Feminist Art: A Reassessment

Introduction

by Susan Bee and Mira Schor

The feminist movement in America of the late 1960s and early 1970s seems to be a particular contentious and problematic part of our history, even among women. It is forgotten or demonized, and yet there are constant efforts to memorialize, revitalize and continue its legacy within new generations of women. For example, a number of events were planned for 2006 to 2007, coordinated under the aegis of the Feminist Art Project, including a number of 35th anniversary exhibitions and celebrations: of Judy Chicago’s Feminist Art Program (FAP) at California State University at Fresno, of the Mary H. Dana Women Artists Series at Rutgers, originated by Joan Snyder, of the exhibition “Where We At,” organized by Faith Ringgold and other African American women artists, of the publication of Linda Nochlin’s signal essay, “Why Have there Been No Great Women Artists?,” of the formation of the landmark women artists cooperative New York gallery, A.I.R, of the Feminist Art Program at CalArts and of the FAP’s 1972 installation project, Womanhouse, followed by the 35th anniversaries of the Women’s Building in Los Angeles, and the Women’s Caucus for the Arts at the College Art Association.

Exhibitions that are part of the Feminist Art Project in 2006 to 2007 include How American Women Artists invented Postmodernism 1970-1975, curated by Judith K. Brodsky and Ferris Olin at Rutgers University, the opening of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum, Global Feminisms curated by Linda Nochlin and Maura Reilly opening at the Sackler in March, and WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, curated by Connie Butler, opening at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and coming to PS.1 in New York next year, One True Thing, curated by Dena Muller at A.I.R. Gallery, From the Inside Out: Feminist Art Then & Now at the Dr. M. T. Geoffrey Yeh Art Gallery at St John's University in Queens, curated by Claudia Sbrissa, Re:Generation, curated by Joan Snyder and her daughter Molly Snyder-Fink, a show of 18 emerging women artists for the 35th Anniversary of the Womens' Artists Series at Douglass College, at Smack Mellon Galleries in Dumbo and The Kentler International Drawing Center in Red Hook, Brooklyn, Women, Art, and Intellect, curated by Leslie King-Hammond, at Ceres Gallery; and also, “The Feminist Future: Theory and Practice in the Visual Arts” a two-day symposium that was at MoMA in January 2007 and a day of panels that are part of the Feminist Art Project at the 2007 CAA Annual Conference in New York in February 2007.

This impressive list is troubled by a number of undercurrents. Many of these are familiar tensions within feminism and the feminist art movement since its early days: tensions over racial representation and the perception of the predominance of heteronormative tendencies, generational tensions and rifts over the social meaning of the word feminism itself: at the MoMA conference one younger woman in the audience described identification with the word feminism as the “kiss of death.” There seems to be a continued disconnect between the current efforts at retrospection, historical reiteration, and recuperation, and the younger generation of women artists, who the older, “70s-era” generation wishes to inspire and also be recognized and honored by.

There is the frustrating reality that once the feminist canon of 70s feminist art was in place, it has been seemingly as fixed as the first (male) art historical canon had been. The efforts to enrich the established history by inserting many artists working inventively and with a feminist agenda of some kind in those years has been frustrated by the general atmosphere of limited commodification of the art market as a whole. The slice of the market and art historical canon pie is ever smaller while the price paid for being a feminist artist has often been substantial, sometimes leading to bitterness. These emotional undercurrents take place against a background of general cultural conservatism and the dominance of market values over social critique and nonconformist collaborative political activism.

Further, adding another archeological layer of forgetfulness, not only are many of the artists whose work was initiated by their generative encounter with early feminist art at the beginning of the movement still excluded from this reinvestigation of the history of that time, but another significant part of the history is also in some obscurity at this time: the intellectualism of psychoanalytic and Marxist-inspired feminist theory that marked the 1980s is also demonized or lost in this generally unintellectual time. Thus the panel that Mira Schor organized for the CAA day of panels on February 17th, 2007– “Life of the Mind, Life of the Market: A Re-evaluation of the Contribution of Theory to Feminist Art from 1980 to 2006” with Mary Kelly and Johanna Burton–will focus on a reevaluation of theoretically inclined intellectualism in a market-driven age.

We organized this M/E/A/N/I/N/G Online Forum precisely because of the contradictory aspects of this renewed interest in feminist art. The many exhibitions and panel discussions on feminist art listed above suggest the desire for a reassessment of the history and the current situation of feminist art and art by women around the world. However, the picture of the art made by women in the 1970s is inevitably partial given the scope of the subject. In proposing this forum to a large spectrum of women artists spanning at least three generations, we wanted to create a situation for reconsideration of 70s feminist art and the 70s in general. The questions we posed were:

Which women artists' work were you particularly interested in during the 1970s? What work were you doing? If you have come of age since the 1970s, what works by women artists of that time or of your generation have been influential for you? What are you doing in your own work that you feel relates to the Feminist Art Movement?

The responses we received span generations between the 1960s and the present. We wish to note that the racial and the gender composition of our respondents reflects those who answered our call for papers, not the much larger group that was invited to participate, a phenomenon also noted by MoMA curator Deborah Wye when the whiteness of the panelists at the MoMA symposium was challenged by audience members. However we are thrilled by the enthusiastic response to our questions and by the responses from the many wonderful women (and one man), who are new or are previous contributors to the M/E/A/N/I/N/G community.

Each person who has responded to our questions has had a personal approach to the questions. The open-endedness of these forums has been one of the characteristics of the M/E/A/N/I/N/G project from its inception in 1986. We hope that this forum gives some sense of the richness of the lived life of feminism in art.

return to contents

There were at least two works by women artists imprinted in my mind in the 1970s and early 1980s. First, Zinaida Serebriakova’s self-portrait of 1909 At the Dressing-Table. This painting was included in textbooks used by all Russian secondary schools. In 2003 a gallery in St. Petersburg, Russia, had a large retrospective of her works, with this image being used on publicity materials, to lure the public to a common image.

Zinaida Serebriakova’s self-portrait, At the Dressing-Table, 1909.

This work appeared during a period in European history when representational painting was questioned and transformed (early 20th century). The mood was even more serious and melancholic in Russia, where the Silver Age in art and literature was characterized by the dark mysterious poetry of Alexander Blok and the paintings of demons by Michael Vrubel. As one critic writes, this painting was made at a time of “spiritual crisis of Russian intelligentsia, brought about by the failure of the first Russian Revolution [of 1905]; the time of broken dreams, worst disillusionment, and loss of faith in human spirit, spiritual disconnect between dream of wonderful future and reality of everyday life.” As a result, At the Dressing-Table had a miraculous joyful impact during the exhibition in 1910 and Tretyakov Gallery (one of the largest art museums in Russia) acquired it immediately. It was included in a Soviet textbook despite its author leaving Russia in 1924, and probably remains there today.

The second work is of another childhood memory from a textbook. Tatyana Yablonskaya’s “Morning” was as joyful and happy as Serebriakova’s self-portrait. A girl stands in the middle of a sunny room, doing her morning exercise, getting ready for a day where she fulfils an important task of educating herself, discovering her ambition and fulfilling her potential, probably to participate in the building of socialist present and communist future. It was done in 1954, by an artist who was a leader in socialist realism movement, and who, according to her own words, later despised the ‘flat’ quality of the painting. Morning is also in the Tretyakov Gallery, since Yablonskaya was a leading Soviet painter, and many of her works were acquired by major museums. She died in 2005 in Kiev, Ukraine, with an official title of ‘hero of Ukraine,’ serving two terms as a member of Ukrainian parliament, professor, multiple award winner, and her own strongest critic.

These two works are influential beyond words for generations of Soviet children, they had impact even by just ‘being there’, and it would be interesting to do more research into the history of their inclusion into textbooks, and its (un)expected result. Without doubt, one could charge these paintings’ official inclusion with being straightforward propaganda and brainwashing. However, both women artists, in different times, in different contexts, were painting women and girls as a matter of fact. Painting them happy, joyful and by themselves: it was radical in 1909 and in 1954. It was still surprising in the early 1980s, enough to be remembered till today.

In 1999 I conducted a Feminist Art Workshop at LASALLE-SIA College of the Arts, Singapore, which resulted in a symposium and exhibition called A Self of One’s Own (there is a catalogue and curatorial essay with the same title). Two publications related to feminist art, inspired by the work done in the 1970s were particularly important to my thinking on the subject during that time: The Power of Feminist Art, edited by Norma Broude et al, and Inside the Visible: In, Of, and From the Feminine, edited by Catherine De Zegher. The same year I met Faith Wilding, who has been a constant source of influence and inspiration. At this moment I am writing an essay about work by Mithu Sen, a Delhi-based contemporary artist and poet who makes drawings, installations and objects, and I share her interest in the topics of hospitality and subjectivity.

Thought and creative work are two dangerous activities for a woman, especially as professional lifelong pursuits, as it might change the world and herself. This transformation has been of interest to me, especially as it became a subject of systematic study and collective work within feminist movement.

The Feminist Art Movement had the guts to bring to the mainstream what was considered before at best accidental and at worst plain crazy: a woman artist. And in the process both words “woman” and “artist” are deconstructed and redefined, since they really cannot be together, it is indigestible by Western art history as we know it. Yes, a woman artist is still considered by many just a contradiction in terms, but after the Feminist Art Movement we can laugh at it, since this is exactly our point! Unlike women artists of the past, who were more or less polite comrades, daughters and female companions of men artists, it was a movement made by women for women, no apologies, and it has been changing lives of those women who participated in it. Some of its aspects were at first uncomfortable to me, however, over a year ago I moved to the US, and now I seem to understand better why it was like it was: adamant, angry, and like a hurricane. It was a sense of common purpose when enough is enough to live like a ‘companion species’, and the courage of American women is admirable. It was a desire to shake off entire culture that makes woman-artist an expression, which is still embarrassing to most of my female art students. It is a shared history of Feminist Art Movement that very few generations of women would ever experience in their lives. In my own work today I try to be patient, since what we face everyday – history, art, language – is still largely anti-woman, even anti-ourselves (how else can one explain that possibility to have a woman or non-white president is still a matter of ‘national readiness’?). That is why I am not surprised that “F” word is so disturbing to many students. I noticed in my classes here that it takes a long time to go through the “F” word, while time would be better spent on discussing questions of aesthetics and its relation to space and time, or cultural difference, or poverty and sex-trafficking. While students try to frame me into a kind of "F box," I am trying to develop ways to avoid focusing too much on trying to prove anything to them, and rather move the discussion into direction of works themselves and issues at hand. To enable it, I have been formulating a few strategies for effective pedagogy, and the following is just two examples from those preliminary ideas.

1. Do not demand from a woman artist more than you would do from a male artist or what you see men demand from themselves. RELAX. It’s ok if not every woman artist or woman thinker is perfect (in whatever sense), and you do not have to feel yourself responsible for everything that another woman is doing. Women artists and writers have always done works of various quality and scale, and there is no need to dismiss the whole work as not perfect. Do not try to outsmart yourself all the time with critical rhetoric: it never ends. Learn: there are many women artists of all kinds of media, history, aesthetics, demographics, and cultures. There is no ‘true’ or ‘innocent’ representation / object / process, and making art involves risk and commitment to choice. Not making art, or writing, is not an answer to the fact that anything we make / write is implicated. RELAX. BREATHE. Take your time, wait, suspend judgment. Give yourself time.

2. When a student or a curator asks why to distinguish between women and men artists, or why to have exhibitions based on gender specificity, do not try to give an answer, even if you have ‘the best or right’ answer. Say something like “Why not?. The question itself frames a problem, makes it into a problem. And today to have a question like that is to be, basically, deaf, since Feminist Art Movement produced, discovered, and recorded so many answers! When Freud or whoever else asks “What does a woman want” he is not asking you, woman, he is just talking to another man / himself. There are so many women’s answers out there, those who want, have heard them. Pause for a moment, check if it is a monologue and not a dialogue as you hope. When you are curating an exhibition of women artists or having a book on women artists, or teach a course on women artists, do not start from or end by explaining / justifying ‘why.’ Not only any one of your justifications would seem like putting down other types of work or exhibitions, it also makes it into an issue even before the works themselves are discussed. After the Feminist Art Movement, it is a waste of our time, to move into this direction of justification, at least, from my personal experience of teaching. My position has become: I do not owe an explanation, not to say, justification, to that question. I have more time to show more recent art works, since it has been explained and answered a thousand times already. Thank God for the Feminist Art Movement! We can, hopefully, move on.

Irina Aristarkhova writes on and teaches courses in new media aesthetics, cyberculture, and feminist theory. She is Assistant Professor of Women's Studies and Visual Arts at Pennsylvania State University . She has edited and contributed to, Woman Does Not Exist: Contemporary Studies in Sexual Difference (Syktyvkar University Press, 1999, in Russian), and edited the first Luce Irigaray book in Russian, The Ethics of Sexual Difference (Moscow Art Magazine Publishing House, 2005). She was born in 1969 in Moscow.

Susan Bee

Family Trees

I got all my sisters with me.
– Sister Sledge (1979)

In the fall of 1969, after graduating from the bohemian grove of Music and Art High School in New York, I went to Barnard College, then as now an all-women’s college. My college years were set against the background of the raucous student actions against the Vietnam war and the emergence of the black power and gay rights movements. Columbia and Barnard were the focal point of many demonstrations in which I took an active part. It was good time to be at Barnard, since I had the great luck to meet or study with such major feminist thinkers as Catherine Stimpson and Kate Millet. At one point, I applied to major in Women’s Studies but was told that no such interdisciplinary major could be considered (some years later, Barnard did establish a Women’s Studies major).

I had also wanted to major in studio art, but Barnard didn’t countenance that either, so I ended up in Art History. In any case, there were almost no women art teachers at Barnard or Columbia. So I found myself looking outside of the college environment for role models. I had the example of the art and life of my mother, painter Miriam Laufer. In December 1970, I wrote a research paper on women artists in Barnard’s first seminar on women’s history, taught by Annette Baxter. At that time, I could find no reference books, or for that matter just about any information, on the subject. All that was soon to change. A.I.R. Gallery was founded in 1972. Lucy Lippard’s crucial From the Center, Feminist Essays on Women’s Art was published in 1976, and Heresies was founded in 1977. From 1979 to 1980 I worked as an editor for Cynthia Navaretta at Women Artists News, which had started in 1975.

In graduate school at Hunter from 1975 to 1977 there were no women art teachers at all in the department. So once again, I found myself looking to the newly formed feminist galleries, A.I.R. and Soho 20. I went to panels at A.I.R., which were organized by Nancy Spero and other artist members. And I listened to Ana Mendieta, Mary Beth Edelson, and many others talk about their artwork. These were heady experiences for a young artist. I vividly recall a panel at A.I.R. where Rosalind Krauss, my art history professor and thesis advisor at Hunter, and the only woman on the modern art history faculty, denounced feminism. No doubt this paved the way for her rapid ascent into the art establishment.

Susan Bee, Doomed to Win, Oil on canvas, 50 x 54", 1983.

Some of the women artists whose work most engaged me in the 1970s were Carolee Schneemann, Hannah Wilke, Louise Bourgeois, Joan Snyder, Pat Steir, Joan Semmel, Joan Jonas, Joyce Kozloff (and the Pattern and Decoration movement), Louisa Chase, Ellen Phelan, Mary Lucier, Joan Snitzer, Lee Sherry, Toni Simon, Eleanor Antin, Howardena Pindell, Alice Neel, Mimi Gross, Alice Aycock, Marcia Hafif, Faith Ringgold, Elizabeth Murray, Eva Hesse, Erika Rothenberg, Dottie Attie, Nancy Spero, and Miriam Schapiro. Well, anyway, those are the artists I most recall now, partly because of my own ongoing relationship with them. I know there were many others whose names I don’t remember or who dropped out of sight. I also mention these names because so much of the Official History of Feminist Art has involved deleting names not authenticated by the feminist and commercial art establishment.

In my student years at Barnard, I did expressionist figurative paintings, influenced, in part, by my mother’s work, as well as cut-up and collaged abstract paintings. I also did whimsical rapidograph fantasy line drawings, especially during my life in the rainforest of British Columbia, where I lived for a year after college with Charles Bernstein. While he wrote poems, I painted and drew – and we both chopped a lot of wood. We also spent a year in Santa Barbara, where I worked in a daycare center by day and painted by night.

Susan Bee in British Columbia, painting by Toni Simon, 1974.

By 1975, we had moved back to New York. When I started at Hunter’s M.A. program, I was doing large abstract stain paintings like Helen Frankenthaler's. I also did a number of letterist collage works that were published in various small press magazines interested in visual poetry; these works were shown in the U.S. and internationally. At Hunter, due to the overwhelming influence of my Minimalist professors, including Robert Morris, who disliked the colorfulness and expressivity of my paintings, I started to paint in just two colors, blue and white. As much as I liked Morris and some of his work, I didn’t feel he and his very much “fellow” company (Krauss included) allowed much room for students who thought about art differently than they did. Whether or not this is a gender issue remains hard to say; but gender cannot be entirely left out of the equation since it was, at the time, a consciously suppressed term. While at Hunter, I also got interested in doing photos and I had a darkroom at home and mostly did photograms and altered prints, where I painted the developer on the photos. I made my first artist’s book, Photogram, in 1978. This has been followed by 11 more books, including six published by Steve Clay of Granary Books and including collaborations with Susan Howe, Johanna Drucker, Charles Bernstein, and Jerome Rothenberg.

Susan Bee, Marsden Hartley Meets Wonderwoman, oil on linen, 1983, 30 x 20".

Around 1978, I joined a women artist’s support group called Tycho that showed together and we had discussions about our work. Meanwhile, from the mid-1970s, I had became very involved with the poets around St. Mark’s Church’s Poetry Project and L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E magazine. I worked on the design of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, pasting it up by hand (precomputer) in my apartment from 1978 to 1981. And after that I worked with the Segue Foundation, designing many of the early Roof books. I also went to lots of performances of Robert Wilson, Philip Glass, Richard Foreman and Kate Manheim, Jackson Mac Low, Charlemagne Palestine, Dick Higgins, Alison Knowles, and the Fluxus group, Douglas Dunn, Yvonne Rainer, Richard Schechner, the Living Theater, and early performances at the Kitchen. I went to the Franklin Furnace and Printed Matter to look at artist’s books and I showed my books there.

Susan Bee and Charles Bernstein, c. 1975

The women poets and writers that I met at that time were a crucial company for me and the poetry community that they formed marked a stark contrast to the art world, where commerce and transient fashion too often trumped both aesthetic values and sisterhood. So I think of friends such as Hannah Weiner, Lyn Hejinian, Johanna Drucker, Kathy Acker, Rae Armantrout, Susan Howe, Lynne Dreyer, Diane Ward, Bernadette Mayer, Anne Waldman, Ann Lauterbach, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Abigail Child, Erica Hunt, Lydia Davis, Leslie Scalapino, Madeline Gins, Adrienne Rich. They showed me a way to proceed to do your artwork and how to find your voice in a male-dominated world and they offered important support during those years. Male poets and artists such as James Sherry, Ron Silliman, Bruce Andrews, Nick Piombino, David Reed, David von Schlegall, Arakawa, Henry Hills, John Yau, Robert Creeley, Jerry Rothenberg, Bob Perelman, Richard Tuttle, and Ted Greenwald, were also very much part of my life then, especially Charles, who I met in high school and married, after years living together, in 1977.

Susan Bee, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Pig, oil on linen, 1983, 50 x 60".

From 1980 to 1985, Mira Schor and I participated in a discussion group of younger artists and critics (men and women) that meet initially at A.I.R. In 1982, I spoke on a panel at A.I.R. titled "Critics: A New Generation." In 1984, I was in Women Artists of the 80's: New Talent, a group show at A.I.R. curated by Corinne Robins. Mira and I decided to publish M/E/A/N/I/N/G in 1986 and we kept the print version going for 10 years till 1996. We then published the M/E/A/N/I/N/G Anthology in 2000 and started M/E/A/N/I/N/G Online in 2002.

Susan Bee and Mira Schor holding M/E/A/N/I/N/G #5, 1990.

In 1996, after many years of struggling to get my paintings shown in commercial galleries (and only occasionally succeeding), I joined A.I.R. Gallery and became part of another community of women artists that is still active. Since joining the gallery, I have had four solo shows, participated in numerous group shows, and been part of monthly meetings.

Looking back on the 1970s, I realize now that the whole fabric of the times was in flux and that the energy of the feminist art movement was just one important part of the larger blossoming of avant-gardes and undergrounds and political movements. Community remains a work in progress for artists: still urgent, still flawed. The 70s laid a groundwork on which I continue to build.

Susan Bee (center in purple) with members of A.I.R. Gallery, NYC, 2006.

Susan Bee is a painter, editor, and book artist living in NYC. She shows at A.I.R. Gallery and Granary Books publishes her artist's books. She teaches in the School of Visual Arts MFA in Art Criticism program. Bee will show paintings in A.I.R.'s 35th Anniversary group show in NYC in Feb. 2007, the show travels to the Putney School in Vermont. She speaks at the CAA on her artist's books on Feb. 17. Bee will do a presentation on collaboration with Johanna Drucker at the Bowery Poetry Club on May 5.

return to contents

Emma Bee Bernstein

After attending “The Feminist Future” symposium at the Museum of Modern Art ( January 26-27, 2007) I don’t think I will ever look at or create art as I did before. This is one of feminism’s greatest triumphs: to change the way people look at and experience the world, to challenge assumptions and provoke interrogation. However, why did it take the attending of a symposium for me to experience this change?

All of the seeds for my feminist future were well planted. I grew up around strong feminist artists, my mother Susan Bee and her many colorful friends. I was raised to be aware of the struggles of womanhood. I had subconsciously internalized the fly-by story of 1970s feminist art as many of its practitioners were friends of the family, and its books and manifestos lay invitingly around the house. At a young age I began to subscribe to Ms. magazine, and my early heroes included Frida Kahlo, Gloria Steinem, and Sylvia Plath. It was when I discovered feminist punk music at age thirteen, though, that I truly came of age as a young activist. Kathleen Hanna, who helped form the Riot Grrrl movement in the early 1990s, was the first feminist idol I truly identified with. Although I was slightly late (I discovered Riot Grrrl ten years after its heyday), the closer connection in time period and age made a huge difference. It was something my parents could not understand, and that made it appealing. Hanna’s band Bikini Kill, with their incendiary call to action “Revolution grrrl style now!,” created an aesthetic and a movement that formed my identity as a young teenager. Riot grrrl was a style of dress, an attitude, a way of life… I soon found that there was a NY chapter of what had become a nationwide feminist D.I.Y. (do it yourself) organization, and started attending weekly meetings on the Lower East Side, where I found like-minded punk girls to write zines and start bands with. We rejected ideals of body image, embraced sexuality and wild style, and adapted an aggressive and impassionate attitude. We started pro-choice protests, had “punk proms,” brought food to women’s shelters, and crashed male-dominated mosh pits. The best thing about my involvement with this group was the sense of being a part of something, not apart from everything (a semantic feminist truism Linda Nochlin pointed out this weekend).

Over time though I grew out of my pink hair and fishnet tights, and became tired of the constant battling between the heterosexuals and the lesbians, the man-haters and those of us who wanted to include boys. I became disillusioned with the “sisterhood” and sadly left the scene. I wouldn’t return to my early feminist days for nearly six years, although the effects of my early involvement were always felt. I began to find more solace in denial, in trying to transgress the boundaries of gender and be a person rather than just a woman. In many chats throughout the years with female friends, even former riot grrls, the word feminism seemed to have become shrouded in a veil of fear. I continued to be privately inspired by woman artists and musicians, but I rarely advertised my predilections. I found that feminism was no longer “cool,” and it made me feel unappealing to identify with it.

Emma Bee Bernstein, untitled, color photograph, 2004.

Throughout college I have gradually outgrown this fear. As an Art History and Studio Art major I never elected to take a course related to feminism, but my artwork and interests became increasingly concerned with issues related to the representation of women. I began to work as a photographer for my school’s pro-sex erotica magazine, and as a result was constantly asked to defend my positions towards pornography and feminism. In my art classes I was also pressed to explain my predilection for taking photographs of scantily-clad femme fatales. My art history BA thesis started as an examination of the intersection of contemporary fashion and art photography, but I kept being most fascinated with how this related to the changing representation by and of women. Eventually I realized that my avoidance of feminism and its history was hurting rather than helping my work and studies, and I began to try and make up for lost time by devouring any text or artwork I could find related to it. It was fortunately at this exact moment that I also found out about the feminism symposium at MoMA, and its scholarship fund. I eagerly wrote up an application for the conference, which appealed to my voracious appetite for feminism at this pivotal moment. When accepted, my enthusiasm only grew, and in the preceding weeks my entire attitude towards feminism changed in anticipation of the conference.

There is no way for me to address here all the issues and ideas that the conference provoked and inspired. There were many highlights, and many sour notes as well. The symposium was successfully bookended by Lucy Lippard and Linda Nochlin who gave the most rousing and positive speeches, making gestures to the power of the collective, the personal as political, and the individual situated in the ism. However, it was in some of the more troubling and complex presentations that the problems of the future were truly allowed to manifest. Marina Abramovic’s defiant (and unquestioned) statement that she was just an artist, not a feminist artist, coupled with her ambiguous video satire of Slavic fertility myths seemed to illustrate the unfortunate consequences of using ribald humor to avoid confrontation. Coco Fusco, however, effectively used comedy to raise the most vital issues facing contemporary feminism: sexuality as subversive power, the personal as profitable, and the artifice of the art market. Unfortunately she was the first and last speaker to take a successful stab in this direction. Even Griselda Pollock, perhaps the most powerful speaker, quickly ran through these issues, using dismissive terminology (the cosmetic commodity culture of spectacle and capitalism) to bypass what are complex and vital issues facing feminism. Why are so many women artists interested in fashion and traditional constructs of feminine beauty? Why is the material spectacle of the art market such an appealing force for young women? Why are women not more defiant towards these forces? Ingrid Sischy alluded to her interest in these subjects, but didn’t address their controversial status.

If the conference was disappointing at all, it was in what seemed to be a general avoidance tactic, instigated through the usual utopian flair for glossing over the truly problematic issues, ranging from tokenism to glamour to the art market. There was a general focus on rehearsing the glorious past, which was essential and enlightening for me, but also seemed to detract at times for the purpose of the conference at hand. This approach seemed most relevant when related to the “writing the history of feminism” and the “institutionalization of feminism” panels, which made understanding of the past an integral element of the future. However, it was less than necessary to rewatch every one of Martha Rosler’s video pieces. The audience participated and perpetuated this waste of time by reciting memories and odd public relations requests, instead of asking relevant questions or taking advantage of the wonderful thinkers on hand.

Emma Bee Bernstein, untitled, color photograph, 2006.

Despite these setbacks, many of the espoused theories were challenging and inspiring. Anne Wagner’s call to the feminist imagination to continue to reinvent the monstrous; the idea of negation, ambiguity, and opposition as essential feminist tools (Wagner and Nochlin); Uta Meta-Bauer’s thesis that theatrical methods act as challenges to previous systems of reference; David Joselit’s definition of a picture as a transgendered agent, which engenders many attitudes, his inkling that the performativity of any artwork and its activism are linked through a simultaneous process of exteriorization of an interior and interiorization of an exterior; Griselda Pollock’s plea for sustained creativity rather than novelty for novelty’s sake, non-Oedipal models that cause respect rather than rebellion in genealogies, for a feminist future that we live beside not below, “the right to say WHO I am, not WHAT I am,” to have feminism conflated with the feminine, for the feminine and masculine to be understood as metaphors, symbols, tools, that create positive dimensional action in all sexes, that the symbolic gesture of maternity be an art world ethos where artists can rear the next generation without having to claim anything in return; Richard Meyer’s championing of the effeminate man; the Guerrilla Girl’s demand for power in anonymous numbers; Helen Molesworth’s call for a museological genealogy of brothers and sisters rather than fathers and mothers; Nochlin’s powerful quotation from Milton that the feminist future render us “Sufficient to stand, but free to fall." These ideas and more are what made the conference the stimulating and moving event it was. Nonetheless, the most inspiring and powerful effect of the whole conference was still the feeling it gave me of being a part of something, rather than apart from everything. Perhaps this is the true triumph of the conference and the real hope for the future of feminism: the sustained creation of communities of support, the continued bonds of sisterhood, and the never ending symbiosis between the personal and the political.

Emma Bee Bernstein was born in 1985 in NYC. She is a senior majoring in Art History and Studio Art at the University of Chicago. She received a Feminist Future Scholarship to attend the Feminist Future Symposium at MoMA. She stars in Henry Hills' film, Emma's Dilemma (2005), in which she interviews Richard Foreman, Ken Jacobs, Tony Oursler, Carolee Schneemann, and many other artists and poets.

return to contents

I came late to feminism, by which I mean that I was born in the early 1970s. In that way, of course, I “missed” the being-there part of a movement (a philosophy? a gathering? an argument? a resistance? a discourse? a practice? a way of life? an aesthetic? a dream? a desire? a revolution?) to which I felt nonetheless totally cathected and totally indebted. Yet, as my parenthetical list above probably makes clear, as much as I identified with feminism—from the moment I heard the word and even, I think, before—I didn’t exactly know what it was. It was handed down to me by way of evidence that I found in my small-town library: books and articles that I mostly lucked onto since I wasn’t quite sure what I was looking for and that I read with an appetite that surprised and thrilled me.

This is all to say that in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I experienced 1970s feminism and looked at its art, albeit in a deferred and almost entirely solitary way. I was lucky to have an art history professor who taught courses on the subjects (in Reno, Nevada, definitely not to be taken for granted), and a friend or two similarly inclined. But, overall, my first encounters with feminism—its histories and its conversations—were taken up from the double divide of time and place. This, I realize now, made my discovery of its figures, its terms, and its relevance all the more potent. For however “late” I had arrived to feminism, it seemed urgent and relevant and powerful—a tincture still waiting to be drunk. It is no exaggeration to say: those who argue that the lessons of feminism have been fully absorbed and outdated need only spend a week or two in the hinterlands of America. It’s amazing how “fresh” feminism feels there.

That said, the artists that I learned about first—whose work, by that time, spanned from the late 1960s upward nearly thirty years—were not necessarily or even pragmatically related, aside from the fact that they were all women and could be claimed, in one way or another, for feminism. This meant that Betye Saar, Francesca Woodman, Barbara Kruger, and Yvonne Rainer (and such historical “precedents” as Claude Cahun and Rosa Bonheur) were ostensibly “common” to one another, if only in the following ways: I was “interested” in all of their practices, and I generally would only hear about these practices if enrolled in a class or reading a book about “women” artists. Such an initial generic leveling is, of course, customary to any topic with which one is just getting acquainted. Yet, I bring it up here because it seems that such a wide and unruly net does not get tightened and honed as a student works her way from 200-level classes to graduate school (if classes in feminist art are even on offer there) and beyond.

I am not making an argument that the most pressing issue for feminism or feminist art history today is its lack of internal distinctions or specialization. But I am concerned that “feminism” is often offered tout court—take it or leave it—before the person to whom it is offered can even be sure what it is they’re deciding on. This accounts, I think, for so many of the continuing conversations (at the beginning of every course on feminism, during the Q & A of every conference devoted to it) that return to the question “What is feminism?” It also accounts for a certain fatigue and suspiciousness in younger students (some of mine at least) who want to discuss politics, representation, ideology, and repression but feel the word “feminism” might confuse these issues rather than clarify them. Indeed, while I was (and still am) exhilarated by including myself almost blindly in the “we” of feminism, I wonder if such a provisional and exploratory model of loose collectivity continues to capture the imaginary of younger women.

This captured imagination is important. I signed onto feminism even before I knew why, and then I started sifting. The work that I found myself gravitating toward, I realize now, was usually generated by a kind of alchemical dosage of euphoria and anger—a recognition of an unbearable structural situation and one’s agency to work against it. Here are some of the artists whose work embodied this kind of energy for me and allowed me to articulate some kind of position in relation to the world myself: Julie Ault, Dara Birnbaum, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Joan Jonas, Mary Kelly, Sherrie Levine, Adrian Piper, Mira Schor, Nancy Spero, and Rosemarie Trockel (to just get started.) My list may look just as unorganized as those I complained about above, but it bears the imprint of my logic and is everywhere evident in my own work. I can make a similar list of writers, historians, and scholars. My practice today of art history, criticism, and pedagogy returns again and again to thinking through the productivity (and production) of a feminism to which I was late but also just in time. How to maintain this timeliness for others (and myself) remains foremost in my work.

Johanna Burton , a NY-based art historian and critic, is the editor of the critical essay collection, Cindy Sherman, (MIT Press, October Files, 2006). She is the author of an article on the women-only art magazine Eau de Cologne, in Witness to Her Art (eds. Rhea Anastas and Michael Brenson, Center for Curatorial Studies, 2006). A faculty member of Bard College’s Center for Curatorial Studies and Columbia University’s School of the Arts, she was a critical issues fellow in the Whitney Independent Study Program and is writing her dissertation at Princeton University on appropriation in American art of the 1980s.  

return to contents

When I came of age in the late 80s, the 70s–when Linda Benglis posing in the Artforum ad with a dildo was radical–seemed eons ago. Unfortunately the politics of today make artwork from the 70s quite fresh–as we fight for similar rights, and freedoms AGAIN. The work of Nancy Spero on war and mythology and Adrian Piper on race, were important in my development as a person but they seemed wedged into history books.

Ingrid Calame tracing the Indianapolis Motor
Speedway, Indianapolis, IN , 2006.

Fortunately, knowledge doesn’t stay in timelines and history books, but gets braided back into life. My involvement with the people who have made and lived history has blurred decades and disintegrated categories. Their ideas have taken a while to percolate into the core of my being. Most of my mentors and models have been women. Teachers such as Mira Schor, with her contribution about feminism and painting have become lifelong friends. When I graduated from SUNY Purchase with my BFA in 1987, I went to work as a studio assistant for artists including Nancy Davidson, Harriet Shorr (who had been my teachers), Janet Fish, and Martha Diamond. They became my models for what it is to be an artist how to run a business, as well as how to keep afloat as an artist emotionally and spiritually. I also learned a lot of painting chops by being a fly on the wall. Carole Byard introduced me to a world of African-American artists, such as Betye and Alison Saar, of whom I had not been aware. She helped me understand my own interracial extended family, as well as the racism and classism built into how I understood it growing up.

My paintings and drawings have deep resonances with the feminist art movement, in their grounding in the body as the pivotal point from which to make artwork. Having always been a painter, it took stepping outside of this practice to better understand its fundamentals. When I was studying film at CalArts in the mid-90s, I realized that a cornerstone of painting was using one’s body, as opposed to a camera, as the tool of translation of information. This affected the scale of the images that I made as well as the information from which I worked. By tracing stains on the street I was using the limits of what I could see and do with my body to gather information. This relates directly to the performances of Carolee Schneemann and paintings of Joan Semmel from the 70s, as well as the earthworks of Robert Smithson and the structuralist films of James Benning. The work in early ninties of Kiki Smith and Sue Williams helped me recognize that the body was a terrain that mattered to me in my gut and my intellect.

My interest in the body as a starting point comes from its absolute familiarity and uncontrollability. The irreducible fact of human mortality makes it the ideal place from which to look at the issue of abstraction. I am interested in how we feel confident that we know anything in this increasingly fractured but claustrophobically collapsing world. My own questions about identity–racial and sexual –fueled my questions about representation, but rather than take on identity politics, I chose to take up the question of the abstraction of representation. Painting, with its history of abstraction, was the perfect location for an investigation into worldly abstraction because there is an intrinsic historical conversation about representation versus abstraction. The work of Polly Apfelbaum, Mary Heilmann, and Jessica Stockholder, primed me for this question when I lived in New York in the early 90s. Since I moved to LA, my peers Monique Prieto, Laura Owens (both CalArts classmates), Linda Bessemer, Sally Elesby, and Berlin-based Katharina Grosse all work on variations of this question which I find moving.

Ingrid Calame, Secular Response 3A (Tracings up to the L.A. River placed in the Clark
Telescope Dome, Lowell Observatory, Flagstaff, AZ), installed at Art Gallery of Ontario,
Toronto, Canada, latex and One Shot paint on wall, 16' 6" x 17' 5", 2006.

Finally, I have found much inspiration in the unusual career of Alexis Smith, bifurcated between ambitious public art works and intimate art world collages. Recent shows of her collages in New York and LA made me reflect on the time that has elapsed since 1991 when I first saw her work in her Whitney Museum mid-career survey. At that time I felt that the attitude in the collages was ironic and I was on the outside of the joke. Today I feel that they pose urgently pointing questions towards current politics in which I am all too enmeshed.

Ingrid Calame is an artist born in NY, who lives and works in LA. She is represented by James Cohan Gallery in New York and Galerie Schmidt Maczollek in Cologne, Germany. Her current project is tracing tire tracks and skidmarks from the Indianapolis Speedway. The resulting works will be on view at James Cohan Gallery, NY (Sept. 2007) and the Indianapolis Museum of Art (Nov. 2007).

The following is a condensed version of something I wrote about the 1970s several years ago in The Aesthetics of Power: Essays in the Critical History of Art ( Cambridge University Press, 1993).

For me, the 1970s began in 1968 on the campus of Columbia University. In the spring of that year, as I was finishing my Ph.D. in art history, students active in the Civil Rights and anti-Vietnam War movements triggered a strike that brought the campus to a standstill. The students introduced a new culture of protest into every corner of the campus and in a matter of days taught some hard lessons about the limits of liberalism in educational institutions. It was something of a shock to watch the reaction of some of the professors in my department. Although renowned as humanist scholars, they seemed utterly unable to recognize the issues raised by the students, never mind taking a stand on them. Their reaction worried me and deepened some fears I already had about the discipline of art history. Their willingness to disconnect the politics of their professional lives in the university from the politics of the world outside – didn’t this replicate art history’s avoidance of the social and the political meanings of art? Eventually, the campus calmed down and resumed its usual business. But the questions kicked up by the crisis did not go away. On the contrary, they became more compelling and complicated as time went by, especially with the appearance of a new wave of feminism and what was then called Gay Liberation. That is how the 70s began for me.

And it seemed to me that a lot of other people were in a similar place. One could feel connected, no matter how vaguely, with other people, not only other artists and intellectuals concerned with civil rights and social justice, but also psychologists, journalists and unionists who felt the possibility of social change and psychological expansion and worked to bring it about. It was that feeling of possibility that I most associate with the 70s, and a sense of shared conviction that what we wrote or taught or made or did could be linked to larger struggles and situations. So, along with like-minded artists and academics, I participated in study groups, consciousness-raising groups, editorial collectives, and radical caucuses, seeking insights and tools with which to study the social, political, and psychological meanings of art from new, more open vantage points. I wanted to know about the intersection of art and power in the past and the present and also about the ways art contested power.

As someone trying to assimilate the Marxist tradition, it did not seem possible (after 1969) that one could be a Marxist and not also a feminist. Reading Marx and the Marxist tradition along with a developing feminist discourse helped frame the issues I wanted to explore: motherhood as an historical concept, the changing nature of patriarchy, the meanings of female nudity in art, and so on. Marxism and feminism together suggested a world that included clashing interests, complex social relations between the sexes and races as well as classes, changing ideological needs, and changing uses for art—in short, a world in which art is not a neutral or passive reflection of historical experience but a part of the action. Above all, Marxism and feminism insisted on the connectedness between things, between the history of subjective experience and the objective, social world. Subsequent history was rough on the optimism of that era. Even so, there is still some 70s left in me. It is the decade that most shaped my outlook and values, and I count myself fortunate to have lived through it.

Carol Duncan is Professor Emerita of Art History at Ramapo College of New Jersey. Her essays, including “Virility and Domination in Early Twentieth-Century Vanguard Painting” and “The MoMA’s Hot Mamas” have been collected in The Aesthetics of Power (Cambridge University Press, 1993) and Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums (Routledge, 1995).

The stand-out woman for me in the 1970s was Louise Bourgeois. Her influences included not only the woman-centered gut wrenching imagery she produced  with the abandon and courage it took in those days to weather predictable responses, but also herself as a human being. Louise would come to A.I.R. Gallery and tug on your sleeve asking how you got into this or that exhibition. Louise never gave up, and the best part is after all those years, it finally paid off, and she lived to enjoy it.

Reassessment
I am not  hearing many reassessments that go deeply into new  territory on the profound influence of feminism that has permeated our world on every level--locally and globally. We could  use a best seller with a clear message and slogan to go with it that will capture people’s imagination and finally place feminism in perspective for the whole population. Followed by many more. I am ever aware and grateful for what the 70s feminist community did for me. As groups, A.I.R. Gallery and Heresies in particular, as individual women, Suzanne Lacy for her wisdom, Nancy Spero for her inspiration, Mimi Shapiro for her support,  and Lucy Lippard for being there. The list goes on. Feminism’s influences have not been static, but have transfigured my art making many times over.

My current projects that spring from the processes of the feminist circle, (non-hierachical, collaborative, giving credit where it is due, structured, group and self-crits, etc), that we actively practiced and produced in the 70s, include workshops produced in collaboration with college students and local residence to create appropriate projects for their community. These workshops build on, while adding to, the feminist working processes we devised in the 70s. Currently a three-year project, titled Utopiana, is in the process of being  produced with the small historical town of New Harmony, Indiana, famous for its early (1816) roots in an utopian experiment. The workshop consists of both townspeople and a group of students from near by University of Southern Indiana, and employs the processes as described above.  Beginning  with the question, “What is utopian in our culture today that we do not recognize as such?” With both direct feedback from the community and our creativity we are designing three projects for the downtown area of New Harmony that will increase public space and facilitate an updated discussion about the towns utopian roots and what that means today. I also dialogue and exchange information with other artists, who are often feminist, around the globe, and are also creating small scale public social space in various communities. While I was in Sweden for six months earlier this year I collaborated with other artists to produce an International Artists Contract which is intentionally kept in draft form so that artists can tailor the contract to their  needs.  To download a copy of the contract go to my web site.

Mary Beth Edelson has exhibited widely and was an early member of A.I.R. Gallery. A book about her work, The Art of Mary Beth Edelson, was published in 2002.

Joanna Frueh

Repatriation in the Realm of Love

Mira and Susan’s questions for their forum have set memories in motion and stirred my interest in my own professional history, the accuracy of feminist art history, and the importance of gratitude. My contribution to this forum is the beginning of a substantial essay about the interrelations of personal memory, professional life, true history, and thanks.

Love
Love is the ground of soul-and-mind-inseparable-from-body. We lose our way, veering far from that home territory, which is light and comforting and full of ease, because damage small and large, from a stare at us on the sidewalk to a slap from a mother to the Freudian or Lacanian theory we read in graduate school to the end of kisses from a lover, infiltrates or attacks our wellbeing. Or life may feel pretty secure—we have friends, a livable income, a home that we have decorated with necessities and beauties that create relaxation—and obstructions to love come from our spinning minds that project anxieties onto events and relations. We become expatriates, stepping all too gingerly into the realm of love; existing without the self-acceptance that allows us to be at home there, both by ourselves and with others. I first called myself a feminist in 1968, when I was twenty, and since then, feminist theory and criticism, feminist art, and women artists and scholars who name themselves and their work feminist have helped mightily to repatriate me in the realm of love. They are major factors in my mature art and writing, which focus on love.

Gratitude
When I think about artists whose work has expanded my mind and heart, and therefore, my writing, my performances, and my photographic collaborations, I pause to say, “Thank you,” before anything else. I am larger and livelier because of you. Largeness: you came into my eyes and psyche, opening them. Liveliness: your art has scintillated through me. It becomes me—a part of the light in a photograph or the imagery in a performance text, of my bodily gestures or bravery, of my patterns of words and my ability to see myself more clearly. The way that you have fashioned yourself and your world becomes me—suits my vision of myself and of the world as that vision both shifts, for my life changes and I grow, and remains true to knowing this: soul-and-mind-inseparable-from-body is real.

Art and Friendship
Directly after graduating from Sarah Lawrence College in 1968, I moved to Chicago. By 1973 I was the Director of Artemisia Gallery, a women’s cooperative. Two artists whom I met there, Janet Cooling and Hollis Sigler, are essential to my aesthetic, intellectual, and personal freedom. I was close to them and their work into the early 80s. Janet reveled in highly saturated, jewel-bright hues, and both her drawings, in densely applied Prismacolor, and her acrylic paintings depicted lesbian lovers, sometimes nude, sometimes clothed, sometimes in sexual encounters, sometimes dancing. The erotic vivacity of the work thrilled me, and her daring, at that time and in the Chicago art world, elucidated and emboldened my own daring. Janet titled one of her paintings from that time This Is Where I Live.

That phrase repeated in me, soul-and-mind-inseparable-from-body, like a mantra, and through the years, that phrase has recurred in the same lucidly meditative way. This is where I live: this mind, this intuition, this body, this age, this city, this boyfriend, this red iris, these saguaros, this millennium, this raunch-girl culture, this surveillance society, this teaching position, this devil’s food cake, this barking dog next door, this desert heat that stands me still—in love with living.Holly’s colorful and witty drawings and paintings featuring her invented character, The Lady, broke my heart and uplifted me. Holly rooted their range of emotion, from gaiety to tragedy, in her own experience. Her work was absolutely intimate. To share intimacy through one’s art struck me as vital to the process and effects of my own work, and the freedom of self-revelation and vulnerability that I felt in her work corresponded with my own tendencies in those directions. So too did her playfulness and sense of fantasy, her girly, tender, and romantic view of femininity and the world.

Janet and Holly were comfortable calling themselves lesbians, and the independence and joy manifested in their art and in our conversations brought buoyancy as well as intense questioning into my own sexual self-perception. The Sexual Revolution coincided with the beginning of Second Wave Feminism, with its activism in behalf of sexual freedom for women. I came of age then, as the 60s drew to a close, and I was taken by the Second-Wave maxim, The personal ispolitical. Lesbian activism was a strong element of the early Second Wave. My relations with women, which were emotional, intellectual, and sometimes sexual, along with lesbian theory as well as activism, compelled me to recognize my own sexual presence: to be none other than myself in my erotic fullness. Holly’s and Janet’s art most beautifully compelled me to be me.

I don’t recall when I became fascinated with Hannah Wilke’s art, but between 1981 and 1983, when I was teaching at Oberlin College, I interviewed her in her New York loft, intending to write about her work. My first publication about Hannah was the sole essay in Hannah Wilke: A Retrospective, published in 1989, and I’ve written several other pieces about her since then, the most recent being in 2006.¹ I passionately respected Hannah’s fearlessness: I loved that she created herself as a nude; in other words, that she created herself as a beauty in her photos, videos, and performances. Most people who know her work probably would say that Hannah was a beauty into midlife, before she died in 1993 after living with cancer. I don’t wish to contradict them, but I do know that through our own practices and thinking we do have some power in creating our own beauty, or lack thereof. In my book Monster/Beauty: Building the Body of Love, I’ve called that power and capacity aesthetic/erotic self-creation. Hannah was brilliant at it and brilliant at creating glamour. I loved looking at her glamour in her art and being in her glamour when we talked. Hannah was not an easy person, but she was just plain brilliant, so talking with her—which meant listening a lot—stimulated me. Being in the glamour of her words as well as the glamour of her presence.

Conversation with artists whose work has meant a great deal to my own has been as important as the art that they created. Though a culture that genuflects to innovation and originality in the arts teaches artists to fear influence, I say, with thanks, that I have been under the influence—intoxicated—by friends and lovers in the Feminist Art Movement. We cannot separate ourselves from either the people or the art that moves us, because we injure our integrity when we delude ourselves into thinking that we have become who we are, in our work and our personal lives, all by ourselves. While the canonized great men of art may influence us and we may like to name them as our aesthetic allies, the passionate relations in our daily lives are lovingly informative. They shorten or end our exile from the realm of love.

Coming of Age and Feminist Affinities
I was born in 1948. From a purely chronological and categorical perspective, that makes me a Second Wave feminist: I came of age as a woman in the 1960s. Yet, I have never felt that I belong wholly to a particular feminist wave; so neither do I feel wholly a member of any feminist wave in art.

Joanna Frueh and Russell Dudley, Venus Verticordia 2005 (2004) .
Photo after Dante Gabriel Rossetti's painting Venus Verticordia (1864-69).

I came of age as an art critic in the late 70s before I came of age as an artist during the early to mid 80s. I was living in Chicago and published my first articles in Artforum, Art in America, The Chicago Reader, the Feminist Art Journal, and the New Art Examiner between 1976 and 1978. My first performance took place at the Deson Gallery in Chicago in 1979, and from then into 1985 I performed (sometimes with my first husband, Thomas Kochheiser) where I lived. In 1986 I presented a performance at the College Art Association conference in New York, and from then on I have performed at many other venues. With the publication in 1996 of Erotic Faculties, a collection of my performance texts that includes a “portfolio” of self-portrait pin-ups, shot in collaboration with my second husband, Russell Dudley, both my performance and photo work became widely disseminated. I wrote and performed the pieces in Erotic Faculties between 1986 and 1994. Russ and I began collaborating on photos of me in 1988, and we shot the images that appear in Erotic Faculties between 1989 and 1992. So, while I was active professionally and creatively in the 1970s—from age twenty-eight to thirty-one—a significant body of my work, the photos, did not begin till midlife—age forty—and was not publicly available till I was forty-eight. Feminism helps to illuminate the complexities of my professional coming of age. First Wave, Second Wave, and Third Wave, as categories that bracket historical periods, that encompass both chords and discords of feminists as well as practices, ideologies, and individuals of significant difference from one another, and that leave out other waves and ripples prior to the nineteenth century and outside of Europe and the United States, are unwieldy and frustrating. Hannah, Holly, Janet, and I all belong in the categorical illusion of Second Wave, because of our birth dates.

While the Second Wave revitalizes and builds on First Wave liberalism—protection of autonomy and of individual choice—with the Second Wave’s focus on reproductive rights, and, as I mentioned earlier, sexual freedom, by the late 70s, and into the Second Wave’s “end” somewhere in the “post-feminist,” deconstructionist early 80s, Second Wave became identified with anti-porn and sex-negative attitudes. (Through the 80s and into the 90s, I generally supported the rights of people to make and view pornography. However, because of its increasingly abundant visual and moral ugliness beginning in the ‘90s, porn has lost much of my support.) Second Wave feminists certainly understood that sex is powerful and that, if women are to feel whole and truly human, they must define, determine, and enjoy their own sexuality, yet I have felt some feminists’ hostility towards the honest, intimate, romantic, and graphic expressions of heterosexual pleasure in my performances, such as Mouth Piece (1989). Even in 2003, when I performed The Aesthetics of Orgasm at a women’s conference in Belfast, a large portion of the audience strongly projected hostility towards me. I felt pain: that hostile portion of the audience was composed primarily of midlife women—my generation—and lesbians—with whom I have felt solidarity for decades. On the other hand, one of the most enthusiastic members of the Belfast audience was Myfanwy MacDonald, a transgender male of around thirty who was working on her Ph.D. in Australia.

Luminosity
I used to teach at the University of Nevada, Reno—I became Professor Emerita of Art History at the beginning of 2007 and am now Distinguished Professor in the School of Art at the University of Arizona—and in the student newspaper several years ago, a writer, having seen a performance of mine, declared that he had witnessed my “luminous sexuality.” If I am luminous, it is because you, luminous sisters, have let me see how you have fashioned your lives and yourselves, how you have done your best to love. Luminous sisters, Janet, Holly, Hannah: in our feminist allegiance, our feminist light, we repatriate the realm of love.

Notes
1. Joanna Frueh, “Beauty Loves Company,” in Nancy N. Chen and Helene Moglen, eds., Bodies in the Making: Transgressions and Transformations (Santa Cruz, CA: New Pacific Press, 2006), 19-26.
2. Maria Elena Buszek, Pin-Up Grrrls: Feminism, Sexuality, Popular Culture (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2006), 14.
3. In note 147 of Thalia Gouma-Peterson’s and Patricia Mathews’s “The Feminist Critique of Art History,” The Art Bulletin, 69.3 (Sept. 1987), 344, the authors quote me and then write that methodologies such as mine “have been criticized for their essentialism and their re-stereotyping of woman as body.”
4. The first and only time that I performed Has the Body Lost Its Mind? was at the Theory panel, The Way We Look, The Way We See: Art Criticism for Women in the ‘90s conference, Los Angeles, CA.
5. Frueh, “Has the Body Lost Its Mind?” in Frueh, Erotic Faculties (Berkeley: U of California Press, 1996), 115.

Joanna Frueh is a writer, an artist, and a scholar. Clairvoyance (For Those In The Desert): Selected Poetry and Prose, 1979-2004, a collection of her key performance texts, is forthcoming from Duke University Press.

Feminism, Actually

I’ve decided to address the questions posed by Mira and Susan with what I’m thinking about now. I was in Judy Chicago’s first feminist art program (Fresno, CA) and then studied with Sheila Levrant de Bretteville at CalArts, and both Judy and Sheila were formative and life-changing mentors. But I’m in the middle of a conversation, mostly with myself, about what women’s lives have to teach us about feminism, actually. I remember in John Berger’s book about Pablo Picasso, he suggests that the Communist Party, of whom Picasso was a card-carrying member, didn’t provide a capacious enough aesthetic space for Picasso to contribute in the ways in which he possibly could have. The party, with its rigid and oppressive ideas of what could be and what couldn’t be art, failed him and therefore us. It’s not that I think this is true for feminism, but I’m wondering how women’s lives get lost – or if they really do – in the middle of feminism, as feminists. These questions aren’t active in my imagination, really, for myself. I am indebted to the feminist movement, or, rather, the women who fought it into existence. The junk, the psychological debris of relatedness, when it doesn’t work or hold, I chalk up to social systems that impoverish, deprive, etc.

But for a while now, I’ve not been able to blame the usual list of suspects when I look at the life and work of a woman who didn’t make it through: Maryse Holder, a writer a teacher, and explorer, in a manner of speaking: In 2002, while researching a piece about women’s video art for Feedback. Video Data Bank Catalog of Video Art and Artist Interviews (Horsfield and Hilderbrand, ed.) I stumbled on a review published in Off Our Backs of the first women’s video art festival, which was held at The Kitchen in 1972. It’s a generic one-page text, written by someone who obviously knew nothing about video and who seems to be puzzling it out as she writes. In the end she decides that women and video might go together: stay tuned, she says. Done quickly—off-hand, almost. And the author is Maryse Holder. We’re going back in time from 2002 – when I found Holder’s review – and forward in time, from 1972, when she wrote it, to 1987, when I saw a film at the New York Film Festival titled A Winter Tan, produced and directed by a team of four Canadians, one of whom stars in the main role of Maryse Holder. A Winter Tan is based on the letters that Holder sent from Mexico to her friend Edith Jones. They were published posthumously in the collection Give Sorrow Words. Holder had a thing for Mexican men and her letters home were full of sarcastic* and detailed descriptions of her sexual encounters with them, but not only.

When I saw the film it was at a time when feminist video and filmmakers, I among them, were still trying to parse Laura Mulvey’s 1975 article “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Yvonne Rainer had released The Man Who Envied Women, for example, in 1985, and here the female protagonist is never seen on screen. We talked about that. Rainer was playing with the conceivable permutations of Mulvey’s thesis, living inside the text and seeing how she could inhabit its feminist and theoretical challenges to the representation of women on screen. In that feminist environment, things mattered– how one represented revealed something about one’s values. They still do, but perhaps the community was less pluralistic than it is now, to put it simplistically. I was working on a video about baseball and was vexed about how to pose some questions about desire – in particular, I was going to tell a story in which lust for men in tight uniforms would be played out against a backdrop of gender politics and oedipal drama. But I didn’t want my “character” to exist off screen. And I also didn’t want to repeat ad infinitum the same setup I had seen hundreds of times: Anguished confessions by young women of sexual desire still housed in a body that’s groomed to be seen, read, scrutinized, and framed.

But A Winter Tan changed things for me, opening up other possibilities because Holder’s character, as portrayed by Jackie Burroughs, even while delivering explicit descriptions of sex, was matter-of-fact, with a mise-en-scene as unromantic as the interior of a florescent-lit bathroom: “He parted my cunt thoroughly and I swear it seemed as if he took a breath. It felt like a wet snake, very cool. I knew I tasted good and he had raved about my pussy… Back to my cunt. I was too grateful to be genuinely aroused….” Nothing coy here, and along with the description of sex, the reality of power: “I was too grateful to be genuinely aroused.” And no down time allowed in detailed sexual descriptions coming from Burroughs, who ventriloquized Holder in a series of pugilistic choreographies, her actress’s toned and slender body a character in the film, rather than the thing from which language flows. I decided that I had another way to represent desire and used similar tactics in my baseball tape, finished in 1987.

OK. We’re now in 2002, though metaphorically, I’m back in the 1970s, looking at early women’s video art for my piece in Feedback, trying to get a hold on how to write a synoptic essay about a favorite subject. I’m reading Holder’s 1972 prosaic one-page review of a women’s video festival and am stopped by the existence of Holder, a minor chronicler in the history of women’s video art and Holder the woman whose clear, mean, sad prose about her two stays in Mexico was adapted into a movie that I saw and that meant something to my life as a working artist. Here is where I should say that Holder never returned from the second of her two trips to Mexico . She was murdered. All of the people who give context to Holder’s letters – Kate Millet, in her introduction, Edith Jones in the middle section of the book, between Holder’s two visits to Mexico, and Selma Yampolski, who writes a sort of epilogue and lamentation, talk about Holder’s second trip being toward a known death. “These pages are the account of a woman on her way to death…” as Millet begins her introduction. And here is also where I should say that undoubtedly Holder’s violent murder plays a role in my curiosity and my concern about the lives of women in the middle of feminism.

Over and over, Holder mentioned her feminist self, her feminist community, as well as revealing her feminist analysis of gender politics. And, still! she marches to the theme, knowingly, of male rejection, male approval in a litany of doomed romances with men. Yes – it a motif occurs in the middle of powerful descriptions of life, sensuality, acute intellectual awareness – and yes, it is still there, this, by her own description, high-school like fixation of men returning a phone call or calling again after a sexual encounter: “…it hurts me to admit to myself that even if Miguel calls nothing can wipe off the stain and fear and cynicism of whore’s self-doubt that assails me….” I found a copy of Give Sorrow Words, the book of her collected letters, and read it, to see if it would help me understand better, this complex pas de deux between a woman’s life and her feminist self. To see if the producers and directors got it right, about Holder. And the book is great. Even better than the film. Not just about sex, after all, but also about loneliness, being stone cold alone in the world. About the funny little snippy competitive moments with other tourists – she gets it, the way power is played out, among themselves, by middle-class whites in a third-world country. About being an observer, and, perhaps, the necessary misery to be a good one. Also hilarious…. Ranging from an American’s chauvinist, snooty remarks about Canadians (her all-time favorite punching bag – how ironic that her letters were brought to life by Canadians) to in-the-corner-with-the-dunce hat moments of self-reflection on why she would scapegoat Canadians.

Revelation: she’s as good if not better than her male literary counterparts Kerouac, Burroughs, Mailer – meaner, wittier, wilder, and “fresher,” as Millet writes. And I find myself thinking – where does feminism fit into this story? I ask a question that I know is wrong-headed: why didn’t feminism save her? What is feminism’s relation to giving succor to women? I know, I think, these were naïve questions. After all, she produced, she wrote. She lived. But, worse, still and an unashamedly feminist question: why does no one know about this writing? I’ve met only two people who’ve read her letters. Are they as good as I think they are (yes)?: “My soul is paring down to a bone of insupportable truth. Every day I feel older and less desirable. I am a way station for new tourists on their way to a deeper scene. I am going to have to bypass the human friend as well. Every restorative kindness is penultimate to indifference. I dance with my shadow and, depending on the angle, and my own indifference, and my ability to dredge up confidence from some ever more remote credentials, I dance well or badly.” And this is where I am now: without answers, but wondering.

When I speak about Holder, my friends, such as Tamar Garb, reassure me that perhaps if it weren’t for feminism we wouldn’t have the one book of Holder’s that we do. True enough. Yes. I want to do more work about Holder, about her writing, and make claims for its powers in a public arena. Ironically, what little I’ve found has been through the traces of web communities. An anonymous reviewer on Amazon.com confessed (subsequently deleted) that she was married to a Mexican man who objected to her keeping the book, which she loved, in the bedroom. Unable exactly to expunge from the scene of conjugal bliss, she confessed that she kept it under the bed. My copy of the book is feathered with bits of paper and Post-it Notes to find my way back into particularly tawdry passages, such as, “Am sitting now in main square in the middle of a carnival dance from the vantage of a café, vainly hoping new life doesn’t overtake me before I can assimilate the old. And trying not to let it work into Lucio, but it is so beautiful to see and it will be over all too soon. Shit this new pen is too gross.” I will “end,” at this point, still a sign on a road map, with a list. A checklist of things I know about Maryse Holder and don’t know about what we owe each other, if anything:

1. Holder was Jewish; She and her parents were hidden during World War II in France; Her mother was shot by the Germans in 1943; In Paris, at the end of the war, her father left her in a hotel overnight, presumably to get food for them, and Holder became ill. In the treatment for her illness she was left deformed on one side of her face; She and her father emigrated to the United States when she was young; She was highly intelligent; She taught English literature in the New York University system for a while; She wrote a piece (“ Another Cuntree: At Last, a Mainstream Female Art Movement”) for Feminist Art Criticism: An Anthology, edited by Raven, Langer, and Frueh; She was mortally self-conscious about her looks; She loved to dance; She went to Mexico twice and wrote a lot of letters to her friend, thinking that the collection would make a book; She wrote devastatingly about the hierarchy of women tourists in a foreign country; She fucked a lot of Mexican men, very young, but not only; She was jailed twice while in Mexico, on drug-related charges but also related to having sex with an under-age man; She could write circles around male writers better known than she. Listen:
   “Got royally, horribly laid by a kitchen helper, plugged me with his monstrous prick three times, the last nearly rape. Boasted about his sexual sophistication, which consisted of knowing fifteen different positions from which to plunge his phallus into my hole. Three times in a row, much come each time, huge ass. Awful. The next night his jism was still working its way downstream. I am certainly pregnant now and will give birth to three bulge-ass kitchen assistants who will no sooner have left my bod than they will turn around and plug me in some endless Chinese fuck progression. Next morning, there he was again, so I said you really dig rape, don’t you, and managed to get my legs in between us to push him successfully off. Totally hung, I notice that he looks different. He is different! Who are you, I ask; why, Ricardo, he answers sheepishly. It was the asshole’s friend! I put on my horribly soiled digs and plunge out into brilliant, dirty, working-class Acapulco. God knows how I survived the day, though the memory of the sheepish would-be rapist managed to buoy me down the hill with ironic amusement. Of course, I still had Stan then, and skid row was a fantasy, nada mas. Now, $30 left, and my respectability is a tattered old dress only basted together.” She said she was taking a vacation from feminism; She said she missed her feminist scene;
2. She said feminism was a vision and an almost impossible one.

* Ironically, on most internet dating services, “sarcasm” is the most commonly used word to describe what men consider to be turnoffs in women.

Vanalyne Green is an artist based at the University of Leeds, UK. Her videos have shown at MoMA, the Whitney, and Videotheque de Paris, among other venues. Publications by and about, and interviews with, Green are in Performance Artists Talking in the Eighties and Women of Vision, M/E/A/N/I/N/G: An Anthology, and Feedback: The Video Data Bank Catalog of Video Art and Artist Interviews.

Decades later, the scars remain.
Confidence grows from adversities.
As a painter, as a woman, I believe all women artists are natural feminists:
I am a painter. It is important to do the work.
"Artists don't retire."

I had a working division in the 1970s, cut in half.

By mid-decade I had stopped collaborating with my then separated husband, (1975-76, we made an installation together with assistants, Ruckus Manhattan) after this time, I emerged on my own: first, with a room-sized installation for a 1976 Great American Rodeo Show at the Fort Worth Art Museum in Texas; then, a commission to make tent and entrance paintings for the just formed Big Apple Circus; and a commission to do an installation in a room of a restaurant at Sixth Ave and 57th St; by 1980, the beginning of the Next Wave at BAM, I did an 80-foot painted set for the Paul Taylor dance company, costumes and sets for Douglas Dunn and Dancers, and joined with the active NYC Collab artists in the Times Square Show.One important and encouraging artist for me was Alice Neel. I had posed for her and got to know her quite well. She said to me, "Why, Mimi, you got over that fellow, didn't you?" and I said, " Alice, if you got over three husbands, I could surely get over one," and she laughed her loud, big way.

Mimi Gross, Arlene Raven and Her Artgroup Women, 2006,
oil and oil crayon canvas, 114 x 159".

Since childhood I knew Louise Nevelson, who was also my neighbor in Little Italy, and an encouraging older woman artist, who said, "Don't listen to anyone, just do your work!" I have always admired, and love, Marisol's work. I admired many works by women artists, especially the ones I knew: Elaine de Kooning, Mary Frank, Yvonne Jacquette, Elizabeth Murray, Yvonne Andersen, Louisa Chase, Suzan Pitt, Donna Dennis, Anne Arnold, Sarah Canright, Katharine Kean, Nancy Grossman, Gladys Nielson, the photographer Evelyn Hoffer, Sigrid Spaeth, Elfi Schuselka, and many choreographers, dancers, poets, all of whom have continued to do their work in a world that has somewhat changed to accept them.We have accomplished a footing in the professional world. In the art world, women artists, many well known and very strong artists, remain a minority. We must continue to maintain our integrity. It is our work that will, that must, speak and survive for us.

Mimi Gross is represented by Salander O'Reilly Galleries, NYC, where she will be in two group exhibitions in 2007: Flowers and Portraits; she will also be in Agents of Change: Women, Art & Intellect, Ceres Gallery, NYC, Feb. 2007. She is doing sets and costumes for Douglas Dunn & Dancers, Zorn's Lemma, Dance Theater Workshop, April 2007; and is a planning art consultant for a playground in Brooklyn.

Susanna Heller

1974 – Nova Scotia College of Art and Design
In my first year at art school I became conscious of feminism. I remember a wrenching shift of my everyday life experience; (both the work experience and the social experience). I thought; I could live my life without compromise at least on certain levels. It seemed simple; who you are is WHAT you do. No more nice behavior and no more nice girl. Now I questioned stereotypes. The ‘personal is political’ helped me get through the social mine field of art school, where I watched a dreary power game of men who only saw women’s bodies. As a very shy 18 year old, I watched most of the women students and artists gain access to power through their appearance, or, as I have come to call it: through their ‘power of face.’ This was a most disturbing and destructive aspect of the art world being presented to me at NSCAD. I also observed that the women who had the strongest empowering effect on me were those who seemed to operate outside and beyond their “power of face.” A few women come to mind: those who appeared to me to be living outside of that intimidating male-dominated power structure. Each had a unique framework, and each seemed to indicate an alternative new way of living and working. Their effect on my confidence in work and life was tremendous. For example; my work went from polite little brown cubist collages to giant pink and green flying chicken bone paintings. All these women lived their creative and social lives in ways that were clearly according to their own invention.

1. Mira Schor
A spitfire of energy, she brought the ‘herstory’ from Womanhouse in California. No more nice girl; but warm, aggressively joyful, engaged, optimistic, serious, proud. Mira was like her work; I think of delicate, elegant beautifully hand scripted diaries on heavily worked paper, and great smoky, funny-scary monster paper works covering an enormous wall. She brought the questions that challenged me to rethink my own past and my personal relation to family, society and history started to shift dramatically. Her NY Jewish European culture mixed with feminist politics had a particularly deep resonance for me: for one thing, it helped me get back to New York City! She brought consciousness to us sleeping, unseeing girls at school.

2. June Leaf
Strong as an oak tree. Her powerful solid body bent over a huge forge, her great feet and hands forging wild riddle-like sculptures about the lives of men and women. When June made a drawing it was a performance. Frequently it would grow to room-sized scale, and would engage a room filled audience. Intensely serious and work focused; there was nothing cavalier about June. All the little men talking while June worked away, she embodied action over words. Commanding the paper, steel, canvas, space, room; June demanded attention and I rehearsed her strengths as life lessons.

June Leaf, Angel on a Treadle, 1980, sewing machine and mixed media, c. 58 x 60”.

3. Marilyn Lenkowsy
Her somber, stark pale face, and her style of honest, unadorned simplicity struck me as a new kind of sexy. The strong, straightforward and undecorated decorum in both her work attitude and personal mannerisms had the same liberating effect on me that June and Mira did. She was intensely, almost darkly serious, yet stayed always patient and warm in her teaching. I remember a wonderful night of art talk, consciousness raising and oyster shucking; all of us leaving with bloodied hands, full stomachs, and empowered spirits. Other women from the past who I had already revered took on new importance at that moment of change: Janis Joplin, Emily Carr, Emily Dickinson, Charlotte Bronte to name a few. And some other contemporary names in those first years come to me: that pink cover of Lucy Lippard’s From The Center, Judy Pfaff, Lucinda Childs, Ree Morton, Elizabeth Murray, Yvonne Rainer. All of these women had a