What is your most memorable experience of a feminist/ women's art exhibition in the past 10 years and why? Did it challenge or change your understanding of feminism?
(Please name the title of the show, the venue, and the
date.
Please feel free to write about shows you may have curated yourself.)
If any readers would like to contribute a response, please email: k.deepwell@ukonline.co.uk
Answers below from: Sonia Cabrera Ullon, Hilary Robinson, Marsha Meskimmon, Joy Mullet, Ulrike Bergermann, Benny Alba.
Sonia Cabrera Ullon
Inside the Visible at Whitechapel. Still thinking about it.
Hilary Robinson (art historian, University of Ulster)
Great question - but one which immediately begs the questions: what is a feminist show? How is it different from a women’s show? what makes it feminist? It seems these days we often loose sight of those crucial questions. For example, it was fantastic to see the Louise Bourgeois exhibition at the Serpentine gallery, see her big spider almost bursting from one of the rooms, and to think about that work - which concerned mothering - as a feminist: but was it a feminist exhibition? Maybe. Was it intended as such? Probably not. On the other hand, Tracy Emin's exhibition at the South London gallery a couple of years ago, which depended so much upon aesthetics and content explored by feminist in the 1970s was depressingly anti-feminist. I liked Inside the Visible in parts - namely, the parts which let us see some key works and/or little-known artists. Some good feminist art; feminist aspects in the curating; some non-feminist recuperation. I really wish I’d seen Amelia Jones’ exhibition of Judy Chicago’s. Jenny Saville’s final year BA show (I taught her in her final year in Glasgow, 1991-2) had many of the paintings that initially brought her to fame - it was great to see them in that particular context in that hugely masculinist art school. And on that note, without wishing to sound sentimental, I’ve seen some great work by some of my students in Belfast, most of whom might not be still working as artists a few years after their graduation, but work which articulates change and developmental thinking. For me, that’s important.
Marsha Meskimmon (art historian, University of Loughborough)
I’ve been thinking about this for a few days and I think I have a show - though it wasn’t feminist in an explicit sense. It’s the Turner Prize show of a few years ago in which all four nominees were women - Cornelia Parker, Gillian Wearing, Christine Borland and Angela Bulloch. The reason this show springs to mind is that I was obliged, in both research and pedagogical roles, to address the sexual politics of the event on many occasions while the show was on. Students asked what I thought of having an all-woman cast for the prize, slightly aggressive audiences at public lectures turned to the topic and wanted some justification of the nominations (as if they were mine!) and so on. The negative elements of this barrage of debate are obvious, but I also found that it made me think long and hard about whether this was a feminist show or the death-knell of feminist art, given that these women were now so successful (the old post-feminist line). And, it also made me think of what feminism, in terms of ideas and aesthetics, had enabled women to produce in contemporary art - I thought most of that show was truly compelling and the work had much to do with a legacy of thought on gender, sexuality, bodies and materiality. In the end, it did make me consider feminism and contemporary art in ways I had not done before and I am pleased that it did.
Joy Mullet (DF9 Telemetry Format Ops Analyst, NASA)
Is This A Joke or What? (O'Kane Gallery, University of Houston, 1999) was an exhibit I helped organise a couple of years ago. We wanted an exploration of feminism, humour and contemporary art in Texas. And we got that. But women have a tough time laughing about these things, that’s for sure. The associated programming included readings of the Guerrilla Girls’ Bedside Companion to the History of Western Art; a master class for curious artists and the public ‘Art Education in the Raw’ and a website: http://www.artwomenhouston.org/12_98jokefolder/jokefront.html.
Another exhibit, though, had a more unsettling impact. The exhibit featured very large canvases of female forms, heads protruding outside the frame. Large, sharply pointed star shapes approached the posteriors of the female forms. It looked to me like the artist was commenting about bodily pain, perhaps even her own physical pain. I felt some empathy. But then I was told that the artist was male. Boom. Everything changed for me. The paintings now looked menacing and dangerous. I was sure I wouldn’t like the artist if I were to meet him.
Ulrike Bergermann (Hamburg/University of Paderborn, Germany)
Thank you for the offer to join the ‘Defining Experiences: Feminist Exhibitions in the 1990s’. I want to give you a hint to a feminist gallery and its opening exhibition that was extremely interesting and delightful: namely, the MARS patent - a virtual/online gallery with roots in Hamburg, Germany, MARS , and, in particular the work Strickliesl by Ellen Nonnenmacher (an artist based in Berlin, Germany). What is the MARS patent? Is it a feminist project? Why did the Strickliesl change my understanding of feminist theory (at least, a part of it: the widely spread metaphor of weaving)?
The MARS patent calls itself an interplanetarian exhibition space on planet mars, and was founded by Helene von Oldenburg and Claudia Reiche. Whatever doesn’t fit into earthly schemes, they say (“You’ll know it, if your work is ready to transgress Earth's limitations”), could be transmitted to the Mars Exhibition Site, MES by means of the HRM_1.0n (High Reality Engine). The HRM_1.0n transforms the vision of a viable martian place for your objects into reality and the mode of global sharing say Reiche/von Oldenburg. That means: completing the online formula and sending the object of art to the MARS patent, your work will be presented: a. on mars/the MES, b. on the MARS patent website, c. in the 24 hours live video report from MES (though most permanently down). But the MARS patent is not committed to exhibitions of male artists - more precisely: only works of people registering under a female name will be shown (and there is no such thing as a RL-contol: The HRM_1.0n is not able to control the biological identity. It's your commitment that counts). Even aliens are not excluded: If they come up with a real e-mail address, they can always try. With a female first name we encourage every alien to participate. This is the adequate reaction to gender theory and its ideas about sex, body, and culture, and it reminds of the way the cyberfeminist Old Boys Network describes to whom their work is addressed: to each intelligent lifeform which calls itself a woman. (This comes as no surprise, as Reiche and von Oldenburg are members of the core group of OBN.) So this seems to me a state-of-the-cyberart project, as well as a state-of-theory-enterprise. It makes you think about representation, globalism, distances, and the virtuality of art business and of exhibited works ...
In October 1999, the first transmission to MES was celebrated in public: MARS patent invited Ellen Nonnenmacher and friends to a small gallery room in Hamburg, Germany, where (on a ruby red floor) the Strickliesl, usually the name of a wooden toy painted as female puppet and designed to produce knitted woollen rolls, was transmitted; people could watch, knit in RL, comment, or make cyberplans of their own. (In January, 2000, Slovenian artist and theorist Marina Grzinic beamed up her Spectralisation in Space.) Now what is so special about Strickliesl? The animated operating scheme shows the mars sandstorms as a motor for the movements of the turning strickliesl, the crotchet hook lifting the thread over one of four hooks producing a stitch, which adds up to the Strickwurst (knitted sausage). A description shows the adaption of the mechanism to mars conditions (gravity, and so on), and the aim of producing strickwuerste is to make life on mars more comfortable. Besides, as Nonnenmacher argues, Strickwuerste stimulate human creativity. It is to be expected, that the first settlers on mars are surrounded by merely functional things. Strickwuerste can be used to give these things a friendly, biological, more human look. Settlers may use their free time to create beautiful things out of the already available Strickwuerste. It is for example really simple to create nice cussions out of Strickwuerste. Now that seems to me like quite a different option on the female qualities of knitting, weaving, sewing and so on from those that were to be read from some cyberfeminists in the 1990s. Most famous are the texts by Sadie Plant; especially her zeros and ones embodied a hypertextual mode of writing (or: weaving) bits of text (etymologically: what is woven) together, but sticked to old ideas about femininity (I discussed that in a german text,‘Weben und Kleben’. Nonnenmacher's discussions, on the other hand, comment as lovingly as ironically on this concept and exhibit it as a nice - mechanism. Both MARS patent and Strickliesl are as simple as elaborate - and charming. MARS patent not only works in and about the digital media including digital art in their own media specific means, but also on the connotations of cyberspace (concerning space, distance, materiality, reality...). Strickliesl proved to me that knitting not necessarily occurs in contexts that want to foster certain kinds of female characteristics - or if so, these are as mechanical as the cultural tools around them. There are many many more implications on the area of "reality", "art", "gender" and their metaphors to be follwed here... to make it short, I just want to give a very warm recommendation of the MARS patent and its subprojects.
Benny Alba (artist, Oakland, CA)
Several chapters of the Women’s Caucus for the Arts (I was on a local board) held an open show of books at Mills College in Oakland, Ca. in the early 1990s. The walls presented quotes digilently searched out on shelves painted white and attached like ledges to the walls. An all inclusive media policy meant a stunning exhibition. People came during off hours (when the gallery was locked) to "see it again" with friends, according to a guard who didn’t know me.
In another WCA show, this time in San Francisco at Fort Mason in the early 1990s, I filled in by gallery sitting for long hours. This venue attracts tourists from all over the world. My favourite piece became so due to the incredible responses... It was titled So Many Bras, So Little Time. I'm so sorry that I don’t recall the artist’s name. About 100 b.& w. polaroid photos of a woman’s upper torso were hand embellished with various colours, glue ons, etc. I saw mothers take their children to point out the different photos. One set of Christians were highly offended and complained loudly to me. What surprised me was that some men studied it quietly and moved on while others rushed by.... Certainly many people energetically talked between themselves after viewing it, having often looked at it a second time on their way back out of the gallery. Both shows made me proud to be on that Board.
Copyright © : n.paradoxa, November 2000
N.Paradoxa : Issue No. 13, 2000