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Overview
A Decade of Negative Thinking brings together writings on contemporary art and culture by the painter and feminist art theorist Mira Schor. Mixing theory and practice, the personal and the political, she tackles questions about the place of feminism in art and political discourse, the aesthetics and values of contemporary painting, and the influence of the market on the creation of art. Schor writes across disciplines and is committed to the fluid interrelationship between a formalist aesthetic, a literary sensibility, and a strongly political viewpoint. Her critical views are expressed with poetry and humor in the accessible language that has been her hallmark, and her perspective is informed by her dual practice as a painter and writer and by her experience as a teacher of art.
In essays such as "The ism that dare not speak its name," "Generation 2.5," "Like a Veneer," "Modest Painting," "Blurring Richter," and "Trite Tropes, Clich?s, or the Persistence of Style," Schor considers how artists relate to and represent the past and how the art market influences their choices: whether or not to disavow a social movement, to explicitly compare their work to that of a canonical artist, or to take up an exhausted style. She places her writings in the rich transitory space between the near past and the "nextmodern." Witty, brave, rigorous, and heartfelt, Schor's essays are impassioned reflections on art, politics, and criticism.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822346029 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 02/01/2010 |
| Pages: | 336 |
| Sales rank: | 726,211 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.00(d) |
About the Author
Mira Schor is a painter, writer, and teacher living in New York. She is the author of Wet: On Painting, Feminism, and Art Culture and an editor of The Extreme of the Middle: The Writings of Jack Tworkov (forthcoming) and M/E/A/N/I/N/G: An Anthology of Artists' Writings, Theory, and Criticism, also published by Duke University Press. Schor is a recipient of the College Art Association's Frank Jewett Mather Award in Art Criticism.
Read an Excerpt
A Decade of Negative Thinking
Essays on Art, Politics, and Daily LifeBy Mira Schor
Duke University Press
Copyright © 2009 DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESSAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4602-9
Chapter One
THE ISM THAT DARE NOT SPEAK ITS NAME
"My mother was communist, feminist, vegetarian, and everything," said Vanessa Beecroft, speaking at the conference "The Body Politic: Whatever Happened to the Women Artist's Movement?" held at the New Museum in December 1998. In a sense, she provided at least one answer to the question posed in the title of the panel: she had happened to it. It is, of course, the third term in her description that is key, epitomizing one way in which feminism is perceived by a new generation of women artists, in this case quite literally the daughters' generation. In the mysterious way in which a good joke works, it is the word vegetarian that reduces the two other terms, which represent major political and social movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, to the kind of self-indulgent, crackpot movements which now reductively sum up the sixties and seventies. Although it may be a healthful practice, here vegetarian is the coded caricature that trivializes communism and feminism.
Speaking last, Beecroft, the youngest member of the panel-which also included Nancy Spero, Mary Kelly, and Renée Cox-opined that she was against work that "screamed." Beecroft herself disconcertingly matched the affectless pose of the women in her videos, which ran continuously during her talk as well as during the discussion period that followed. According to her, such "screaming" work may have been necessary to make polemic points and get attention early on in the feminist art movement, but she herself had encountered no problems in her four-year career. In response to comments about statistics showing the still deplorably low numbers of women exhibiting their work-Spero mentioned that the initial gains achieved in the mid-seventies through demands and protest, from about 4 percent to 25 percent of women in group exhibitions, had never been exceeded to this day-Beecroft stated that she never counted. However, she admitted in a quick aside, her work was often shown with other women's; she did not elaborate further on why this might be the case. She also traced her interest in the female nude to her grounding, as an Italian, in Italian Renaissance art, with no acknowledgment of feminist art historians' extensive iconographic analysis of this history of representation. As disaffected, Barbie doll-figured, half-naked women milled around the atrium of the Guggenheim Museum in the video of her performance there the previous year, she said she was "always impressed by beauty in women, the ability to be objectified, and to objectify themselves." As for the question of power, she expressed some nostalgia for art done under repressive totalitarian regimes when subversion had to be done through covert, non-screaming codes: "I don't mind even the condition of non-power. I think it's more stimulating. Let's say, in old dictatorships, all the intellectuals, they were in this condition. If it's this level, I like, I don't like when it's against, so obvious."
The other panelists and the audience, largely composed of women in their forties and fifties (and about ten hardy men) did not seriously question Beecroft on the political content of her work and her statements. No one noted that if we've learned anything from thirty years of feminist and postmodern critiques of representation, it is indeed that every representation serves an ideology, not just those that "scream." Unfortunately, but as so often happens, the "bad girl" got most of the attention of the audience, although negatively, despite the depth of experience of the other panelists-Nancy Spero in particular was luminously brilliant that evening. None of the other artists on the panel addressed Beecroft with any direct remarks on the dangers of flirting so closely with traditionally exploitative figurations. Perhaps they felt that it would have been like shooting fish in a barrel. Nevertheless, I suspect that many in the room that evening were appalled by Beecroft's complacency, her sense of entitlement, and her apparent contempt for the work that had enabled her sense of privilege.
And yet, isn't that what the early feminist artists' movement had worked for, the day when young women artists would feel only entitlement and possibility? After all, in the Bible, God made the Jews wander in the desert until all those who remembered slavery had died out so that only a fresh, amnesiac but free generation would enter the promised land of milk and honey. The difference here is that only thirty years have passed since the beginning of the women artists' movement, and many of those who first worked in feminism are still alive and not even that old, and are only now doing mature work that synthesizes a broad experience encompassing feminism as well as later discourses. But they haven't forgotten how it was. More importantly, they still see and experience the underlying discriminatory practices of patriarchal systems because they were trained to look for them in the world and in themselves.
The ideological schism made evident at this event has been revisited and reenacted at several panels organized on feminism "then and now," including a panel moderated by Faith Wilding held in conjunction with "Between the Acts," an exhibition of works by young women artists at Art in General, curated by Juana Valdes (September 11, 1997 to October 25, 1997); a series of panels held at the A.I.R. Gallery from 1997 to 1998 to celebrate its twenty-fifth anniversary; and "The F-Word: Contemporary Feminisms and the Legacy of the Los Angeles Feminist Art Movement," a symposium organized in October 1998 by the Feminist Art Workshop (FAWS), a group of California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) students, alumni, and faculty, at which I was a participant. Toward the end of "The F-Word" symposium, the question was asked, "Where is feminism going?" While predictive comments are probably futile, one can attempt to pinpoint where feminism has come to. Tracing the progression of events at "The F-Word" provides a few impressions of what is admittedly a complex subject of inquiry.
"The F-Word" included an evening of "Videos from the Woman's Building," presented by Annette Hunt and Nancy Buchanan, who had both been involved in the Woman's Building in Los Angeles in the mid-1970s. The fervor and sincerity of a new political movement was expressed in works by Suzanne Lacy and Leslie Labowitz, Nancy Buchanan, and Nancy Angelo, interviews with Arlene Raven and Sheila de Bretteville, and in archival footage of the construction of the Woman's Building.
In Memory and Rage, a 1978 video documentation of Lacy's and Labowitz's performance piece in front of the LA city hall to protest a series of killings of women, women clad in dowdy dresses and sensible shoes and masked by long black veils recite statistics of violence toward women, backed by a chorus of participants yelling out, "We fight back!" The video records every detail in real time, no matter how silly or boring, so that a local black male councilman is seen to be both supportive and opportunistic, and local female TV reporters earning their stripes on the street (and reporting back to the invariably male anchors) seem to understand their own stake in the issues raised by the event. At the end a young Holly Near sings her song "Something About the Women." One young woman in the symposium's audience said, "This [violence against women] is all still happening but there seems to be more silence." The power of group action, the power of anger informed by facts, and the total sincerity of the participants burned through any cynicism that the contemporary media-savvy audience might have brought to a retrospective viewing of its traces.
Another powerful work was a fictional video from 1977: On Joining the Order by Nancy Angelo. In it a woman's voice tells a story of a young girl who can't understand why puberty has caused a loss of intimacy with her father. One night, when her mother is away, she gets into her parents' bed, waits for her father to stumble home in a drunken haze, and lets him have sex with her, as he mistakes her for his wife, her mother. When he awakens and realizes what he has done, he turns his face away and weeps. The mother returns, they all have breakfast, and nothing is said. The narrative is told so that it seems like a true story yet with the strange pace and eerie plotting of a folktale. Although the topic of incest is incendiary, the story here is morally ambiguous and not didactic; it isn't clear who is more culpable, the girl who slipped into her father's bed, or the father who had distanced himself from her precisely because of his fear of incestuous intimacies.
While the quality of the black and white video now seems primitive, the aural narrative is juxtaposed with astonishingly effective metaphoric rather than illustrative imagery. No people are pictured; during much of the tale, fingers of what look like a woman's hand stroke a rose suspended in clear gel. The slow manipulation of the rose in this primal goo as a visual accompaniment to a narrative of incest seems like a perfect example of what early feminist art in the United States sought: visual art that would depict and embody sexuality as experienced by the woman as subject. In this case one intuited, correctly, a lesbian erotics.
At the end of this evening the pervasive feeling was that the seventies ROCKED! Yet two facts shadowed the presentation. First both Hunt and Buchanan expressed their gratitude that anyone was interested in what they had been involved with so many years ago. More tragically from a historical point of view, the material we were watching had almost been lost: Hunt, after safeguarding these hours of tape for nearly twenty years, recently had put them on the curb for garbage collection. Only a providential call inviting her to place the tapes in the Long Beach Museum of Art's archives saved this historically valuable material. The fragility of feminism's legacy was baldly evident.
Two overarching themes were established at "The F-Word" symposium's official opening reception: gratitude for the pioneering work of feminist artists of the 1970s generation, who were invited to participate and be honored at the "F-Word" symposium, and loss, both of the focus and energy of that moment and of documentation of the work made by these women. The FAWS collective and the symposium grew from the FAWS member Karina Combs's discovery, in the CalArts archives, of evidence of a feminist art program at CalArts, which she had never heard of! Documents, in some cases already in the dumpster, led to the rediscovery of material and events jettisoned from institutional memory, even though it might be argued that the existence of the Feminist Art Program at CalArts from 1971 to 1975 was one of its principle and most innovative contributions to contemporary art history. Those of us involved in the program and the Woman's Building in LA certainly had not forgotten, and now we were told that we were honored guests. Liz Barrett, a current faculty member and part of FAWS, said, "What was really important to us was to meet you all, to meet the people who had been part of the Feminist Art Program. We wanted to create an occasion for you to come and reflect with us on your experiences with those programs and your stories-your personal stories-and your art practices."
So we did tell our stories. That night there were vivid and funny testimonies from the women who had been in Judy Chicago's original Feminist Art Program at the California State University, Fresno, as well as participants in the Womanhouse project and the Woman's Building. The next day the symposium began with a panel which included Faith Wilding, Cheri Gaulke, Sue Maberry, and me. Each of us spoke about our early experiences but also about our current work-in our art, jobs, and teaching-where feminism operates in a complex field of interests. Wilding spoke of her involvement with cyberfeminism, for example. Gaulke spoke of collaborative projects in the public-art field and in teaching, and Sue Maberry about a recent grant from the Getty that allowed her to transfer slides of early feminist artworks to digital form (but she had to choose only 1,500 out of 10,000 images). I spoke about the dilemma I experience between feeling the responsibility to continue to represent feminism in my work, for pedagogic purposes, and moving toward other intellectual and formal concerns, for my own growth. As a group, we seemed to have an engaged but also a balanced and reflective view of the past and, at the same time, we existed very much in a developing present of contemporary artistic and pedagogic practice.
In the informally circulated "Journal Notes from F-Word Symposium Week at CalArts," FAWS notes that the final discussion "got bogged down in some of the usual dichotomies between 1970s and 1990s feminisms which once again enforced a simplistic and somewhat false division between essentialist and constructivist views of the body." This was surely not the intention of FAWS, whose "Working Papers for Themes and Topics," prepared just before the symposium, put forth well-informed and wide ranging questions and strategies. But indeed, by the end of the symposium, the still considerable living power of "seventies feminism's legacy" had been overshadowed by a curious reenactment of the way in which it was condemned to the essentialist scrap heap of history by certain aspects of postmodernist discourse predominant in the 1980s.
This was largely effectuated through interwoven presentations by Simon Leung and Juli Carson, who both paid particular homage to the work of Mary Kelly. While the intellectual rigor of Kelly's critique of traditional representation of woman becomes ever more significant in the face of a less theoretically inclined moment, it is important to remember the extent to which, in the 1980s, the discourses of which Mary Kelly is considered the exemplar represented not only a necessary corrective to some work from the 1970s, but also a new prescriptive and divisive hierarchy within feminist art. Those involved in a critique of totalizing systems and essences seemed to display totalizing impulses of their own: to replace Woman with the concept of Human Vehicle for constructed gender signifiers, a shift that continues to leave out the more complex lived experience of interwoven biological and social construction. As I have discussed in other contexts, the critique of essence also favors certain visual strategies, doubling the prescriptive effect of the new hierarchy. Thus, the evocation of Mary Kelly by Carson and Leung-in the context of a symposium dedicated to the reconsideration of the feminist legacy of the 1970s (implicitly, the American version of that legacy, given the location and circumstances)-felt like a reenactment of the repressive aspects of the postmodernist discourse and set into motion the familiar miasmic atmosphere described in the FAWS report.
Certainly more fluid movement along the previously frozen vectors of masculine/feminine and male/female has opened up a wider range of identities. But when Leung said, "I don't know what a body is," he did not allow for the very real social, legal, and economical consequences that still devolve from living in a biologically sexed body. The pitfalls of the rhetoric about a post-sexed body were illustrated by the question one student posed: "I think it's still problematic; as a visual artist, as a woman, as a black woman, where do I put my body? ... I just want to hear the body talked about.... Do we address the body and therefore play into notions of [the] essential, of fetish, or do we not address the body and try to make a theoretical model of the body? But where's the body? ... In my studio this is kind of daunting." Indeed, how do you deal with conflicting theoretical positions when in the studio? "The language" doesn't help beyond a certain point in the struggle to visually represent experience of the lived body, especially if the concept "woman" has been so successfully problematized that a woman doesn't trust her own experience. If Woman with a capital "W" is an essentializing concept that silenced differences among women, nevertheless the confusion and doubt evident in some of the students' questions and faces made it clear that if you can't say that actual women, embodied and enculturated, exist, then women are silenced yet again.
(Continues...)
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Table of Contents
Preface vii
Introduction 1
Part 1 She Said, She Said: Feminist Debates, 1971-2009
The ism that dare not speak its name 21
Anonymity as a Political Tactic: Art Blogs, Feminism, Writing, and Politics 36
Generation 2.5 47
Email to a Young Woman Artist 70
The Womanhouse Films 72
Miss Elizabeth Bennett Goes to Feminist Boot Camp 75
Part 2 Painting
Some Notes on Women and Abstraction and a Curious Case History: Alice Neel as a Great Abstract Painter 91
Like a Veneer 119
Modest Painting 135
Blurring Richter 161
Off the Grid
Weather Conditions in Lower Manhattan, September 11, 2001, to October 2, 2001 198
Part 3 Trite Tropes
Trite Tropes, Clich?s, or the Persistence of Styles 215
Recipe Art 231
Work and Play 245
New Tales of Scheherazade 252
Appendix: Work Document: Grey 257
Notes 265
Bibliography 305
Index 313