About a year ago, Ellen Willis, the mother of my childhood
friend Nona Willis-Aronowitz, died. Ellen Willis was an important
second wave feminist, cultural critic, and journalist, who inspired
many feminists, of her own and younger generations to be radical
and critical, but also to keep pleasure as part of the mix. Talking
with Nona at the time of her mother’s death, we realized
that as the literal daughters of the second wave --my mother
being Susan Bee,---we had a responsibility for the legacy we
inherited: to keep the memory of our mothers, and feminism, alive.
Having gone through various stages of feminist denial and rediscovery
ourselves, we wondered how other young women of our generation
relate (or do not) to feminism. At the same time, having both
just graduated from college, we felt the desire for self-discovery,
for change, for travel and adventure. Putting all these elements
together, “GirlDrive” was born. After nearly a year
of planning and saving, and 50 years exactly since Jack Kerouac’s
male-themed “On the Road” we packed up our ’98
Chevy Cavalier and hit the road. We were on the road for two
months, went to twenty nine cities, interviewing and photographing
nearly two hundred women (selected portraits of which you see
on the screen, all of which I took en route), and chronicling
our journey daily on a blog, titled girldrive.blogspot.com.
We talked to mostly women between the ages of 18-30 with diverse
interests, professions and backgrounds, asking them about their
lives, ambitions, struggles, and if feminism fit into any of
that. Internet feminist buzz grew about our blog grew, and at
the end of the trip we were interviewing and staying on the couches
of women who had found us online. Our readers gave us the courage
to drive ahead. The seemingly invisible cyber feminism network
was translated into real women, new friendships, bonds and hospitality.
Community. We stopped only when the money ran out and our car
slowed down. It was a life-altering experience. Now we are back
in the “real world,” living in Chicago, working as
waitress and hostess, of course (the real women’s work),
and putting our myriad results into book for Seal Press.
I come to feminism via the arts, my mother and grandmother
being feminist painters, and am focusing a section of our book
on artworld issues. We did not, by any means, just interview
artists, but these issues naturally sparked my interest. We also
did not just focus on young women. We are specifically interested
in the intergenerational dialogues, in making communication accessible
among women of all ages. Since our project was in the shadow
of Ellen’s death, the theme of mothers and daughters transformed
from a sentimental to a political subtext for the trip. Most
young women said that their first strong role model was their
mother, whether she was feminist or not. If not their mother,
it was a teacher, an artist, a musician, but always a tangible
woman who made strength and creativity seem possible. In that
vein, we interviewed established figures of the second and third
wave that we admired, including Carolee, Mira, and my Mom, and
issuing fan girl like requests to Kathleen Hanna, Alix Kates
Schulman, Lyn Hejinian, Joan Jonas, Joan Snyder, Katha Pollitt,
Anne Waldman, Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards, Michelle
Wallace and Faith Ringgold, Bailey Doogan, Joanna Frueh, Maria
Ellen Buzik, the list goes on… “Mentorship” emerged
as the key word of hope among the intergenerational activists.
Both Erica Jong and Linda Nochlin cited mentoring and teaching
as the most important step for the feminist future. Nochlin reminded
me of the tradition of old master apprenticeship, of men helping
boys become skilled and connected throughout the history of art.
Jong talked of the importance of having older confidants who
were not your mother, because at a certain age no girl
will tell her mom about the things she most needs advice for.
Deborah Siegal talked about getting beyond sisterhood infighting.
Laura Kipnis talked of women being their own worst enemies. Andi
Zeisler, head of Bitch magazine, is just plain sick of family
metaphors, of older women acting like her mother. And Griselda
Pollock’s call, at the MOMA feminist future symposium,
for non-oedipal modes of art transmission was most powerful.
But, in the case of art, what can the substance of “feminist” mentoring
be for an unreceptive audience? There is many an “ungrateful
daughter” who doesn’t care to hear about her predecessors.
It itches the ears like your mother telling you should eat your
greens. Many older artists, who teach, such as Carolee, find
their students stubbornly resistant to the “f-word.” But
won’t we find ourselves caught in a downpour, wishing we
had heeded that nagging voice to take an umbrella? Among the
many younger women artists I talked to, most do not desire to
be defined exclusively as feminist artists. They “skirt” the
issue in the interview, but do not refute the way their art may
deal with gender. It is no fun to be labeled, these young artists
say. They may be artists who are also feminists. But they are
not feminist artists. But don’t hiss so soon!
There is good news: young women artists are revolutionary.
They are making works that deal fervently with gender and sexuality,
that deconstruct beauty standards, that unveil the veiled. They
revel in the grotesque, the cosmetic, celebrity culture. They
poke fun at themselves. They show us their obsession with the “feminine”,
but it is pop essentialism, deadpan gender. They do not care
if you think they are vapid sluts, clad in designer trends. They
look with a female gaze, they have autonomy, they are not marionettes.
They are, indeed, artists who are feminists. Young women thinkers
will say they are gender revolutionary before they are feminist-identified,
and just as they seek to explode the binaries of sex, they mix-media
and ideology, creating a patchwork of consciousness that is as
thoroughly contemporary as it is politically feminist.
That being said, I would like to discuss my own artwork, which
is entirely separate from the documentary portrait work I am
doing for GirlDrive.
The photos you see on the screen are from the ongoing series Masquerade which
was my undergraduate thesis last year, but is the articulation
of a project that extends since I began taking photographs ten
years ago. I have experimented with a changing set of fashions,
backdrops, landscapes, postures, and facial expressions, all
in order to explore the art historical relationship between femininity
and artifice in representation, and the limitations and romance
of such invocations. Taking off on the popular dialectical theme
of “femininity and masquerade,” my approach to the
subject vacillates between disgust and romance, irony and sincerity,
comedy and pathos, never exactly settling comfortably into one
ideological zone. The starting point is always the clothed woman,
situated in tableaux and performing a persona. I am always searching
for a specific moment, when the model seems somehow to belong
in the scenery and fashions, and the picture begins to evoke
something seemingly specific but ultimately unlocatable. I try
to paste together fragments of remembered feminine representation.
Using a historical imagination perhaps culled from Julia Margaret
Cameron and John Singer Sargent but filtered through Antonioni
and John Waters. My process is an updated version of the young
girls game of “playing dress-up,” my photo shoots
are collaborative processes usually involving me and my friends
throwing ourselves into characters and moods we wish to become
for the seconds the shutter is released. These performances are
built on privacy and intimacy, but are necessarily predicated
on the presence of the camera and the knowledge of a future audience.
The camera acts as a vanity mirror, showing us how fantasies
of representation are enacted through the cosmetic surface of
fashion and design, and filtered through our self-conscious modes
of presentation. In all of the photographs, a set of elusive
and unknowable eyes peers out from the layers of artifice, trying
to see and be seen. The woman underneath the clothes and behind
the skin remains a mystery to us and to herself. The perfect
projection of the internal imagined self, if it exists, only
does so for the duration of the photographic performance. However,
I have tended to explore the campy side of the “mysterious
lady” trope, finding schlock the appropriate mode for these
imagined selves. This has allowed me to distance myself from
reiterating an ambiguously idealized vision of femininity and
fashion, instead finding an avenue of control and inflected art
historical awareness within that… which is what I see
other young women artists doing as well.
Because of my recent experiences and projects and my upbringing,
I would without hesitation or fear call myself a feminist artist.
But after traveling the country, talking to artists and women
of all varieties and ages, I wouldn’t say this was the
most accessible identification. It is simultaneously the most “uncool” and “cool” proclamation;
cool of course to those in the know. Our goal as feminist artists
and art historians should be to get work by women seen, the critical
context heard. But different generations of women artists need
to choose open communications that commemorate without killing,
but that recognize differences and the specificity of historical
moments. An attitude adjustment is in order. Mentorship must
come without passive aggression. Visible networks of friendly
recognition must be initiated. There also needs to be a paradigm
shift in our critical framework, so that younger women artists
aren’t vilified by the hands that feed them. Objectification
and glamour must be re-contextualized. The way we understand
influence and imitation must be revised. This time the art world’s
marketable revolution and glossy politics must be cracked open
from the inside and out. Let feminism be an amorphous conceptual
cloud that floats over women’s ideation and visual experience
--and that brings us together instead of partitions us off from
one another.