkly 192 Now Here (1990) 218, 231, 234 Obsessions From Wunderkammer To Cyberspace 138 Oppenheim, Meret (1913–1985) 75 Other Story: Afro-Asian Artists in Post-War Britain, The 187 Parable Island 203 Pondick, Rona (b. 1952) 85 Prostitution 45 Queer Bodies 18 Rochdale Art Gallery 144 In Search of the Femorphic Woman 9 Some went mad, Some ran away 24 State of the Art 198 Stolen Glances 18 Tate Gallery 74, 77 TechnoSphere 138–9 This is my Body...This is my Software 166 Tutti, Cosey Fanni 47 Walk on Buy 138 We Knitted Braids for Her 11, 28 What She Wants 157–8 women 88–9 Women and Photography (1985) 131 women’s art 221 Zegher, Catherine de 120 exile 14, 15, 117–18 Exiled Spence, Jo (1934–1992) 12 experimentation 19, 108, 193, 238 exploitation 156, 201 Expulsion from the Garden of Eden, The 16 family albums 142, 147, 154, 194 fantasy art history 228 eroticism 161, 180 female body 123 fetishism 84 Gunning, Lucy (b. 1964) 125 romance 180–1 visual arts 227 Fear of the Intellectual Wife 223 Feeney, Jacinta (b. 1954) Strongholds (1991) 202–3

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INDEX female artists 41–2, 74, 75, 90, 133 fetishism 84 identity 35 imaginary 110, 111, 124, 125, 224 representation 2 specificity 109, 119 subjectivity 28–9 female body Black Women 205 censorship 78 commercialisation 180 depictions 9, 15 fantasy 123 feminist discourse 11 Fetishism 82 gaze 180 history 22 images 48 imagination 41 Poland 213 race 185 representation 12, 21, 59 self-portraiture 160 women 70 women artists 79 women’s art 222 female sexuality contexts 2 Fetishism 82 images 28, 83 monsters 41 photography 13, 158 representation 18 self-portraiture 160 feminine 69–70, 124, 150, 151, 165, 212 Femininity 28 femininity 223, 227 feminism aesthetic evaluation 76 aesthetic value 73 analysis 107 art 61 art criticism 228 art education 235 art history 75, 227–8, 238–9 art practices 2, 31, 90, 96, 187, 226 art theory 13 Baylis, Diane 156 censorship 49 Chadwick, Helen (1953–1996) 35 Cottingham, Laura (b. 1959) 231 cultural theory 105 debate 102, 124 discourses 17 diversity 169, 240 essentialism 117 exhibitions 2 female body 59

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feminist theory 119 Guerrilla Girls 86, 89 Hiller, Susan (b. 1940) 66 history 218, 232 identity 223 images 47 intellectualisation 175 language 100 painting 67, 104 performance art 17 photography 162 Poland 212 pornographic imagery 79 power relations 90–1 representation 9, 78, 172 second wave 133, 185 sexuality 229 Smith, Kiki 27 technology 139 terminology 133 Tutti, Cosey Fanni (b. 1951) 49 Feminism and Modernism 68 Feminism, Art History and Cultural Politics 67 feminist art art practices 107 erotic art 21 essentialism 59 evaluation 76–7 exhibitions 2 experimentation 108 explicit body 17 modernism 104 painting 67 politics 102 Pollock, Griselda (b. 1949) 187 psychoanalytic theory 227 theory 68, 99, 114 visual languages 107–8 Feminist Art News 104 feminist discourse 11, 20, 117, 124, 213 feminist history 3, 116 feminist movement 217 feminist performance 20, 125 feminist photography 160 feminist theory 9, 117–18, 119, 120, 217, 226 Ferguson, Bruce Now Here (1990) 231–2 Fetishism 60, 81–2, 84–5 fetishism definition 81 desire 84 Fleury, Sylvie (b. 1961) 84 McIver, Moira 161 war photography 160 women 159 Fictions of Collective Life 22 Fiesta 46f8 Final Journey 211 Flesh Colours 115

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INDEX Fleshy Face 223 Fleury, Sylvie (b. 1961) Delicious (1994) 84 Twinkle (1992) 84 Fly Girl Watching the World (1993) 206f40 For they know not what to do: Enjoyment as a political factor 125–6 Forshaw, Louise Hammer and Knife (1987) 175 Foucault, Michel (1926–1984) 124, 221 Fox, Anna (b.1961) Weekend War Games in Britain in the 1990s 161f29 Workstations 161 fragment 60, 79, 175 Fragments, 1978 65 Fragments of my Father 145 Framing Feminism: Art and the Women’s Movement 1970–1985 18, 96, 101, 102–3 France 11, 49 Freedom and Change 102f18 Freud, Sigmund (1856–1939) 28, 63, 70, 81, 82, 110 Fruitmarket Gallery, The (Edinburgh) Interim, Part 1: Corpus (1984–5) 63 Fuchs, Anneli Now Here (1990) 231–2 funding 45, 74, 191, 199 Gablik, Suzi (b. 1934) Has Modernism Failed? 112 Gallery Photographers, The 18, 186, 193 Gatwick Suite (1984) 149 gaze Asian woman 207 Black feminism 185 female body 180 photographic anthropology 205 pleasure 124 self-portraiture 186 theory 121 touch 165 gender Androskin 54 art 218 art education 237 art history 228 artworks 49, 227 blindness 74 body 24 Burman, Chila (b. 1957) 205 capitalism 182 Chadwick, Helen (1953–1996) 37 children 154 Del LaGrace Volcano (b. 1957) 169 discrimination 75 exhibitions 204, 232 female body 80 feminist art 67 feminist discourse 12

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film theory 170, 226 gender blindness 74 identity 127 imbalance 187 La Grace Volcano, Del (b. 1957) 54 Maher, Alice (b. 1956) 203 monsters 41 Parable Island 203 photography 162 Poland 212 pornographic imagery 50 race 185 representation 79, 198 role reversal 31 roles 47 Sieverding, Katharina (b. 1944) 150 Strongholds (1991) 201 theory 107 transgender 52–3 visual arts 227 voice 55 women photographers 159 Gender Trouble 12 Georgopoulos, Gabrielle 13 Coming up for Air 15 Euridice 15 Gesture in Psychoanalysis 115 Get hold of this (1994–5) 125 Girl Power 236 Glammadeb 54 Global Feminisms 2 God Giving Birth 9 Godfrey-Isaacs, Laura (b. 1964) 79 Alien Blob 80f14 Fleshy Face 223 Grambye, Lars Now Here (1990) 231–2 Great Britain art education 104 art galleries 74 art practices 18 child pornography 155 exhibitions 2 female artists 90 feminism 90, 102 politics 212 The Protection of Children Act (1978) 155 Great Cosmic Mother: rediscovering the religion of the earth, The 9 Greater London Council (GLC) 191, 197 Green, Linda Wilson Male Photographer with Signifiers 134f22 Green Madonna 203 Greenan, Althea 11, 24 Greer, Germaine (b. 1939) 29, 221 Town Bloody Hall (1971) 233 Grosz, Elizabeth 42 Volatile Bodies: Towards a Corporate Feminism 43 grotesques 40, 41

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INDEX Guerrilla Girls censorship 87–8 Confessions of the Guerrilla Girls 87 Dearest Art Collector 87f17 feminism 86, 89 Guerrilla Girls Outside the ICA in 1995 86f16 Hotflashes 89 Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA, London) 88 support 90 United States of America 88 Gunning, Lucy (b. 1964) Climbing Around My Room (1993) 125 Horse Impressionists, The (1994) 125 Hackney Flashers communication 240 photography 137 Who’s Holding the Baby? (1978) 240f46 Hammer and Knife (1987) 175 Haraway, Donna (b. 1944) 43, 167 Hart, Linda Acting Out: Feminist Performances 21 Has Modernism Failed? 112 Hatoum, Mona (b. 1952) Changing Parts 14 exile 14 Hayward Gallery 198 Measures of Distance 14–15 Over my Dead Body 14f2 photography 13 Roadworks (1985) 197f38 themes 195 Hayward Gallery 187, 196, 197 Health and Efficiency 47 Hedegus, Chris (b. 1952) Town Bloody Hall (1971) 233 Hemmings, Clare 3 Why Stories Matter 4 Hiller, Susan (b. 1940) art practices 65–6, 239 Dedicated to the Unknown Artists, 1976/7 65 Entering the Masquerade 158 feminism 175 Fragments, 1978 65 Gatwick Suite (1984) 149 Midnight, Baker Street (1983) 149 Monument, 1981 65, 66f12 self-portraiture 147 Ten Months 222 Himid, Lubaina (b. 1954) Freedom and Change 102f18 Hayward Gallery 198 Pollock, Griselda (b. 1949) 103 racism 101 themes 194–5 Thin Black Lines 2 Histoires des Robes (1990) 84 history Black Women artists 193, 200

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Cottingham, Laura (b. 1959) 234 culture 198 female body 22 feminism 101, 218, 232, 240 fetishism 82 personal history 193 women 217, 221 women artists 221 women’s art 188 Hohenbüchler, Christine We Knitted Braids for Her 28, 29f5 Hohenbüchler, Heidemarie We Knitted Braids for Her 28, 29f5 Hohenbüchler, Irene We Knitted Braids for Her 28, 29f5 Homes for America (1966–7) 47 Honey, Nancy 158 Apple of My Eye, The (1991) 157f28 Horse Impressionists, The (1994) 125 Hotflashes 89 How Can We Create Our Beauty? 109 How Do I Begin To Take Responsibility For My Body? (1985) 148f26 Hunter, Alexis (1948–2014) 2, 239 Approach To Fear XI - Effeminacy Productive Action 223, 224f43 Fear of the Intellectual Wife 223 Hysteria 222 I pose a paradox: a discourse on smoking 144 I Probably Want Perfection in Everything and a Little More: Maybe That’ll be My Downfall 54f10, 55 Ibramullah, Naz States of Mind 211 ICA, London see Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA, London) iconography 35, 206, 213, 222 idealism 126, 163 identity age 64 artworks 128 beauty 110 Black art 209 Black-Asian artists 199 Black Women 186 Black Women artists 192, 210 Burman, Chila (b. 1957) 207 children 155 enjoyment 125, 126 female sexuality 158 feminine 150 feminism 95, 102–3, 223, 232 fragmented 42 gender 127 imagination 111 Inside the Visible: An Elliptical Traverse of 20th Century Art - in, of, and from the Feminine 121 Kaur, Permindar 117 manipulation 68

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INDEX ORLAN (b. 1971) 167 painting 111 phallocentrism 123 photography 146 pleasure 126 Poland 188, 212, 213 politics 2, 20–1, 22, 125 pornographic imagery 50 race 97, 187, 209 representation 59, 142–3, 205 soldiers 160 technology 167 trafficking 182 transgender 54, 55 Tutti, Cosey Fanni (b. 1951) 45, 49 women 112, 149–50 women artists 221 women’s art 224 ideology 35, 241 Ikon Gallery (Birmingham) 117 images art 105 boundaries 13–14 consumption 48 digital arts 165 female body 79 female sexuality 83 meanings 107 monsters 42 Obsessions From Wunderkammer To Cyberspace 138 power 40 representation 15–16 semiotics 106–7 touch 164 transgender 52–3 women 26, 47 Images/New Images or The Reincarnation of Saint Orlan 167 imagination 41, 42, 111 Immediate Family (1990) 155–6 importance 4, 111 In An Unsafe Light 9, 11 In Defence of the Indefensible: Feminism, Painting and Post-Modernism 104 In Mind and Body: Feminist Criticism Beyond the Theory/Practice Divide 97–8 In Search of the Femorphic Woman 9 In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens 192 Industrialisation (1982) 210 influence 18, 31, 67 Ingres, Jean Auguste Dominique (1780–1867) Odalisque 87 Inside the Visible: An Elliptical Traverse of 20th Century Art - in, of, and from the Feminine 97, 120–1 installations 70, 104 Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA, London) Black Visual Arts Forum 185 COUM group 49–50

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debate 101 exhibitions 2, 18, 45 Framing Feminism: Art and the Women’s Movement 1970–1985 96, 101 Guerrilla Girls 88 Guerrilla Girls Outside the ICA in 1995 86f16 Hiller, Susan (b. 1940) 65 McQueen, Steve (b. 1969) 209 Oppenheim, Meret (1913–1985) 75 ORLAN (b. 1971) 166 participation 240 Potter, Sally (b. 1949) 176 Preaching the the Perverted (1993) 18 State of the Art 198 Tutti, Cosey Fanni 47 Interim, Part 1: Corpus (1984–5) 60, 63–4 Interim, Part 1: Corpus, detail Supplication (1985) 62f11 Interior Scroll 21 International Women’s Day Show 192 interpretation 37, 49, 75, 194 Intimate Distance (1990) 186, 193–5 Ireland see Northern Ireland; Republic of Ireland Ireland, Helen 68 Sixteen Seeds 70 Irene and Christine Hohenbüchler We Knitted Braids for Her 1995 31 Irigaray, Luce (b. 1930) female imaginary 124 Flesh Colours 115 Gesture in Psychoanalysis 115 How Can We Create Our Beauty? 109 idealism 163 Natal Lacuna, A 97, 114 Speculum of the Other Woman 110, 111 standards 77 symbolism 30 This Sex Which Is Not One 109, 110, 112 women’s art 222 Zürn, Unica (1916–1970) 112 Irish art 201 Irish culture 187, 204 ‘Irish Women Artists: Eye to Eye’ (1986) 4 Jefferies, Janis 11 Double Labia 30–1 John, Gwen 74, 75 Jones, Allen (b. 1937) 70, 84 Journal of the Museum of Women’s Art 116–17 Katz, Mouse 9 Spring Heiress 10f1 Kaur, Permindar Cold Comfort (1996) 117 Cot (1993) 117, 118f19 Tall Beds (1996) 117 Keegan, Rita Rita Keegan in her Studio (1980) 186f36 Women of Colour Index, The (1985–1995) 185

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INDEX Kelly, Mary (b. 1941) art practices 239 Body Politic, The 18 femininity 223 feminism 175 Interim, Part 1: Corpus (1984–5) 60 Interim, Part 1: Corpus, detail Supplication (1985) 62f11 On Difference and Representation 227 pleasure 124 Post-Partum Document 47, 49 Riverside Studios, London 64 subversion 107 women in history 101102 Ken Moody (1983) 54 Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge Interim, Part 1: Corpus (1984–5) 63 Klein, Astrid (b. 1951) 151, 152 Knots (1987) 69f13 knowledge learning 99 painting 70 photography 152 power 100, 104 sharing 132, 139 Kolbowski, Sylvia (b. 1953) On Difference and Representation 227 Kozyra, Katarzyna (b. 1963) Bathhouse (1997) 213f42 Krauss, Rosalind Antivision 31 Kristeva, Julia (b. 1941) communication 224 creative expression 107 desire 118 discourses 11 disruption 68 fragmentation 70 Powers of Horror 168 subjectivity 42 Women’s Time 30 Kruger, Barbara (b. 1945) 21 Now Here (1990) 232 On Difference and Representation 227 Kuryluk, Ewa (b. 1946) Veronica and Her Cloth 223 La Grace Volcano, Del (b. 1957) see also Del LaGrace Volcano (b. 1957) Androskin 54 Balding Del 54–5 gender 54 Glammadeb 54 Mutantselves 54 ‘On Being a Jenny Saville Painting’ 52–3 Saville, Jenny 55–6 Three Graces, The 54 Transgenital Landscapes 54 Lacan, Jacques (1901–1981) 97, 107, 110, 121, 124, 224

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Lacey, Suzanne Womanhouse 18 Land 201 language art history 228 body 97 criticism 103 feminism 96, 100, 224, 239 feminist art 107 Irigaray, Luce (b. 1930) 111 libido 37 photography 135, 152 power relations 84 representation 177–8 social exchange 221 value judgements 81 violence 126 women artists 213 Lee, Rosa 70, 71 Knots (1987) 69f13 Levine, Sherrie (b. 1947) On Difference and Representation 227 Liberating Life Drawing 11 Libido Rising 1989 107 Lichtenberg Ettinger, Brachta see Ettinger, Brachta Lichtenberg (b. 1948) Lilith 26 Lippard, Lucy (b. 1937) 19, 48, 104, 175 Lipper, Susan 161, 162 Live in Your Head 238 Liverpool Tate 187, 201 Locker Beds 203 Lomax, Yve Broken Lines: More and No Difference 67 On Difference and Representation 227 London 86, 90 Looking at Paintings 226 Lucas, Sarah (b. 1962) 126 Get hold of this (1994–5) 125 Two Fried Eggs and a Kebab (1992) 126, 127f21 Lyotard, Jean-François (1924–1998) 124, 146 Magazine, The 97 archives 1 Black Diaspora 4 chronology 3 letters 9 myths 188 name change 117, 118–19 race 185 technology 132 terminology 133 Maher, Alice (b. 1956) Thicket 3 202f39 Thicket, The 203 Mailer, Norman (1923–2007) Town Bloody Hall (1971) 233 make: the magazine of women’s art see Magazine, The MAKE (Women’s Art Library) 1

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INDEX male imaginary 110 Male Photographer with Signifiers 134f22 male sexuality 32, 48, 156, 158 Mama Langue Borderline Conditions & Pathological Narcissism (1989–90) 122f20 Mann, Sally (b. 1951) Immediate Family (1990) 155–6 Mapplethorpe, Robert 18 Ken Moody (1983) 54 marginalisation 47, 187, 188, 208, 211 Marley Funeral, The 203 Martin, Rosy Fragments of my Father 145 I pose a paradox: a discourse on smoking 144 phototherapy 142–3 poem 141 Site of Death; In Living Memory of James John Martin, The 142f24 Spence, Jo (1934–1992) 132 Unwind the Ties That Bind (1988) 40 Mary Magdalene 26 Masaccio (1401–1428) Expulsion from the Garden of Eden, The 16 Matrix 122–3 Matrix (1999) 53 Matrixial Gaze, The 121 McAvera, Brian (b. 1948) Parable Island 203 McQueen, Steve (b. 1969) 208 Mirage (1995) 209 meanings art 36 art and pornography 45 artworks 123 control 71 feminine 122 femininity 227 fetishism 82 images 107 painting 68 performance art 18 Measures of Distance 14–15 Meat Joy 21 media 104, 131, 132, 170, 171–2, 213 medical technology 167 memory 152, 223 men art education 235–6 audience 175 photography 135, 159 pornographic imagery 132–3 representation 163 as subject 159–60, 161, 162 Mendieta, Anna 19 Blood Sign 19–20 Blood Writing 19–20 menstruation 18–19, 47 Menstruation II 18, 19f3, 55 Meskimmon, Marsha 12

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In Mind and Body: Feminist Criticism Beyond the Theory/Practice Divide 97–8 Messager, Annette (b. 1943) 79 Histoires des Robes (1990) 84 metaphor 24, 28–9, 30, 64 Midnight, Baker Street (1983) 149 Mirage (1995) 209 Mirror Reflecting Darkly 192 models 46, 47, 49 modernism 101, 104, 199, 217 Moi, Toril (b. 1953) 116 MOMA (Louisiana) 218 monsters 40, 41, 42, 43 monstrous works 41–2 Monument, 1981 65, 66f12 Mor, Barbara Great Cosmic Mother: rediscovering the religion of the earth, The 9 Mother and a Whore 156–7 Mouth to Mouth (1995) 177f33 Mozart, Amadeus (1756–1791) Cosi fan tutti 45 multiculturalism 171, 188, 212 multiple images 147–8, 149, 150 Mulvey, Laura (b. 1941) audience 175 Body Politic, The 18 fetishism 84 Interim, Part 1: Corpus (1984–5) 64 visual pleasure 124 Visual Pleasure and the Narrative Cinema 226 You don’t know what is happening do you Mr Jones? 70 Murray, Jayne 139 Cyber Launderette 138 Mutantselves 54 Myers, Eveleen (1856–1937) 159 Mythic Being, The 4 Narratives of Dis-ease: Exiled 39f7, 42 Natal Lacuna, A 97, 114 National Endowment for the Arts 18 National Museum of Women in the Arts (USA) 74 National Photography Conference 138 Nattering on the Net 137 natural sciences 40–1 Nature, Self Portrait (1996) 210f41 Nead, Linda Feminism, Art History and Cultural Politics 67 Negative Capability as Practice in Women’s Art 68 Nengudi, Senga (b. 1943) Now Here (1990) 232 New York 4, 87, 90 Newcastle 166, 209 No Fire in the Hearth, No Sun in the South 201–2 Nochlin, Linda (b. 1931) 176, 221, 228 Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists? 185

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INDEX Noggle, Anne (1922–2005) 43, 160 Northern Ireland 202 see also Republic of Ireland Novella 220–1 Now Here (1990) 218, 231, 234 Obsessions From Wunderkammer To Cyberspace 138 Obstacle Race: The Fortunes of Women Painters and Their Work, The (1979) 221 Oceans Apart (1989) 194f37 O’Connell, Deirdre No Fire in the Hearth, No Sun in the South 201–2 Odalisque 87 oeuvres 75, 110 Of Mutability 35, 36, 223 Off Centre 70 Ofili, Chris (b. 1968) 208 ‘On Being a Jenny Saville Painting’ 52–3 On Difference and Representation 227 Opik, Urve Women Artists Slide Library Journal, The 9 Oppenheim, Meret (1913–1985) 75, 82 oppression 185, 189, 191, 192 Orange and Blue 47 ORLAN (b. 1971) body art 49 Carnal Art 169 Images/New Images or The Reincarnation of Saint Orlan 167 performance art 168 This is my Body...This is my Software 166 Woman with Head...Woman without Head 166f31, 167 Other Story: Afro-Asian Artists in Post-War Britain, The 187 othering 187, 204, 205, 212 O’Toole, Fintan (b. 1958) Strongholds (1991) 201 Our Clothes 16 Over my Dead Body 14f2 P-Orridge (b. 1950) 12, 45 Prostitution 47 painting children 154 Del LaGrace Volcano 12 essentialism 59 evaluation 76 feminism 67, 95, 104 gaze 121 importance 111 Interim, Part 1: Corpus (1984–5) 63 photography 132 readings 68 representation 174 scripto-visual art practices 105 technical image 131 trauma 55 uncertainty 70 unconscious 71

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women 70 Pane, Gina (1939–1990) 49, 167 Parable Island 203, 204 paradoxes 82 Parker, Jayne Almost Out (1984) 175 Parker, Rozsika (1945–2010) 103 Framing Feminism: Art and the Women’s Movement 1970–1985 18, 96, 101 participation 103, 239–40 ‘passionate attitudes’ 63 Pavel, Helen 69, 70, 71 Pazos, Carlos (b. 1949) Fetishism 83 Peacock 27 Pennebaker, D.A. (b. 1925) Town Bloody Hall (1971) 233 performance 18, 19 performance art art practices 18, 20 Baker, Bobby 222 bodily experience 22 COUM group 45, 46, 48 creative expression 174 erotic art 21 explicit body 17 feminist art 104 feminist discourse 11 meanings 18 Orange and Blue 47 ORLAN (b. 1971) 168 technology 166 theatricality 22 Tutti, Cosey Fanni 47 We Knitted Braids for Her 30 Performing the Border (1999) 181 Performing Sexualities 18 phallicism 117, 122 phallocentrism 123, 137, 163 philosophy 74, 76, 97 Photographers Gallery, The 18, 186, 193 photography art practices 18 artworks 127 Asian woman 207 Black Women artists 193 Body Politic, The 18 Chadwick, Helen (1953–1996) 35 children 154, 156 culture 146 death 144 Euridice 15 exhibitions 201 exploitation 156 family albums 142 feminist art 105 flux 162 Interim, Part 1: Corpus (1984–5) 63 Intimate Distance (1990) 186 La Grace Volcano, Del (b. 1957) 54

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INDEX Magazine, The 132 men 135, 159 Narratives of Dis-ease: Exiled 40 Obsessions From Wunderkammer To Cyberspace 138 photographic anthropology 205 reception 132 self-portraiture 147–8 surveillance 146, 205 technical image 131 technology 137, 152 tools 205–6 viewers 165 women 169 women artists 146–7 women’s art 13 phototherapy 40, 132, 142, 144 Pierce, Kimberly Boys Don’t Cry 55 Piper, Adrian Mythic Being, The 4 Piss Flowers 11, 34f6, 36 Pizan, Christine de (1364–1430) 221 Book of the City of Ladies, The 220 Book of the Feats of Chivalry 221 pleasure art 127 artworks 80, 123, 125 discourses 124 idealism 126 representation 35 transgression 125 poetry 141, 145 Poland 2, 187–8, 212, 213–14 politics analysis 79 art 105 art practices 20, 103 arts 228, 234 Black-Asian artists 197 Black Women artists 192, 193 feminism 90, 96, 101, 235 feminist art 67, 76, 102 fetishism 81, 84 gender 159 Girl Power 236 Great Britain 212 Guerrilla Girls 89 identity 125 language 135 Marley Funeral, The 203 Northern Ireland 202 Now Here (1990) 218 participation 103 political practice 21 radical 124 representation 11, 17–18, 78, 172 sexual politics 71 Spence, Jo (1934–1992) 132 strategies 232

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video art 175 women photographers 162 women’s art 1, 9 Pollard, Ingrid (b. 1953) 195 Oceans Apart (1989) 194f37 Pollock, Griselda (b. 1949) art practices 211 Feminism and Modernism 68 feminist art 187 Feminist Art News 104 Framing Feminism: Art and the Women’s Movement 1970–1985 18, 101, 102–3 Himid, Lubaina (b. 1954) 103 Inside the Visible 97 Vision and Difference 73 Pondick, Rona (b. 1952) Baby (1989) 85 Fetishism 84–5 pornographic imagery art 12 audience 47–8 children 132, 154–5 feminism 79 men 132–3 rape and violence 17 sexuality 45 Tutti, Cosey Fanni (b. 1951) 48, 50 pornography art 45, 105 censorship 49 children 154–5 demonisation 48 Spence, Jo (1934–1992) 107 Tutti, Cosey Fanni (b. 1951) 12 Porter, Roy Resurrecting the Body 21 portraiture 147, 154 Post-Partum Document 47 Potter, Sally (b. 1949) 174, 176 power art 105 fetishism 82 images 40 knowledge 100, 104 O’Connell, Deirdre 202 rebellion 194 women 138 power relations body 24 changes 160 discourses 229 eroticism 161 feminism 90–1 Georgopoulos, Gabrielle 15 Girl Power 236 language 84 photography 135 pornographic imagery 45 technology 139 women’s art 12

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INDEX Powers of Horror 168 Preaching the the Perverted (1993) 18 Prendergast, Kathy (b. 1958) Land 201 process 115, 143, 149 Projects UK 18 Prophet, Jane TechnoSphere 138, 139f23 Prostitution 45, 47, 49 P.S.1, New York 2 psychoanalytic theory art history 230 art practices 218 communication 224 deconstructionism 59 Ettinger, Brachta Lichtenberg (b. 1948) 97 feminism 105 feminist film theory 226 fetishism 82 fragmentation 112 Lacan, Jacques (1901–1981) 124 painting 111 repression 110 visual arts 227 puritanism 13 Putting Myself in the Picture (1986) 148 Queer Bodies 18 race art 218 art practices 208 Burman, Chila (b. 1957) 205 classification 210 feminism 3, 185 identity 97, 187 othering 205 Ratnam, Niru (b. 1974) 209 Sieverding, Katharina (b. 1944) 150 stereotyping 186 racism 86, 123, 189, 199, 202 Radical Presence Black Performance in Contemporary Art 4 rationality 41 Ratnam, Niru (b. 1974) 187, 209 re.act.feminism 2 reactions 37, 47 rebellion 194 reception 132 recognition 189–90 Reformation 138 Rego, Paula (b. 1935) Encampment 224 Secrets and Whispers 224 reimagining 70–1 Reitmaier, Heidi 176 Remote Sensing (2001) 181f35 Rendell, Clare 103 Framing Feminism: Art and the Women’s Movement 1970–1985 101

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Women Artists Slide Library Journal, The 96 representation all women shows 232 art practices 2, 208 artworks 47, 128 Biemann, Ursula 182 Black female body 205 body 26, 64 children 155 colonialism 229 culture 127 desire 84 discourses 59 economies of pleasure 124 education 218 female beauty 115 female body 9, 12, 13, 18 feminism in art 102 feminist art 104 feminist theory 172 fetishism 81 Fetishism 82 fragment 60 Framing Feminism: Art and the Women’s Movement 1970–1985 101 gender 79, 107, 198 identity 142–3, 146 language 177–8 McQueen, Steve (b. 1969) 209 media 170 men 163 Narratives of Dis-ease: Exiled 42 Parable Island 203 photography 135, 147 politics 11, 17–18, 78 race 185 self-representation 150 Sieverding, Katharina (b. 1944) 150 symbolism 223 systems 35 technology 133 Tutti, Cosey Fanni (b. 1951) 50 video art 174, 175 visibility 60 women 11, 18, 20–1, 63, 111, 112 Republic of Ireland 201 see also Northern Ireland resistance 2, 205, 223 resisting definition 68–9 Resurrecting the Body 21 reviews 9, 11, 29 Rita Keegan in her Studio (1980) 186f36 Riverside Studios, London 63, 64 Roadworks (1985) 197f38 Roberts, Michelle Piss Flowers 36 Robinson, Hilary 116–17 Robinson, Mary (B. 1944, President of Ireland 1990–1997) Strongholds (1991) 201

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INDEX roles 149, 185 Room of One’s Own, A 232 Rosler, Martha (b.1943) Digital Photography: Captured Images, Volatile Memory (1989) 132 Saussure, Ferdinand de (1857–1913) Course in General Linguistics 106 Saville, Jenny 12, 43, 55–6 Closed Contact No. 9 53f9 Del LaGrace Volcano 52–3 Matrix (1999) 53 Scaffold Body 25f4 Scar and Cloth (1991) 164f30 Schneeman, Carolee 49 Interior Scroll 21 Meat Joy 21 scripto-visual art practices 95, 104, 105, 226 sculptures 24, 32, 174 Secrets and Whispers 224 self-portraiture Burman, Chila (b. 1957) 205, 207 gaze 186 La Grace Volcano, Del (b. 1957) 54 multiple images 147–8, 149 othering 149 Shifting Terrains 209 Sieverding, Katharina (b. 1944) 150 Tutti, Cosey Fanni 48–9 women 42, 43, 147 women photographers 160 women’s art 12 Serres, Michel (b. 1930) Third Lesson, The 168 sexism 86, 123, 189 sexual differences 185 sexual identity 22, 35 sexuality art practices 18, 21, 218 Burman, Chila (b. 1957) 205 feminism 229 feminist art practices 17 fetishism 84 Foucault, Michel (1926–1984) 221 images 28 male sexuality 32 performance art 18 Poland 188, 212 race 205 representation 11, 21, 35 Tutti, Cosey Fanni 45 video art 175 visual arts 227 women 13, 164, 182 women photographers 155 Sherman, Cindy (b. 1954) 48–9 Untitled Film Stills (1977–80) 149–50 Shifting Terrains 209, 211 Sieverding, Katharina (b. 1944) 150

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Transformer (1973/4) 147f25 sight 163, 164 Sinclair, N. Woman with Head...Woman without Head 166f31 Siriso 211 Site of Death; In Living Memory of James John Martin, The 142f24 Sixteen Seeds 70 Sjöö, Monika God Giving Birth 9 Great Cosmic Mother: rediscovering the religion of the earth, The 9 Skin and Blister 223 Slight Reprise (1995) 125 Smith, Kiki Blood Pool 26 India 27 Lilith 26 Mary Magdalene 26 reviews 11 Scaffold Body 25f4 Squatter with Butterflies 26 Virgin Mary 27 Whitechapel Art Gallery 24, 26 Smith, Stephanie Mouth to Mouth (1995) 177f33 Smyth, Ailbhe Strongholds (1991) 201 Some went mad, Some ran away 24 SPACE Studios 2, 45 specialisation 133, 172 Speculum of the Other Woman 110, 111 Spence, Jo (1934–1992) exhibitions 2 Exiled 12 How Do I Begin To Take Responsibility For My Body? (1985) 148f26 Industrialisation (1982) 210 Libido Rising 1989 107 multiple images 149 Narratives of Dis-ease: Exiled 39f7, 42 phototherapy 132, 142–3 Putting Myself in the Picture (1986) 148 self-portraiture 160 Unwind the Ties That Bind (1988) 40 Spender, Dale (b. 1943) 138 Nattering on the Net 137 Spring Heiress 10f1 Sprinkle, Annie (b. 1954) 49, 177 Squatter with Butterflies 26 Starr, Georgina (b. 1968) 176 Crying (1993) 176f32 State of the Art 198 States of Mind 211 status 46, 135–6, 196, 219 stereotyping 186, 205 Stewart, Edward 177f33 Stolen Glances 18

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INDEX strategies art history 228 art practices 101, 227 Biemann, Ursula 182 exhibitions 232 feminism 235 performance art 22 race 187, 209 Strindberg, Madeleine 69, 70, 71 Off Centre 70 Strongholds (1991) 201, 204 struggles 190–1, 202, 212 Sulter, Maud (1960–2008) Breaths: Art, Health and Empowerment 144 Hysteria 222 Zabat 222 Surrealism 20, 82 surveillance 146, 205 symbolism absence 111 body 222 children 154, 156 communication 224 culture 221 female body 210 femininity 227 iconography 213 motherhood 157 phallicism 122 representation 30, 115 Veronica and Her Cloth 223 women 201 women’s hair 194 Synapse IV 229f44 Take Your Top Off (1993) 125 ‘Taking Matters Into Our Own Hands’ 2 Tall Beds (1996) 117 Tate Britain 2 Tate Gallery 47, 74, 77 technology change 180 culture 138 desire 180 discrimination 138 feminism 139 ORLAN (b. 1971) 167 performance art 166 phallocentrism 137 photography 152 romance 181 training 131–2 women 133 TechnoSphere 138, 139f23 television 171–2, 175 Ten Months 222 terminology 40, 95, 96, 105, 131, 133 textiles 28–9 The Protection of Children Act (1978) 155 themes 3, 65, 194–5

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theory art practices 95, 115 Black feminism 185 cinema 170 culture 103 debate 104 feminism 67 feminist art 68, 99, 105, 114 feminist history 116 fetishism 81 gender 107 Haraway, Donna 43 Inside the Visible: An Elliptical Traverse of 20th Century Art - in, of, and from the Feminine 121 painting 59–60 representation 59 women’s art 190 Thicket 3 202f39 Thin Black Line, The 2 Thin Black Lines 2 Third Cinema 172 Third Lesson, The 168 Third World 191 This is my Body...This is my Software 166 This Sex Which Is Not One 109, 110, 112 Thormeycroft, Diana 43 Three Graces, The 55 Thrills and Spills 157 Time Out 29 To the Lighthouse 30 tools 205–6 touch 163–4, 165 Town Bloody Hall (1971) 233 training 131–2, 138 Trangmar, Susan Amidst (1994) 151f27 Untitled Landscapes (1986) 150–1 Transformer (1973/4) 147f25 transgender 12, 52–3, 54, 55 Transgenital Landscapes 54 transgression 82, 124, 125 Tutti, Cosey Fanni (b. 1951) action art 46 artworks 49 censorship 49 Fiesta 46f8 P-Orridge, Genesis 45 pornographic imagery 48–9, 50 power relations 12 pseudonym 45 Twinkle (1992) 84 Two Fried Eggs and a Kebab (1992) 126, 127f21 Typhoid Mary (1991) 165 UK see Great Britain uniforms 160, 161 unitary subject 146 United Kingdom (UK) see Great Britain United States of America 18, 88, 104, 154–5 Untitled Film Stills (1977–80) 149–50

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INDEX Untitled Landscapes (1986) 150–1 value judgements 75, 81 Veronica and Her Cloth 223 video art aesthetics 171 Biemann, Ursula 182 creative medium 174 feminism 133 feminist art 104 Obsessions From Wunderkammer To Cyberspace 138 women artists 175–6, 178 viewers Amidst (1994) 151 Chadwick, Helen (1953–1996) 36 Hatoum, Mona (b. 1952) 195 Mann, Sally (b. 1951) 156 photography 146, 165 self-portraiture 150 violence 17, 26, 28, 55, 126 Virgin Mary 27 visibility Black-Asian artists 196 culture 208 female body 79 representation 60 women 78, 101, 117, 236 women artists 235 Vision and Difference 73 visual arts 227, 228, 239 culture 169 languages 107–8 pleasure 124 Visual Pleasure and the Narrative Cinema 226 Vogue 49 voice 55, 104, 125, 126, 168, 236 Voice Over 175 voices 31, 67 Volatile Bodies: Towards a Corporate Feminism 43 Von Bonin, Cosim (b. 1962) Now Here (1990) 232 voyeurism 84, 159 WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution 2 Walk on Buy 138 Walker, Alice (b. 1944) In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens 192 Walker, Maxine (b. 1962) 195, 210 Shifting Terrains 209 Ways of Seeing 79 We Knitted Braids for Her 11, 28, 29f5, 30, 31, 32 Wearing, Gillian (b. 1963) 126 Dancing in Peckham (1990) 176, 232, 233f45 Slight Reprise (1995) 125 Take Your Top Off (1993) 125 Weekend War Games in Britain in the 1990s 161f29 Western culture analysis 109

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Black Women 185 death 144 female body 59 feminism 188 othering 205 photography 135 Western tradition 13, 41, 219 What She Wants 157–8 Where do we Draw the Line? (1992) 18 Whitechapel Art Gallery 24, 26, 68–9 Whiteford, Kate (b. 1952) 68–9, 70 Whitewash 208 Whitford, Margaret (1947–2011) 114 Whitney 88–9 Who’s Holding the Baby? (1978) 240f46 ‘Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?’ 185 Why Stories Matter 4 Wikstrom, Elin (b. 1965) Now Here (1990) 232 Wilke, Hannah (1940–1993) 27, 49 Williams, Sue (b. 1956) Now Here (1990) 232 Williamson, Judith (b. 1954) 149–50, 241 woman 9, 63 Woman With Attitude 114 Woman with Head...Woman without Head 166f31, 167 Womanhouse 18 women art education 236–7 Black-Asian artists 198 blood 26 bodies 78 body art 48 creative expression 164 exhibitions 88–9 female body 70 female specificity 119 fetishism 82, 84 figurative representation 112 Freud, Sigmund (1856–1939) 28 identity 149–50 images 47 imagination 42 isolation 102 knowledge sharing 132 men 159 monsters 41, 43 photographers 135 photography 131, 137, 169 power 138 representation 11, 18, 63, 78, 111 repression 110 Surrealism 82 technology 133, 139 visibility 60, 101, 117 voice 104 women’s cinema 172–3 Women and Photography (magazine) 131

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INDEX women artists aesthetics 176–7 art practices 239 children 154 education 235–6 experimentation 238 history 221 iconography 222 photography 146–7 Poland 187–8, 212, 213 resisting definition 68–9 self-doubt 69 status 219 video art 175–6, 178 work 79 women photographers 131 Women Artists Slide Library, The exhibitions 4 funding 74 specialisation 133 Vickers, Heather 135 Women Artists Slide Library Journal, The 1, 9, 96, 101 Women Artists Slide Library Newsletter, The 4, 60 Women of Colour Index, The (1985–1995) 185 women photographers 155, 160, 162 women’s art body 223 complexities 233 desire 31 Eurocentrism 190 exhibitions 221 history 188 identity 224 politics 1, 9 power relations 12 self-portraiture 12 Women’s Art Library 217

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Women’s Art Magazine Irigaray, Luce (b. 1930) 97 name change 97, 117, 118–19 Natal Lacuna, A 114 photography 132 Women Artists Slide Library Journal, The 1 women’s cinema 170, 171, 172–3 Women’s Liberation 103 Women’s Movement 67 Women’s Time 30 Wood, Debby see Del LaGrace Volcano (b. 1957) Woodman, Francesca (b. 1951) 49 Woolf, Virginia (1882–1941) Room of One’s Own, A 232 To the Lighthouse 30 Workstations 161 Would, Debby see Del LaGrace Volcano (b. 1957) Wright, Annie 1 Writing Desire (2000) 179f34, 180, 181–2 ‘writing the body’ 24 Yates, Marie (b. 1940) On Difference and Representation 227 You don’t know what is happening do you Mr Jones? 70 Zabat 222 Zegher, Catherine de Inside the Visible: An Elliptical Traverse of 20th Century Art - in, of, and from the Feminine 97, 120 Žižek, Slavoj (b. 1949) For they know not what to do: Enjoyment as a political factor 125–6 Zone Gallery This is my Body...This is my Software 166 Zürn, Unica (1916–1970) 112, 114, 115

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