© samantha krukowski |
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The year is 1952. Simone de Beauvoir asks her famous question in print, on the first page of the introduction to The Second Sex. "What is a woman?," she writes, setting up a fifty year echo. "Are there women, really?" The year is 1991. Donna Haraway introduces us to the concept of the cyborg, "a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction." Haraway tells us "bodies...are not born; they are made." Echo unknown. With these two thoughts, separated by years but not by intonation, behind (above) me, I face a question about the relationship between feminist theory, feminist art history and performance art since the 1960's. I cannot begin without facing the terms which will shape the words to follow them. After all, they too are constructs; like women, like bodies. One problem with the terms is that they bleed into each other. There is theory in feminist (or any other kind of) art history. There is history in (feminist) theory. There is performance in the writing of both, and there is writing when their content turns performative. As for history, theory and performance, there is a place outside the feminist arena (no matter how shifting and liquid its boundaries) where these cohabitate and, in turn, influence the nebulous zone from which they are separated. Anything which is deemed feminist must be deemed so not only from within but from without, from the places where it is internally defined and those against which it postures, and perhaps also from the points of its permeability. My trek into this material, quicksand-laden though it may be, is aided by a short dictionary of words which has been culled from diverse sources. The dictionary is an expanding dictionary in that each of its terms produces another set of terms. In the ideal word, the dictionary would proceed exponentially; not alphabetically (step by step), but from point to expansion. The included terms have numerous and scattered points of origin; they are stored on library shelves, those of various houses or along neural networks. It would be difficult to afford specific citations for each; their authority relative to the material at hand comes not from footnotes but instead from redundancy. They appear again and again in (non)feminist theory, history and performance texts from the mid-twentieth century to the present. The "definitions" which support each term are not only conceptually relevant but temporally stacked. While I would argue that feminist art history, theory and performance from the 1960's to the present have all been structured by different (if interlaced) methodologies and some variations in focus, I would also argue that there is a core set of issues which has remained constant despite the deviations in approach over time. The terms of the dictionary are derived from these stable issues. Their definitions are structured by chronology. Some terms may have entries for each decade (60's, 70's, 80's, 90's) and others may have entries for only one or two, since some terms have been emphasized or de-emphasized in accordance with the way in which they are culturally, socially, politically or intellectually considered. Greatly oversimplifying, feminist activity is political in the 60's, personal or communal in the 70's, theoretical in the 80's, and revisionist in the 90's. Because the terms and their definitions are not exclusive, there is repetition between them here as in a typical dictionary where definitions are often tautological. Blood The act of menstruation is commonly shared among women. A double-sided
sword, "the curse" is cause for physical discomfort, mood changes,
sexual modesty (and sometimes abstinence) even as it is the sign of fertility
and mature womanhood. The monthly female cycle is the site of mystery
(with technologically advanced products it is virtually invisible), of
rejection, and of silent, hidden discourse. Faith Wilding's "Sacrifice" (1970) includes walls lined with blood-soaked Kotex, and a mannequin (as female sacrifice) which is laid out on a table with a belly filled with bloody cow intestines. This is an art of forceful exposure, one which does what it says. The work does not sustain formal criticism but analysis relative to content and method. Judy Chicago's Menstruation Bathroom in "Womanhouse" (1972) is a completely white, deodorized room with a shelf full of women's paraphernalia and a trash can full of bloodied tampons. She conveys the experience of menstruation by portraying the objects for its preparation and disposal. Chicago intimates that the revelation of these "realities" (though they are props in a theatrical setting) transmits a "real" message, something tangible about what it is like to be a woman. See "Essentialism." Body It is not only political discourse but artistic discourse which shapes the way in which feminist theory, criticism and performance come to speak about and deal with the body. The homogeneity of pictorial space is disrupted in 1960's by the artist's insertion of his/her own body as the artwork. The structural frameworks of post-1960's art practices which Ursula Meyer introduces in Conceptual Art (1972) are valuable to an understanding of how the body (and conception) comes to replace the object (and production.) The proposition or investigation, not their physical result, evolves as the subject of an artwork. Value judgments become secondary to curiosity and awareness. Seriousness is devalued in favor of play. The physical is made theatrical, ideological, conceptual and event-ual. Joseph Kosuth describes the morphology as "art as idea as idea" where Bernar Venet sees it as "art as knowledge." Mary Kelly describes body art as "the individual obsessed by the obligation to exhibit himself in order to be." Body-as-tool. Shigeko Kubota performs "Vagina Painting" in 1965. Squatting over a piece of paper, paintbrush affixed not in, but near her vagina, Kubota moves the brush from paint to paper and makes a genital drawing (?), a drawing-from-genitalia. She paints from a place from which no man can paint. Her essentialist feminist painting comes from the seat of a woman. The illusion of vagina cum hand of the artist is troubling. Why does she avoid using the real thing? Body-as-information. Carolee Schneeman performs "Interior Scroll" in 1975 for an entirely female audience. Schneeman begins the piece in ritual form, painting her body with strokes of paint before slowly extracting a scroll from her vagina on which is written her text "Cezanne: She was a Great Painter." The scroll plays out the struggle of a woman artist against the way she is misperceived by a male "Structuralist filmmaker." She wants recognition and exposure, he thinks she is charming but her work is too emotional, they try to define a relationship but there is no equality on which to base it, she asks how he regards her and plays with the feminization of certain terms ("film-makeress"), he says "Oh No we think of you as a dancer" (a more typical female role.) Schneeman juxtaposes the nude female body (object of desire) with her intellectual voice and work (location of a separate, literally disembodied, identity.) What Schneeman reveals is one of the many possible encounters which, though casual, illuminates the process by which women, their history and voices, are erased. Body-as-transformation. The French performance artist Orlan has been changing her persona and person at once since the 1980's in a series of operation/performances. After selecting desirable anatomic parts from old master paintings (the chin from Botticelli's Venus, the Mona Lisa's forehead), Orlan undergoes plastic surgery in a ritualistic environment in order to replace her features with emblematic and socially sanctioned parts. The operations are choreographed to involve music, poetry and dance, and sometimes the costumes of a famous fashion designer. Orlan treats herself as a readymade, offering her flesh as the material of sculpture. At work here, however, is the problematic relationship between a female artist who engages a critical discourse about the portrayal of women in the history of art while employing an exploitative process in the making of her art. As Carole Spitzack points out in "The Confession Mirror: Plastic Images for Surgery" in The Hysterical Male: New Feminist Theory (1991): "The lucrative business of cosmetic or 'plastic' surgery presents an intriguing site for the deployment of contemporary power relations. The highly material 'illness' of physical/aesthetic imperfection is 'cured' throuugh complex and overlapping mechanisms of confession and surveillance. A patient confesses inadequacy to a physician-confessor who sees and evaluates; in the confessional process, the patient is supplanted with the eye/I of the physician who functions together with the discourses of desire and consumerism." While Orlan ironizes plastic surgery, she is party to it. Does it matter if she prefers her altered self? See "Reality." Domesticity Because of women's early lack of membership in art world institutions (schools, museums, organizations), much of their creative history exists in forms which emerge from the domestic sphere--letters, autobiographies, confessional poetry, diaries and journals, interior decorations, china paintings, small still-lifes or landscape paintings. The desire to protect the domestic sphere as the domain of woman and family is visible in many publications of the 1950's, some of them McCarthy influenced. One 1953 article in House Beautiful, written by the editor Elizabeth Gordon, rails against modern art and architecture for destroying the comfort of the home by promoting unlivability, stripped-down emptiness, lack of storage space and therefore lack of possessions. She writes: "I have talked to a highly intelligent, now disillusioned, woman who spent more than $70,000 building a 1-room house that is nothing but a glass cage on stilts," referring to Edith Farnsworth who commissioned Mies van der Rohe to build a house for her in Plano, Illinois. Many artists in the 1970's insist that the domestic itself is artistic. Rather than courting membership in the male-dominated artistic academy, their moves are separatist and centered on women's stereotypical activities. The "WomanHouse" project of the CalArts Feminist Art Program (1972) is perhaps the most thorough (and literal) example of this attitude. The domicile is described by a variety of artistic practices, from painting to performance. A "nurturant kitchen" has walls decorated with eggs and breasts. A linen closet houses a mannequin divided between its shelves because "this is exactly where women have been--between the sheets and on the shelf." A performance entitled "Scrubbing" makes this activity, traditionally exercised by women, ritualistic and visible. Later in the decade (not related to "WomanHouse"), Mierle Laderman Ukeles performs "Maintenance Art Activity" in which she washes museum floors with a mop over and over again. See "Structure." Essentialism Feminist artists of the late 1960's and 1970's search for a women's sensibility or aesthetic. Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro co-author an article in Womanspace Journal (1972) which poses the questions "What does it feel like to be a woman? To be formed around a central core and have a secret place which can be entered and which is also a passageway from which life emerges? What kind of imagery does this state of feeling engender?" Articles like this and projects like "Womanhouse" tend toward an essentialist view of woman which is, in the end, exclusive and limiting. Freud's insistence that biology is destiny is countered by feminist critics like Helene Cixous who writes in 1975 that "There is no such thing as 'destiny', 'nature', or 'essence', (only) living structures." By 1980 the body is rejected as the site of female essence, especially in the writings of feminist film theorists like Laura Mulvey, Pam Cook and Claire Johnston who see the idea of a historically unchanging feminine essence as anathema to feminism and its goals. See "Voice." See "Woman." Food Names: Candy. Sweetie. Pumpkin. Adjectives: Luscious. Tangy. Fishy. Practices: Diet. Plastic Surgery. Bulimia. Treatments: T&A. Appetizer. Meat. Woman is at the place of food and at the place of its absence. Issues of the body are inherently related to this category. Whether in terms of reference, consumption or practice, women artists and critics have used the food-body "problem" as a point of origin for work. In 1972 Eleanor Antin performs "Carving: A Traditional Sculpture." She diets for thirty-six days and records the results in photographs taken daily. Hers is a play on the making of sculpture: the sculptural program proceeds with the carving of layers, one at a time, as with other subtractive sculptural media. Substituting her body for a sculptural medium, Antin objectifies the American (female) preoccupation with dieting, documenting the results of deprivation without the usual silence. Judy Chicago's "The Dinner Party" (1974-79) is a complicated
installation which speaks many messages at many levels. There is the social
occasion of dining with the inversion of the relationships server/served,
consumer/consumed. There is the depiction of women's history in a domestic
format. There is the recognition of the unrecognized at a staged event,
such that each woman represented is presented as an individual (history).
There is the overt (and much criticized) sexual nature of the plates--women's
genitalia made beautiful and specific but in your face. There is the sacrificial
nature of the body dressed as art. See "Domesticity." History The network which supports feminist art, history and theory begins where
it is necessary to make something out of nothing, to write that which
has not been written, to analyse that which has not been questioned. The
acts of making, writing and analysing attract audiences which spectate
between the acts themselves (the historians visit the artists, the artists
inspire the theorists, the theorists inform the artists and the historians)
and audiences which are external to their processes but not to their (possible)
impact. The 1970's sees a dramatic increase in the number of publications and organizations devoted to feminist causes. The movement gains leaders and constituents. Museums are attacked for exclusionist policies (in May, 1970 the New York Art Strike shuts down many galleries and museums.) The literary canon is questioned (Kate Millet's Sexual Politics indicts masculinist bias of Western literature in August, 1970). There is enough activity to support an anthology (Sisterhood is Powerful is published in 1970.) Organizations are formed to help women artists shift status from amateur to professional. Long-term institutional changes are sought. The evolution is from radical structurelessness to intentional organization. Audience awareness and self-consciousness is of primary importance--the audience is understood as something to be manufactured. Early consciousness raising among women is solidified and turned out. This is the most active feminist decade; the audience for the feminist agenda is largely female. The 1980's political environment is not conducive to the feminist cause. The last, unsuccessful drive for ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment in 1982 and the shift in 1980 to a conservative administration indicates a tide which is turning against feminism. New groups pick up the feminist agenda with an ironic style and less overt (sometimes completely covert) operations. The Guerrilla Girls paper SoHo with activist posters but wear masks in public; their personal risk is minimized but their collective power heightened under the veil of secrecy. Their target audience is populist (the street is their gallery) but circumscribed (SoHo's art world). The issue of audience is allied to problems of culture and class. Martha Rosler writes in "Lookers, Buyers, Dealers, and Makers: Thoughts on Audience" that "social class (is) "the weightiest determinant of one's relation to culture." She points to the difference between onlookers (who know about high culture through 'rumor and report'), actual audience (people who own and understand artworks), and appreciators (who are engaged in art appreciation to cultivate elevated sensibilities.) Feminism is something to buy or not, to invest in or not. Its audience is its market, its strategy is confused with its sales; its politics are overwhelmed by suspicion and distrust. The 1990's struggles with the presentation of feminism, the dirtied term which Susan Faludi's Backlash and Naomi Wolf's The Beauty Myth only momentarily reinvest with new energy. At issue for many women interested in feminist causes is how to organize the best of the previous strategies into one which can be carried into the future. Feminism is decentralized as a cause and topic such that it is an interdisciplinary methodology, an echo amongst various approaches which have been engaged in deconstructing sites of power and identity. See "Theory." Mother Woman has been defined by her ability to give birth. Examinations and presentations of motherhood have, not surprisingly, littered feminist writings and performances. In 1972 "Birth Trilogy" is performed by the Feminist Art Program Performance Group. An enacted ritual of birth and rebirth, it preaches transformation for its participants and the possibility of transformation for its audience. Of primary importance is replacing one's birth as female in a hostile, male-dominated world with a rebirth into a community of women. With each rebirth, consciously attended by the reborn and her helpers/witnesses, there is a metaphorical rebirth of the entire women's community. In Mary Kelly's "Post-Partum Document" (1976), Kelly uses her relationship with her infant son as her raw material. The exhibition of this work is divided into two parts: objects and records which act as factual evidence of the past (diapers, fecal stains, casts of the child's hand, scrawls--all indicating the complementary relationship between the mother and child, the dyad), and written documentation which relies on Lacanian psychoanalytic principles and provides structure and commentary for the physical objects. Criticized for being an esoteric but incomprehensible, exciting but intimidating work, Kelly's use of psychoanalytic principles in a feminist forum describes a direction for artists and writers in the 1980's. Kelly's interest in and use of Lacan derives from texts like Juliet Mitchell's Psychoanalysis and Feminism. Julia Kristeva writes "Stabat Mater" in 1986. Her essay's topic is the cult of the Virgin Mary and its resonance relative to Catholic attitudes towards motherhood and femininity. "Stabat Mater" is a deconstructed text which juxtaposes Kristeva's scholarship with her own experience of motherhood. She treats issues of feminine paranoia, asks why the feminist critique of the traditional representation of motherhood has not produced an explanation for women's continued desire to have children, indicates the need for further understanding relative to the mother's body, the experience of childbirth, the mother-daughter relationship. Kristeva's is a psychoanalytic approach underwritten by Lacan and shared by writers like Jane Gallop, Mary Jacobus, Luce Irigaray and Helene Cixous. See "Blood." See "Body." Paganism The feminist movement dips into spiritual and metaphysical realms, reaching for women's principles which are gilded by myth and age, for universal female symbols which are inherent and timeless. Witches are reminders of women's past persecution and symbols of hidden powers; goddesses transcend difference, diversity and division. The earth mother goddess is posited against the sky father god. In 1968 WITCH (Women's International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell) takes theory to the streets with "zap actions" and "witch hexes". On Halloween a widely organized hexing against banks and brokerage firms ("Up Against Wall Street") results in a five point stock market decline. In 1975 Ana Mendieta exhibits "Silhueta en Fuego", an earth work performance with fire, cloth and earth. Mendieta's materials are those most basic and most necessary to humankind's perpetuity. Earth and woman are equivalent points of origin and sustenance. In 1977 Betsy Damon stands as the "Seven Thousand Year Old Woman" on the streets of New York, her body covered with small, colored flour bags. She is, apparently, the embodiment of many-breasted Artemis of Ephesus. The 1978 issue of Heresies is given over to the topic of the Great Goddess. See "Food." Sex Sex may be politically liberated in the 1960's and 70's (free love and bra-burnings) but it is increasingly problematized with the maturation of the women's movement. In "A Constant State of Desire" (1987) Karen Finley speaks the unspeakable sexuality. Her voice is raw and black. If the audience cannot hear (will not hear) her, she forces audition. She makes her words louder (yelling emphasis): "LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT POWER", more grotesque (closet revelations): "For I already have an abortion on my conscience from when a member of my own family raped me. Don't worry. I won't mention your name. Don't worry. I won't mention your name. And the reason why my father committed suicide is that he no longer found me attractive", partners to action (the score): "Easter baskets and stuffed animals sit on table. Take off clothes. Put colored unboiled eggs from basket and animals in one large clear-plastic bag. Smash contents till contents are yellow. Put mixture on body using soaked animals as applicators. Sprinkle glitter and confetti on body and wrap self in paper garlands as boas." Finley's performance is one of exposure. Her method is brute force. She assumes the position of the aggressor, her audience that of the victim. She is not interested in sexuality (there is no mythos here about feminine allure and pleasure) but in those sexual experiences which are violent and transgressive and which therefore have no social voice or identity. Finley obliterates aesthetic distance. Critics worry that she adopts the language of the patriarchy and perpetuates it. Is hers a genuine or simulated hatred of women? If Karen Finley is one bad girl, a 1991 article by Christine Tamblyn in Art Journal entitled "No More Nice Girls: Recent Transgressive Feminist Art" places her alongside other (performance) artists who engage similar activities. Joan Braderman's 1989 videotape "No More Nice Girls" is full of bad girl postures, "fuck-me pumps", foul language, and heavy makeup; Holly Hughes' 1987 play "Dress Suits to Hire" exploits lesbianism and the butch/femme stereotypical opposition; Linda Montano's "Summer Saint Camp" includes porn stars Annie Sprinkle and Veronica Vera and reveals the class bias inherent in the good girl vs. bad girl stereotype. In another article from 1991, Mira Schor's, "A Plague of Polemics" the author speculates on the ramifications of these activities. "Whether these (are) 'bad girls,' rewriting patriarchal representation of Woman, and recuperating it with subversitve feminist intent, or just 'bad boys' with estrogen, replicating age-old exploitation of the female body, is a question deserving more attention by postmodernist critics." Kate Linker's article "Representation and Sexuality" clarifies how the freely revealed sexuality of the 1960's and early 70's is transformed into a theoretical problematic in the late 1970's and early 1980's. For Linker, no reality exists outside of representations. She introduces the ideas of "suturing", in which a subject is bound in to its representation and of "subject-positioning", where the subject is placed in or by the discourse and constructed in or by it as well (this recalls Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle and the idea that the spectacle is circular, it is made and it makes at once). Linker demonstrates that woman functions as a symptom for man. She is a fetish, a filler for the Lacanian void such that she is a category against which masculine privilege attains presence. Her negation allows the her dominion. Linker writes: "Men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at." Linker's article clarifies the paradoxical, and perhaps dangerous consequences of women who objectify themselves in the midst of speaking about (or against), parodying, that objectification. See "Vision." Structure The performative practices of feminist artists (and critical/theoretical responses to them) are influenced by a set of artistic structures which might not be considered feminist. While it is important to recognize interest in re-investing women's practices with new meaning and examining problems of ideological transmission and reception, certain ways-of-working are derived from arenas which are less about women but about art in particular. Allan Kaprow's seven-point definition of the Happening exemplifies changes in (and bases for) artistic practice from the 1960's forward: -art/life connection See "Voice." Theory Feminist art activity (art, theory and criticism) in 1960's is fueled by social and political struggles which aim for self-definition and sexual liberation in the midst of sexist victimization. "The personal is political" credo of early feminist is not an automatic guarantor of good art. The 1970's preoccupation with the person of the artist (images of the Goddess, "cunt art") are easily undermined and ridiculed. They are reduced to cliches rather than appreciated as revelations. Feminist criticism in the 1970's looks like a set of strategies rather than a theoretical model; there are antitheoretical positions (Virginia Woolf serves as a model for writers like Mary Daly, Adrienne Rich, and Marguerite Duras who satirize the narcisissm of male scholarship and celebrate women's 'fortunate' exclusion from patriarchal methodology.) Woolf is oft-quoted as writing "while it is "unpleasant to be locked out...it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in." Confronting the canon, resisting definition (see Judith Fetterley's The Resisting Reader), suspecting monolithic systems predominates. In the 1980's ideological techniques and investigations are more common. Performers use assaultive/flamoboyant behavior, transgress boundaries by appropriating pornography and exploiting their own bodies. In 1980 Lucy Lippard writes in an Art Journal article entitled "Sweeping Exchanges" that feminist art is "neither a style nor a movement (but) a value system, a revolutionary strategy, a way of life" such that a revolution in feminist art will come not from its form but from its content. Much 1980's feminist criticism uses poststructuralist, psychoanalytic, Marxist and linguistic theory to underwrite analysis. Griselda Pollock's use of Brechtian strategies for distanciation and montage is intended to expose conventions of representation. Her writing stands in the face of essentialist feminism alongside that of other critics (not all of whom are female) like Kate Linker, Hal Foster and Craig Owens, all of whom want to look not at new images of femininity but at re-presentations of cultural images for analysis. Elaine Showalter defines two types of feminist criticism in "Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness" (1985). The first is ideological and includes the feminist as reader, feminist readings of texts which analyse images and stereotypes, concern for the omissions and misconceptions of women in literature, interest in criticism and semiotic systems. She acknowledges this as a mode of interpretation but indicates its weakness in that it makes feminist reading just another kind of interpretation which has to compete with all the others. The second is woman-centered, independent, and intellectually coherent. It is not necessarily separatist but it stands firmly against androcentrism. It insists upon a criticism based on women's experience: Showalter writes "we must choose to have the argument out at last on our own premises." She, obviously, prefers the latter approach. Feminism enters the academy (unfortunately) as "gender studies", bearer of an immediately marginalized position and strangely lukewarm nominalism. The early ethics of awakening are supplanted by an anxiety about the isolation of feminist criticism from an increasingly theoretical community indifferent to women's writing. The question arises: How should feminist criticism define itself relative to new critical theories and theorists? The 1990's "girl artists" are in the mainstream. Cassandra Langer's 1991 article "Feminist Art Criticism" in Art Journal deals with the work of Cindy Sherman, Barbara Kruger, Sherrie Levine and Jenny Holzer. They are "conquering heroes...(but) the so-called 'successful' art woman appears to have bought the male game...their art is a mirror-image expression of male nature, not of human nature. If we pursue a feminist analysis of Sherman, Kruger and their group, some questions arise: What is the attitude fostered by these artists toward women? How do the models of woman represented affect the audience? Is it provocative to participate--to see with the eyes of the male gazer?...Can feminist artists enter the 1990's using the system without it abusing them?" Joanna Frueh and Arlene Raven echo Langer as editors of a 1991 Art Journal issue devoted to feminism and art. "Feminism," they write, "alters the terms of culture's bad jokes, the dead weight of images, by posing and answering the questions: How does consciousness change images? How does it create the new, transform the stereotypical?" In 1994 Norma Broude and Mary Garrard write "Feminist art and art
history helped to initiate postmodernism in America. We owe to the feminist
breakthrough some of the most basic tenets of postmodernism: the understanding
that gender is socially and not naturally constructed; the widespread
validation of non-'high art' forms such as craft, video and performance
art; the questioning of the cult of 'genius' and 'greatness' in Western
art history; the awareness that behind the claim of 'universality lies
an aggregate of particular standpoints and biases, leading in turn to
an emphasis upon pluralist variety rather than totalizing unity."
There is a difficulty in knowing how much of the evolution cited by Broude
and Garrard comes from feminism and how much of it comes from the disciplines
which inform feminist discourse. See "History." Vision Woman and the photograph, woman on film, woman documented in performance--the use of the body and its capture in words and images shifts emphasis to the sites of sight and of looking. Laura Mulvey's classic article "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" demonstrates how woman is a perpetual signifier for the male other. A man lives out fantasies and obsessions through language which is imposed on a silent woman. A woman bears the weight of looking but does not look, she bears (literally), but does not make. Woman needs a new language of desire (a new language for looking) because the old one is bound in patriarchy. Mulvey shows how the pleasures of films are dually bound in scopophilia (looking and objectification which arises from the pleasure of using another person as an object of sexual stimulation through sight) and voyeurism (a narcissm which comes from an identification with the image seen.) A viewer has power over a screened image such that the viewer feels the effect of the privilege of looking into a private world. Mulvey refers to Lacan's essay "The Mirror Image": "Recognition is thus overlaid with misrecognition: the image recognized is conceived as the reflected body of the self, but its misrecognition as superior projects this body outside itself as an ideal ego, the alienated subject, which, reintrojected as an ego ideal, gives rise to the future generation of identification with others." Woman is important to photography and film because of the responses she generates. She is an alien presence, bound in signifier specificity, who (which) can stop the narrative and must be carefully integrated into the rest. See "Blood." See "Voice." Voice Women's silence is equivalent to women's pain. Psychological pain turns physical and, finally, vocal. Performances which work against woman's silence also work against the incommunicability of pain (see Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain.) In 1962 Yoko Ono performs "Conversation Piece." She bandages imagined wounds "to articulate her psycho-physical pain" writes Kristine Stiles in "Unbosoming Lennon: The Politics of Yoko Ono's experience." She insists on telling the story of her invisible interior suffering for the act of telling "is central to repossessing and sharing the 'body as an historical text'." Ono is writing the body out of silence. In 1972 Judy Chicago, Suzanne Lacy, Sandra Orgel and Aviva Rahmani perform "Ablutions." A woman is tied to a chair and to everything else in the room after being bathed in eggs, earth and blood. A tape of women telling about their rapes plays in background. At the end of the performance the tape repeats "I felt so helpless all I could do was lie there and cry." In 1979 Rachel Rosenthal performs "The Arousing (Shock, Thunder): A Hexagram in Five Parts." Rosenthal first wraps herself in bandages and then unwraps them, alluding to the construction, deconstruction and transformation of an identity through layering, disguise, and masquerade. The bandages are a concealment, a costume for the unspoken. To be able to speak is to be freed. See "Vision." Woman Or, the woman problem. Simone de Beauvoir has demonstrated that woman is not just a womb (women can be wombless), not necessarily 'feminine' (masculinized women are still women), not mythically female (what is the eternal feminine?), not merely human (women are not men). She illustrates how the very question "what is a woman?" is not a question likely to be asked by a man because it insists upon a reciprocity which does not exist between the sexes. The masculine, de Beauvoir clarifies, occupies the positive and neutral position, while the feminine occupies only the negative. Woman is the other, constructed as such relative to the majority discourse and the majority activity, even though women are not a minority. Men say "women" and women refer to themselves reflexively. Changing the term alone (to womyn, for example) is not sufficient to change the structure which makes and propagates the terminology. Renouncing male-given womanhood is akin to giving up the pleasures and possibilities of male society (political, social, economic) and that, in the end, means all society. There is no move which makes the proposition of equal but separate possible. "If we are to gain understanding," de Beauvoir writes, "we must get out of these ruts; we must discard the vague notions of superiority, inferiority, equality which have hitherto corrupted every discussion of the subject and start afresh." Starting afresh. This is the woman problem. Out of de Beauvoir grows Linda Nochlin's article "Why Have there Been No Great Women Artists?" (1971) She moves the woman question out of essentialism into the realm of intellectual discipline. "The so-called woman question...can become a catalyst, an intellectual instrument, probing basic and 'natural' assumptions, providing a paradigm for other kinds of internal questioning, and in turn providing links with paragdigms established by radical approaches in other fields." Nochlin argues against all naturalistic assumptions. What is visible is not necessarily what is. See "History." See "Theory." |