I would like to thank the organisers of this session for inviting me to speak about n.paradoxa and contemporary feminist debates.
In order to explain what n.paradoxa does and how it sees itself as an active intervention in feminist discourse, I want to begin by discussing 3 publications on feminism and the visual arts, which came out in the last 12 months. My reasons for beginning here are firstly, that they can tell us something about the current state of feminist discourse and secondly they project a view of feminism, which is worth analysing. The first is Hilary Robinson's anthology of one hundred texts of feminist art criticism from the 1970s to the present - called Feminism - Art - Theory 1968-2000, a 1000-page volume published by the UK academic publisher Blackwells. The second is Helena Reckitt's Art and Feminism - which is introduced by a long essay by Peggy Phelan but also is also structured an anthology of artworks and texts and is published in a well-illustrated format by Phaidon. The third is Ute Grosenick's Women Artists in the 20th and 21st Centuries, from Taschen books, which profiles the work of 93 women artists, a largely contemporary selection since around 80 of these artists are still working today.
These books share a remarkable consensus - in so far as they position - American feminists/ feminist artists as around 50% of what constitutes their definition of feminism. Peggy Phelan in her introduction to Art and Feminism remarks on the fact her account will only follow the American women's art movement as this is what she is familiar with. The picture is not uniform concerning who is otherwise important in the remaining 50%. The German publisher Taschen does seek to emphasise contemporary German women artists, positioning them as 14% of the other contributors, while both Phelan and Robinson include around 25% of artists/contributors from the UK, leaving 12.5% for Europe and 12.5% for other countries including Australia, Asia, Canada, Japan and South America. The emphasis within these publications raises many questions for me because it does not coincide with my understanding of the spread of feminist thought internationally, nor my knowledge of the many different initiatives by women artists around the world. Yet what struck me as I reviewed these 3 new books was the steady building of an orthodoxy - a taught discipline, and a linear history - which while providing an effective account to support “the emergence, impact and triumph of the American feminist movement” (the subtitle of Mary Garrard and Norma Broude's The Power of Feminist Art) was marginalising and eradicating alternative perspectives and very different forms of feminism in other locations in the world, in an attempt to “mainstream” its own account.
Language is part of the problem. Translation into English of many feminist texts from Germany, Italy, Spain, France or many other countries partly accounts for the absence from anthologies without funding for translation costs. But it is not the only explanation, given the large volume of American and British texts translated into many other languages. There is no doubt that the account of the American feminist art movement is the most well published and widely disseminated account of all the potential histories of feminist art movements in the last 30 years – but this does not mean it is the only account around – or the only major feminist art movement to have emerged - as even the most cursory look at the history of international feminist art exhibitions organised in Europe in the last 30 years would indicate. In spite of evidence to the contrary or “insider” knowledge (ie active participation in the women's movement in someone’s life experience) which would counter this view, the popularisation of one account of feminist art continues relentlessly.
When I began n.paradoxa, this was one of my concerns – namely that there existed a homogenisation and closure on feminism's potential and effectively its archiving as a historical movement. n.paradoxa is fuelled by an active research principle, embedded in its title. Para - meaning “beyond or through” and doxa - “accepted opinion, taught knowledge”. It began with my own research on an academic, but government-funded, research trip which I undertook in 1996 to Canada and around Europe (to 7 countries), looking at the history of feminist art. I was already then questioning what I had the greatest knowledge of, and which had been an inspiration to me, the Anglo-American account of a history of feminist art, especially the false idea that it was the only history of feminist activity.
The result of this research trip was to set up n.paradoxa as a website, an e-journal. Initially I envisaged it as an online resource for students, artists and lecturers with information and articles about the work of contemporary women artists. 1996 was the moment at which most Universities internationally became connected to the net and made this facility available to their staff and students and this was to be my main constituency - an international one, which in spite of my decision to publish mainly in English, would be available to anyone who logged on from anywhere in the world. I also wanted to ensure that it could provide a starting point to the terrible ignorance of students (and some staff) about the volume of publications internationally on the histories of feminist art and the work of contemporary women artists in the last 30 years. In this sense, n.paradoxa was to be a “meta-site” bringing together sources of information found nowhere else on the web - which it has proved to be, and maintained its uniqueness because of this active research principle. So, on this site, you will find information pages and links to women’s art organisations, film festivals, and publications on contemporary women artists. I recently reorganised the n.paradoxa booklist by country and here you will find the many publications from Germany, Australia, Canada and many other countries which challenge the picture created by the 3 books I began by discussing. The feminist art movements in those countries are not the minority players, that this account makes them appear to be, but have their own documented histories and debates.
In 1998, I began to publish n.paradoxa in print and as a bi-annual journal it is now entering its fifth year of publication. The conception for this was to continue the tradition of feminist art journals which I had read and admired in the past, LIP (Australia); Heresies, Women Artists News and Chrysalis (USA); Ruimte (Netherlands): all of whom had ceased publication. The aim was partly to do more and different things using the print medium but also to reach an “art-world” audience who tend to use the internet as a communications and marketing tool rather than as a form of publication equivalent to print. Art exhibitions use the web to distribute or republish material that they would generally publish in leaflets, rarely going beyond this format, with the exception of a few very specific commissions to web artists. Art criticism and analysis are very poorly represented online, compared with the volume of actual information pages on exhibitions. Art journals tend to use their websites to summarise and supplement their printed form and to act as advertising for subscriptions - the exceptions to this general rule are the journals on new media.
Women’s studies/feminist theory online also has had very little to say about women artists as producers of culture compared to the work on woman in terms of representations within culture. n.paradoxa also distinguishes itself from the many feminist cultural e-zines and journals as it is not a project about “women's culture” in the inter-disciplinary sense of embracing literature, film or dance and theatre. n.paradoxa's focus is always on the work of women artists (visual arts only) and their projects. The different forms of analysis published are about this work’s relation to a wide variety of feminist theories of gender, politics, experience, social and cultural mores, historical understanding - and this is taken as an open-ended enquiry not as a fixed position or as “one type of approach or method”. Recognising these types of constituencies online and analysing their existing work, lay behind the decision to develop the website and later go into print. n.paradoxa perversely went from website to print and continues to maintain the two forms as separate editions. They publish separate copy and have separate identities. I believe, they also have different audiences/ readers – especially in terms of geographical spread – to judge from the emails I get. The print version is sold by mail order and has a wide international audience but its distribution in bookshops - principally for reasons of cost - is limited to the UK and Northern Europe.
It was my ambition for the journal (in both forms) that it should be a platform for feminist debate from different locations in the world. Each printed volume contains contributions from 10-12 different countries (and the countries themselves continue to change). While feminism has often been dismissed as a “local”or localised event – a specific peer reaction – it is my belief that the appearance of feminism in art is a truly unprecendented global phenomenon and that it is the exchanges between feminists internationally which form one of the most rewarding areas in which to work. n.paradoxa seeks to publish in-depth analysis of women artists’ projects, rather than following simply the reviewing practices of most art magazines of current shows. Attention is paid to women’s presence in international biennials as an indicator of changing trends. This idea is the consequence of taking up one of the major feminist criticisms of the dominant culture, namely, its systematic marginalisation of the “value” of women's work. Serious scholarship and in-depth analysis are the means to counter this view of women's art practice and to intervene to change this value system and to give space and meaning to women’s work. There are no regular correspondents for n.paradoxa and this principle is designed to continue to widen the scope and range of contributions published. Contributors are women artists, curators, critics and art/social historians from different parts of the world. No media is allowed to predominate and a wide range of work in painting, sculpture, installation, new media, video, photography and performance and public art work have been discussed as well as very different forms of debates, conferences, workshops and exhibition strategies undertaken by women artists. To date, contributions from probably more than 30 countries have been published in its 2 versions and this list will continue to expand: from Uruguay to Taiwan, from Australia to Slovakia, from Russia to Canada, from Poland to China, from Switzerland to Mexico, from Ireland to Iran, from India to Turkey, from Hungary to Iceland, from Finland to Uganda, from Germany to Japan, from the Carribean islands to Denmark, from Spain to France and Israel as well as from the USA to the UK.
n.paradoxa's ambition is inter-national in the sense of knowledge and ideas moving between one place to another. This is often called trans-national but I chose international to provide some distance from any one specific kind of discourse or a modified post-colonial or third-world vs. first-world form of discourse even though this form of analysis does regularly appear on the pages of the journal. Another principle is that a plurality of narratives, different voices and different perspectives are essential to the structure of each publication. Discussions of the inter-relations of class, sexuality, ethnicity and race in the work of women artists and the cultural politics which gave them visibility is present within the journal, alongside discussions of feminist psychoanalytic theory, different methods of feminist art criticism and discussion of different working practices and cultural concerns. If heterogeneity is the organising principle, the effect is not random or chaotic, because of the organising themes of each volume, which provide a structure through which to reveal difference.
Although gender unites women artists as producers into a marginalised group in culture and in popular perceptions of cultural value - in terms of representation, gender alone rarely structures their interests or concerns as individual artists. There are nevertheless subjects which women artists have tackled which have never been tackled in the work of male artists because of their experiences as women in the world. Women artists’ approaches to their chosen subjects have been consistently different from the work of their immediate (male) peer group – as much work in feminist art history and art criticism has continually shown. The platform n.paradoxa provides is unusual and many times, the essays published could not have been published elsewhere, not for reasons of quality, but because they fell outside the policies of existing magazines and journals. In choosing the themes, I was conscious of trying to link up with classic pre-occupations in feminist art practice or feminist theory, Desire and the Gaze or Body, Space and Memory but I was also trying to provide a space for emerging debates. One of the earliest volumes was on Women and New Media and this is one of the earliest publications on the subject of cyberfeminism in the visual arts. There was a volume on Performance Art called About Time, another on Sculpture/Public Art and Installation. The current volume EcoLogical has two very different ideas within it - the first ecology and eco-feminism, the second systems of logic in women's work, especially around collections. The purpose of providing a platform like this is to publish people’s research work, in a well-produced, thoughtful and provocative manner which raises the visibility of the writers and the artists, opening up avenues for future enquiry. This trend continues in the next volume, Rethinking Revolution.
Copyright © : Katy Deepwell, July 2002
N.Paradoxa : Issue No. 16, 2002