I wanted to speak about the topic of strategies from the point of view of being an editor of a feminist art journal which began online in 1996 and in print in January 1998. I wanted to try and explain the politics of what I do in relationship to the question of feminist historiography. The best way I could think of explaining my strategy was to borrow a phrase from Drucilla Cornell when she spoke of feminism as being marked by a strategy of the ‘future anterior’ – a phrase which seemed to sum up my work. I am projecting into the future with a knowledge of the past and I am looking both ways at the same time using knowledge of the past, to try and move forward. This is because I am very conscious of the fact that I would not be editing the journal today if it had not been for my early encounter as a 19 year old foundation student with Griselda Pollock and Roszika Parker’s book Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology (Pandora,1981) and the questions it raised. The other phrase, which seemed to me to be important to describe my strategy - and I believe is from Marx - was ‘pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will’ as it seemed to me that anyone who continued to work as a feminist art historian through the 1980s and into the 1990s had to be in that category.
My decision to start an international feminist art journal also arose from what I perceived as a ‘boredom’ – a set of closures – which have also been described by the other speakers here today – with the dominant Anglo-American agenda. This was a very very strong feeling from Western feminists who I encountered when I started an extensive research project in 1996 and whose work I had read for many years which could be summed by the feeling that this agenda was dead that its work was over, that it was no longer fashionable, even a relic from the past. This perception, however, was in conflict with my own knowledge and my experience that the most interesting and exciting possibilities to learn and create was from professional exchanges with women from all over the world particularly from different European countries, with whom I had the opportunity to meet since 1989 in several international conferences. I couldn’t understand why given twenty/thirty years of work that this closure had occurred.
And then I realised as I was looking around, where is this knowledge in print? This was the way to share and exchange this kind of knowledge amongst many people but this shared knowledge of these other women’s projects, the different explorations of feminist histories in Europe particularly, didn’t exist in print. It wasn’t available. And although people were telling me that it was ‘known’ and ‘accepted’ this was knowledge shared only by a few. Looking across the literature in 1987, feminist work on contemporary women’s art practices was newly available in 3 or 4 anthologies of Anglo-American work but one has to remember that unfortunately the reality became that the next anthology of new previously unpublished work in the same vein did not come out until 1995 when New Feminist Art Criticism came out. (Qualification : Frueh and Langer, Janet Wolff’s Feminine Sentences was an exception) While in these 8 years many exhibition catalogues were published and several feminist/women’s art magazines were published, anthologies of new writings were very scarce. These kinds of closures in debate are what I as an editor/researcher, now try and pay attention to.
At the same time, I also want to encourage a memory and a cultural understanding of what women artists are doing in many different parts of the world because our level of understanding and professional exchange internationally are still extremely poor. Our understandings of how feminism has taken up very different inflections in many different parts of the world, where quite different debates and discourses have been initiated and developed. This is what I am seeking to reflect in my journal as and when I can negotiate, receive funds, encourage articles to be written by women artists, curators, and critics from different parts of the world. Each volume of the print version, for example, contain artists or writers living in at least 10 different countries in the world.
I also want to explain the title of the journal as it is part and parcel of the spirit of enquiry which I am trying to foster. n.paradoxa is a play on Donna Haraway’s discussion of a parasite called mixotricha paradoxa which lives in the gut of a termite in South Australia. This parasite has paradoxical and unexpected habits of survival and reproduction. It seemed appropriate as a paradigm of feminist research, as Donna Haraway suggested in the original article, but I have adapted. Firstly, it survives only by attracting other parasites or bugs to live on it (which for a web-site seemed appropriate as the site hosts different articles ). Secondly, it always reproduces by division. Conflict and debate are what I see as an essential part of feminism; they are what has formed its problematic. Argument is the way in which we move forward, it is not something to be repressed – so that we can be nice to each other – it’s part of the debate that we have to have and to identify the places where we disagree and the tendencies which develop as a result. Thirdly, n.paradoxa’s discovery as a unique species in the gut of a termite makes one wonder about the level of in-depth research which is needed as who but a feminist would search so hard to cut up and identify such an object of knowledge. And sometimes when one is doing feminist research it feels like that – this kind of discovery reveals the value of seemingly obscure forms of research and the real time and effort needed to make such discoveries.
Here I would like to agree with Whitney’s remark – that there remains still a huge amount of very boring and very predictable empirical and bibliographic research to be done – we have taken far too much for granted if we keep on reproducing a self-complacent and self-evident understanding that we already all know what feminism/s are and are lulled into a secure sense that we all know what feminist historiography is when this is really not the case. It’s a shame, for example, on our panel that we have no one from Germany because of the great work that has been done in their biannual feminist art historians conferences where the German language art historians have debated issues which have parallels with what goes on in America or the UK but they are not the same debates, artists or areas of work discussed. They have a different set of values, ideas and issues and certainly a different hierarchy of artists who they consider worth studying and worth doing in depth research on. So this is my plea for an acknowledgement of your European and international colleagues as well as to stress that the more editorial work I do for n.paradoxa the more I am trying to open up the discussion for Asia, Latin America and Africa to try and make people aware that feminist art practices are not exclusive to or centred in America. One way I wanted to underline this point was to remind this audience of two major international feminist exhibitions which took place in the 1970s ; the Magna 1975 and Feministische Kunst International 1977 where in both exhibitions around 20 countries took part and this was for me an early inspiration for international co-operation in feminism and for n.paradoxa.
Copyright © : Katy Deepwell, March 2000
N.Paradoxa : Issue No. 12, 2000