CRITICAL WRITING

Critical writing is going to be an on-going feature of the MAWA newsletter. If you have an idea for a piece about an art issue, concept or event, please submit a 50-word synopsis/proposal in writing to Shawna at dempsey_millan@mawa.ca. Note that because of space, not all proposals will be accepted. Also, because the newsletter is quarterly, these pieces should be more theoretical than topical. Each finished piece should be approximately 650 words in length. A writers’ fee of $200 will be paid for each published work.

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Some Post-Ism Thoughts on Art and Feminism in the 21st Century
By Amy Fung

Speaking plainly, I ask you: What exactly is feminism? For somebody in my generation (those born after 1977 or there about), feminism ranges from being a human rights issue to being a dirty word. For many of my peers, post-feminism is easier to relate to, but no two minds can agree on what post-feminism actually means. So in looking at feminism in a post-ism age, how does this infinite fracture within feminism(s) reflect our artistic practices?

There is certainly need for further inquiry when artists as wholly different as British sensationalist Tracey Emin and Australian post-colonialist Tracey Moffat can be lumped together simply because of anatomy. This was the case in a confusing guest lecture I attended some years ago at the University of Alberta. As an impressionable young student, I did not see any similarities between the works, but the discussion wildly speculated on artistic intentions (oh, academia!).

Feminism is certainly a complicated animal. It has always been rooted in the personal, in the various realized experiences of the female body, unleashing the female self as a preface to social change. As a movement for rights and equality, feminism as we know it today has roots in the Victorian Era, which squarely places the foundation of feminism in the hands of an upper class sect, i.e. Christian and European. In the 20th century, feminism materialized as a global human rights issue and, like most human rights issues, there is still a long journey ahead. Feminism has grown and split into localized, nationalized and racialized feminisms that speak to the multifaceted refractions of being a woman depending not only on ideological specificities, but also on the colour of your skin and which area of the world you live in.

So how has any of this been reflected in the art world? Feminist art recently received a reprieve in the retrospective of WACK! curated by MoMA’s Connie Butler. The touring show traced feminist art through a predominantly historical lens and featured important, but mostly Caucasian artists that experimented with their bodies and sexualities. The show appeared as a time capsule of radical female artists, leaving me to wonder whether feminist art could still exist or whether it was a history lesson. Another exhibition, while lesser known but far more contemporary, was The Dunlop Gallery’s Pandora’s Box curated by Amanda Cachia. The international line up included the likes of Ghada Amer, Laylah Ali, Wangechi Mutu and Kara Walker exploring issues of femininity without ever outwardly calling the show a feminist exhibition. In looking at the legacy of feminism in contemporary art history, there is no one certain style or philosophy, or even agreement, as to who was and is a feminist, and that has certainly translated into diverse exhibitions and curatorial strategies.

The one consistency is the under-representation of women in galleries and museums. For decades, The Guerrilla Girls have been throwing up stats that show how drastically disparate the numbers are when it comes to women vs. men in the art world, and through it all the percentages have not improved. Sure, The Whitney Biennial for the first time in its 78-year history featured more women than men. As gender was not a defining issue in curatorial selection, was it then just mere coincidence? I’d love to say yes, but I know it to be untrue. Enrollment by women in art school has been steadily climbing, but where do all these young artists go after they graduate when women still make up less than 30% of most exhibition line ups? My generation who lives and operates in a post-ism world still can’t help but recognize this disparity, which leads to the bigger question of how we can be post-feminists when feminism itself has not exactly been resolved.

I don’t believe there is a single answer, but acknowledging our experience and our history will only help inform us. My own turning point in rethinking feminism was through recently attending a lecture by Lucy R. Lippard on Eva Hesse entitled “Something Old, Something New: Eva Hesse Forty Years Later”. It’s been forty years since the New York Women’s Movement was founded and the key feminist exhibitions were first curated, but the definition of feminism is still not agreed upon and feminism in the art world still has a long way to go.

Lippard’s talk revealed that the ideas and influence of feminism are long from being mummified as footnotes. It was intriguing to hear her speak of Hesse’s works in terms such as the “female malaise” and “sensuous abstraction”, phrases that situate the work within a scope larger than any single artistic intention. Hesse herself never identified with feminism, though the burgeoning of must-read texts such as The Second Sex were certainly nearby; self-identification is only one piece of the much larger puzzle. Even if not named as feminist by the artist, can we not reclaim it as such?

Lippard then told an anecdote about speaking with her friend’s daughter. Lippard asked the independent young woman if she identified as a feminist, which for many these days is an awkward question at best. The younger woman said yes she did, that she stood up for herself and for what she believed. Lippard corrected her by sharing that feminism is not about standing up for yourself, but standing up for other women.

To stand up for ourselves as well as for others has become a lost artform in a post-ism landscape, where individualism outshines us all. We may be beyond labels but, like Hesse or any artist who may or may not identify as a feminist, it is the reach of the work, and the pushing of limits and boundaries of one’s efforts, that makes art have an impact that rocks us to our undeniable cores.

At the end of her talk, Lippard shared a quote from Hesse that drifted along the lines of “life doesn’t last, art doesn’t last . . . ” but while we are participating in both of these ephemeral states of expression, we may as well try to make it count for the better and for the next crop of post-individualists.

Amy Fung is an independent art critic and curator and the founder of Prairie Artsters.com. Fung will be completing a Curatorial and Arts Writing Fellowship in Scotland in 2011. For more information, visit AmyFung.ca

Meera Margaret Singh, Anthea Black, Lucy Lippard and Amy Fung (left to right). Photo by Jess Dobkin

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What if we discussed performance as the only feminist art form?
by J.J. Kegan McFadden

In the article “Against Performance Art: Carrie Lambert-Beatty on the art of Marina Abramovic” (ARTFORUM, May 2010), the historian discusses performance as something that “functions differentially, relationally, centrifugally.” This is in response to The Artist is Present (Museum of Modern Art, 14 March – 31 May 2010), the overwhelming career survey of one of the most famous and lauded performance artists in history; it calls into question the reality (and necessity) of the artist’s presence in this exhibit. Of course Lambert-Beatty is dancing around the reality of Abramovic as celebrity, and this over the top ode to her stature/status somehow paints her in, once again, a masculinist light.

Being a curator and artist who took the art historical route over that of the studio, I learnt early on that the history of art, like so many histories, is dominated by men. It was around the time of this knowledge imbedding itself in me that I also began to think about performance art. Having studied the work of so many male-dominated areas of art history—more specifically painting, sculpture, and drawing—I began to look for other media where strong female voices rang out: craft, textiles, video and performance. Now of course it is true there are just as many examples of strong women contributors to the various fields of painting, sculpture, and drawing as there are men, but whether they are recognized as such or not is the root of this text. Equally, there are so many male artists working in craft, textiles, video and performance who may or not be recognized, and therefore perhaps the real topic is emphasis on gender roles in the visual arts. It is with this very reasoning that I’ve always thought of performance as a means to discuss—to pinpoint and analyse—current social concerns more effectively than two and three dimensional works of art.

Most of us paid attention to the 2007 exhibition, WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution (organized by The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles) that was billed as “the first comprehensive, historical exhibition to examine the international foundations and legacy of feminist art”; but did you know that when it was in Vancouver in 2008 (it’s sole Canadian presentation, I might emphasize) local artist-run centre The Western Front put together its own survey of important moments in Canadian feminist art history? The F Word consisted of a concise exhibit along with a fabulous catalogue. Of the artists included in this project, an overwhelming majority create performative work whether on stage, screen, or in text.

Locally, we are lucky to have a rich and fertile history of performance cleverly documented through Live at the Centre, an exhibition and accompanying publication curated and edited by Shawna Dempsey for Winnipeg Art Gallery (2004). In her curatorial preface to the catalogue, Shawna describes performance art as something that “happens and then is gone, often disappearing without a trace.” Has the same sentiment not been uttered (and screamed) so often with reference to our feminist stories and storytellers? The protagonists whose actions challenged patriarchy in small but profound ways often remain unremembered, their identities forgotten or erased.

From that inspired collection of performance ephemera and newly commissioned work, I still remember, awkwardly, hand to hand contact by Sandee Moore. This one-to-one performance took place in the gallery among all the history of our place, with the artist seated on a bench, and me (or you) beside her. She took my hand (and maybe your hand too) and held it while staring ahead to a simulcast projection of the two of us, holding hands, seated, waiting. I remember it went on just long enough for me to feel uncomfortable with the amount of attention both from the artist but also from passers-by. It seems as though this intimate approach resonates with Sandee, who recently embarked on Wake Up Winnipeg, a phone performance masquerading as a wake up service, dishing details, gossip, and noteworthy news items pertaining to our fall civic election. Each morning when she awoke, Sandee called those who signed up online and offered what at first sounded like an automated message: “Good morning Kegan, this is Sandee with your wake up call. It’s 9:13 am and I wanted to rouse you with ______.” The sentence ended with a news bite that she parleyed into chitchat about a stupid thing a candidate said, or a ridiculous stand that a candidate took. As a performance, Wake Up Winnipeg reminds me of phone trees (a grassroots information-sharing technique that long predates email), but also of the building block of feminist ideology: the personal is political. By spinning her research of yesterday’s political fodder into intimate wake up calls, Sandee personalized the information and created a brief stir in the process.

Permit me a brief exploration of other voices familiar to our region:

Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan’s work in performance and accompanying texts (which I take to include video) over the last twenty-five years has allowed Winnipeg the opportunity to consider feminist approaches to social critique and heteronormativity via a camp sensibility that always rings true. From their early costume-based investigations into such archetypes as “the home maker” and “the bull-dyke” to the more complicated set of personae such as “ranger”, “perfumiere”, and “super hero”, Shawna and Lorri have placed feminist critique back into the history from which it was initially ignored.

Jeanne Randolph is a major contributor to the understanding that to ask questions (another fundamental tenant of feminism) is not only to rock the boat, but more importantly to also lay the foundation for something better to come along. In her performance lectures, Jeanne subverts various ideas we all take for granted: the image has a truth; the lecturer knows what she’s doing; the audience is there to learn not teach; there is a “right” and a “wrong” way of proceeding. Now that we in Winnipeg are lucky enough to count Jeanne amongst our ranks, dare I say permanently, it is eminent that performance will continue to take many (subversive) forms, and that feminist thought will persist, and ring out, in textual performances of many kinds.

Wanda Koop’s major survey exhibition, On the Edge of Experience, curated by Mary Reid, opened at Winnipeg Art Gallery in September with her latest work, Hybrid Human, combining a live performance element by Jolene Bailie along with score by Susan Chafe and lighting design by Hugh Conacher. Whether or not the performance, which “is an investigation of artificial intelligence, robotics, and the human body’s integration and understanding of this mediated way of experiencing the world” (according to WAG’s press release), was successful is not of my interest at this point. It is more important to recognize the invitation and presence of performance (and its kin, audio and lighting) among this magnificent exhibition of painting.

More recently, Gwen Armstrong, Lindsay Ladobruk, Sarah Anne Johnson, Ming Hon, hannah_g, Freya Björg Olafson, and Leah Decter have all added to the tradition of feminist performance locally. Often stemming from either a familial connection being dealt with in situ, or the gendered and ordered body in space, the artists I’m listing have incorporated performance into interventions, installations, video, and other mediums, thereby creating a site for inquiry into how histories are disseminated and kept alive.

So how does my own incomplete and somewhat anecdotal history of performance (offered above) get back to my original question of what if we discussed performance as the only feminist art form? As Abramovic states in defining performance art, “The artist is present.” And is it also not the objective of the feminist project to be present, to be recognized as present? I think my goal with the examples I’ve included in this text is to underscore that performance has the ability, not unlike feminism, to permeate, to sweat through and to seep into other terrain—to be present above all else. What would happen if all the feminist artists worked only in performance for the next year? There would likely be a lot of bad performance art created. But so what? Experimentation is key in challenging the world, isn't it? And if feminists (and artists) aren’t interested in commenting on the world around us, then what are we interested in doing?

J.J. Kegan McFadden is the Director/Curator of PLATFORM centre for photographic + digital arts. Everything he knows, more or less, he’s learnt through performative gestures by one woman or another.