‘Small Things End, Great Things Endure’: New look for feminism

Reyhan Harmanci

Thursday, January 17, 2008

San Francisco Cronicle

Feminism’s vital signs have been taken - and its eminent demise predicted - for as long as women have organized for equitable treatment. And with Hillary Clinton holding her ground in the Democratic primaries, feminist issues seem more timely than ever. In New Langton Arts new show, “Small Things End, Great Things Endure,” the contemporary state of feminism is examined by group of local and internationally known artists.

Co-curator Jill Dawsey says the impetus for this show was a raft of shows in New York and Los Angeles in the past year that looked at feminism historically. “There was a lot of talk around those shows, and I wanted to put together a group of artists of a slightly younger generation,” she says, “who are looking at feminism in different ways. We wanted to take the pulse of feminism today.”

The conclusions of the investigation, Dawsey says, are mixed. “We began thinking of feminism and broadened the field to different offshoots.” Transgender and queer theory has been greatly impacted by feminism. “People are using feminist theory of the past to look at the body in new ways,” she says. Taking off on the historical shows, artists such as Emily Roysdon, who looks at the work of artist and gay activist David Wojnarowicz, and Anna Maltz, who pays winking homage to the Guerrilla Girls, wrestle with the questions of how far we’ve come.

Meanwhile, other artists in the show examine how retrograde notions of feminity are alive and kicking today. “Andrea Bowers takes up the institution of marriage. She uses Emma Goldman’s essay on marriage and love, which was written more than 100 years ago, and made a video installation where two brides stand in opposition to each other, as if reading wedding vows, but it’s actually an acerbic essay of Goldman’s,” Dawsey says.

She notes that the unease around the language of feminism exists in the liberal Bay Area as much as any other place. “A lot of people aren’t interested in gender today - it’s seen as a kind of closed question,” she says. “There’s a sense of well, that’s over.”

The problem, she says, is it’s not really over. Her show suggests that it would be a shame to consign feminism to a tidy historical dustbin; the issues being raised a century ago, as Bowers’ piece shows, still seem ripped from the news. “Feminism has been around for a long time, but I don’t think we even know what it looks like now. I hope there are new conclusions to be drawn. Things haven’t changed,” she pauses, “that much.”

 

 

Have you seen it?

Included in Langton’s exhibition of contemporary feminist art was a pair of Maja Bajevic works from her series Women at work. Now, the fourth in the series has appeared. Here’s what the Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa said:

Maja Bajevic holds her first solo exhibition in a public venue in Italy, the Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa of Venice, together with the publication of the first complete monograph on her work (published by Charta, Milan, edited by Angela Vettese).

The artist lives between her native Sarajevo, Paris and Berlin, and emerged on the international stage thanks to her participation in events such as Manifesta, the Istanbul Biennial, and the Documenta in Kassel. She has gained prestigious forms of recognition, as demonstrated by her DAAD residency in Berlin.

The exhibition takes place in the sombre yet domestic environment of Palazzetto Tito, a venue chosen in the past by artists such as Marlene Dumas, Karen Kilimnik and Richard Hamilton by virtue of the original features of its lancet windows and its antique wooden flooring.

The visitors enter this typically Venetian house to find themselves immediately imprisoned in a room filled with a net of barbed wire. A number of women who normally work for the BLM use this grid as a frame, covering the most dangerous parts of the installation with woollen yarn. ‘Repetitio est mater studiorum’ is the title of this installation/performance, referring also to the professorship that the artist has held for the last three years at the IUAV University of Venice. The piece is part of a series of works entitled “Women at work”, in which Maja Bajevic asked women from specific places (Sarajevo, Istanbul, Barcelona) to work for her and use their feminine manual skills as a form of protection against the aggressiveness of our era, as well as being a way in which to keep their historical memory alive. In the other rooms, which may be reached by braving the wire found in the first room, visitors may view the videos of three other works from the same series: “Wo men at Work - Under Construction”, “Women at Work - The Observers”, “Women at Work - Washing Up”, as well as photographs from the series entitled “Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year”. The following room includes a reference to the performance “En attendant”: set in a field of clay ground full of earthworms; there are also a series of hand-written sentences scrawled on a wall saying, “Sometimes I think I don’t know anything. And I feel better. And I think I could go away, somewhere, run away – why not? “. In the last room there is a monitor showing “Here’s to Looking at You, Kid”: the face of the artist seems to weep black clay, like a clown who, once the makeup has been removed, loses his sense of happiness and shows us his real sense of desperation.

Imprisonment, feminine knowledge, the difficulties of sharing but also of bearing solitude and all other forms of constriction: these are the themes that emerge from the works, from the very first, an original performance which will then become an installation, to the others, which bring together the last 10 years of the artist’s work. The end result is an exhibition of great emotional power, one which speaks to us of an individual condition as well as reflecting a collective state of mind and a vertiginous historical condition.

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Feminist Art in the Expanded Field

Small Things End, Great Things Endure
January 17 – March 15, 2008
Text by María del Carmen Carrión and Jill Dawsey

In the contemporary imagination, modern feminism is thought to be lodged firmly in the 1970s, bracketed by post-’68 “bra-burners” and 1980s backlash. Recently major museum retrospectives, collaborative initiatives, and symposia on feminist art (especially in Los Angeles and New York) have conferred an almost fashionable status on the subject. Does institutional interest in feminism signal the movement’s continuing relevance, or does it relegate it to the historical past, announcing its demise? Small Things End, Great Things Endure demonstrates that artists continue to insist feminism—its histories, its theories, its politics— is unfinished business. Far from a fleeting fashion, feminist art practice has gathered momentum.

Feminism is a movement that began long ago and has yet to hit its stride. As a form of politics and as a body of thought, it has been characterized by an uneven development: its messages have spread in slow and unruly ways, frequently hindered by lines of class and geography, by periods of backlash and denial, and by moments of revivalism quickly co-opted by the marketplace (riot grrrl to bad girl to spice girl). Visionary science fiction author Ursula K. Le Guin once observed that the women’s movement can be said to have gone on for over one hundred and fifty years or nearly six hundred years, depending on whether one started with Seneca Fall (the first women’s rights convention in the United States) or Christine de Pizan (that medieval harbinger of the woman’s movement), but it has yet to last continuously beyond on generation. Today we see evidence to the contrary in the emergence of an “expanded field” of feminist art practice, with feminsit thought opening onto a host of related concerns.

Historical conciousness, for example, is foregrounded in the work of Anna Maltz, Ali Naschke-Messing, Jen Smith, and Mathilde ter Heijne, all of whom revist key figures or moments from the feminist past, retracing it as a means to counteract our culture’s pervasive state of historical amnesia. Eve Fowler, Emily Roysdon, and Jonathan Solo deploy the queer and transgender perspectives of discourses historically indebted to feminisim, staking a claim for the visibility of “non-normative” bodies in the public sphere. In this works, such claims are inflected by a palpable sense of pleasure that comes from eschewing norms and creating counter-narratives. Reflections on the mediated body and feminine performativity are found in works by Zoe Crosher and Wynne Greenwood. Investigations into social roles, the laboring body, and gendered institutions are trenchantly explored in the video works of Andrea Bowers, Maja Bajevic, and Akosua Adoma Owusu.

Small Things End, Great Things Endure surveys emerging art now, aiming to take the pulse of a new generation’s feminist activity. The exhibition proposes ways in which multiple and even contradictory models of feminism coexist in this expanded field of feminist art production. Approaching feminism art not as glossary of stylistics concerns, or as an archival moment embedded our recent history, Small Things End, Great Things Endure names an ongoing political quest.

Works in the exhibition

Andrea Bowers
Vows (Goldman, Emma. “Marriage and Love.” New York: Mother Earth Publishing Association, 1910.), 2006.

In Andrea Bowers’ two-channel video installation, Vows, a pair of larger than life brides face off, reciting passages from Emma Goldman’s early twentieth century polemic. With witty, acerbic words, Goldman critiques marriage as a patriarchal institution that infantilizes and isolates women (”Ye who enter here leave all hope behind,” one bride quotes from Dante’s Inferno). Ventriloquizing the feminist, anarchist Goldman, the brides appear to listen and respond to one another, as though reciting enlightened nuptial vows. Goldman wrote her text nearly a century ago, yet her words are still apt in light of today’s booming matrimony industry, with its proliferating bridal expos, wedding planners, and themed ceremonies styled in visions of a Disneyfied Victoriana.

Anna Maltz
Gorilla, 2007

The Guerrilla Girls have served as the conscience of the art world for over two decades, yet today’s young women artists still face the same dire statistics that the Guerilla Girls first made public on Manhattan billboards. In Manhattan, for example, where women represent more than half of the students at visual art schools, less than one third of the solo shows at Chelsea galleries spotlight women. Anna Maltz’ Gorilla (2007)—a suit and mask knitted in black mohair, with leather pectorals and face—is a tongue-in-cheek homage to the Guerilla Girls, and a playful self-insertion into this subversive yet exclusive sisterhood. Her previous suits—mermaids, super heroes, and the naked bodies of an “average” family: mom, dad, kids—negotiated the ways in which we see the self. By bringing the participant back to the childhood impulse of “playing dress up,” he or she is allowed the freedom to perform gender and identity roles beyond their usual limits. With Gorilla, Maltz also revisits feminist craftwork, claiming a territory conquered by feminist predecessors like Rosemarie Trockel and Judy Chicago. The suit is specifically made to fit the artist—as such it may represent Maltz’s own negotiation of how to fit in the art world.

Emily Roysdon
Untitled (David Wojnarowicz project), 2001.

In her Untitled (David Wojnarowicz project) (2001-2007), Emily Roysdon pays homage to the artist and gay activist David Wojnarowicz. She revisits his series Arthur Rimbaud in New York (1978-79) in which Wojnarowicz photographed his lover disguised as the French Symbolist poet, wearing a mask—a facsimile of Rimbaud’s face. Roysdon in turn photographs a figure wearing a mask of Wojnarowicz’s face. As a queer, female artist, Roysdon’s identification with Wojnarowicz—a queer, male artist, who died of AIDS—crosses lines of gender and sex, time and space, life and death. Central to this work is the concept of identification. Idenfication, in psychoanalysis, means to adopt one or more attributes of another subject. It is through that process that human beings construct an independent self. The French psychoanalyist Jaques Lacan defined identification as “the transformation that takes place in a subject, when he assumes an image”, words that resonate strongly with Roysdon’s series. Yet, in Roysdon’s own words, her identification with Wojnarowicz is one that is “bound to fail by technical psychoanalytic standards” which poses the question of why this identifcation must remain incomplete and why it is bound to fail. One of Roysdon’s images directly recreates an image from Wojnarowicz’s series in which a figure lies in bed with his erect penis in hand; in Roysdon’s image the phallus is a strap-on. Even as Roydon’s recreation of the image is “bound to fail,” its divergence from the original opens new ways of imagining alliances between distant moments and different bodies.

Jen Smith
Citizen, 2007.

In 1994 the American artist Catherine Opie carved the word ‘Pervert’ on her chest, and photographed herself against a decorated black backdrop in a black S&M hood, her arms pierced by rows of needles. Opie’s now iconographic image challenged the parameters of normative sexuality, instigating discussion about queer issues and making underground subcultures more visible. Jen Smith revisits Opie’s gesture, recreating and strategically altering the image. In Smith’s version, the backdrop and the hood have both turned from black to white; the needles in her arms are still there, as in the “original” photograph. This time, however, the word on the artist’s chest is ‘Citizen.’ Smith’s remake is reverential; it also asks the question: what is lost and what is gained when the historically marginalized gain greater visibility in the public sphere?

Eve Fowler
Untitled, 2005

Eve Fowler makes unexpectedly raw portraits of friends and lovers. Fowler’s photograph of fellow artist K8 Hardy wearing a pair of jeans with the crotch cut away immediately calls to mind the picture of Austrian artist Valie Export posing with a machine gun in a publicity photo for her performance Action Pants: Genital Panic (1969).

In that performance, Export removed the crotch from a pair of pants and wore them to a movie house, proceeding slowing through the aisles, challenging male viewers to confront “the real thing” instead of passively watching the fragmented bodies of women on the screen. The difference in appearance between Export and Hardy is slight but significant: Hardy’s closely cropped hair replaces Export’s Medusa-like mass, and Hardy holds no gun: her stance is non-combative. Her tender, direct look seems to ask the viewer to lay down their gaze, to engage her as human, female, queer, and equal. In addition, Fowler presents a selection of images that have been previously disseminated in zines that she produces. These are haunting images that exude sensuality. Their power resides not only within the image, but also in the viewer’s experience of a multiplicity of gestures and bodies – transgendered bodies that are preoperative, transitional, or postoperative.

Jonathan Solo
I am not who you say I am, 2007
Transgression, 2006
Done Apologizing, 2006

Jonathan Solo is interested in representing bodies that challenge the social inscriptions and constructions that determine gender. His carefully crafted drawings depict characters that transgress categories. He starts his process by creating digital collages, using sources that include photographs of friends and family, as well as images gathered from fashion magazines. He draws them with graphite, cuts them up, and reassembles them to create the final image. Solo’s work points toward an implosion at the limits of the body, introducing a fracture in the binary conception of male/female while emphasizing the political construction of the body and its subversive possibilities.

Zoe Crosher (in collaboration with Leslie Grant)
The Cindy-Shermanesque (but She’s the Real Thing), 2005.

The Cindy-Shermanesque (but She’s the Real Thing) (2005) presents a cluster of images drawn from Zoe Crosher’s on-going project, The Reconsidered Archive of Michelle du Bois. The archive comprises hundreds of images Crosher inherited from du Bois, an American woman who worked as an escort as she traveled through Pacific Rim countries during the 1970s and 80s, photographing herself every step of the way. In ordinary snapshot style, du Bois poses for the camera, primps before the mirror, lounges in evening wear, or hams it up in cowgirl get-up. Du Bois appears in such a great variety of costumes and hairstyles (including Farrah Fawcett’s famous flip hairstyle, a Dorothy Hamill wedge, and an off-kilter brown wig) that she bears comparison with Cindy Sherman, the artist who famously dressed in the guise of clichéd Hollywood heroines in her Untitled Film Stills of the late 1970s. If Sherman’s work suggested that femininity is a kind of masquerade, rather than a natural or inherent set of attributes, Crosher and du Bois up the ante. In The Cindy-Shermanesque (but She’s the Real Thing), “femininity” is seen to be the site of multiple and conflicting fantasies relating to sexuality, exoticism, mass media, and capitalist exchange. “She’s the Real Thing,” Crosher’s title tells us, yet du Bois reminds us that the everyday self, like femininity, is a fiction.

Wynne Greenwood
Peas, 2007

Wynne Greenwood’s multi-media sculpture, Peas (2007) presents the body as a site of competing voices. A video projected atop the sculpture shows Greenwood in dialog with her anxious gut, which is represented by a face drawn on her stomach, and which is speaking in a stereotypical male way: “hey babe, um, I’m just doin’ my thing here,” it says, “Chill.” “You jerk,” Greenwood responds tearfully. The “face” drawn on the stomach appears with a boxy cardboard body that extends into the space of the room. Embedded in a cartoonish body at the hip region, a second video monitor shows a close-up of a vagina and pea-shaped faces drawn on the skin. The title Peas playfully refers to adages such as “eat your peas and carrots” and “mind your p’s and q’s” – bromides that govern our good behavior as children. Peas can be read as a female self buffeted by the myriad conflicting voices – of lovers, perhaps, or those of media and the state – that lay claim to her body.Maja Bajevic
Women at Work – Under Construction, 1999
Women at Work – Washing Up, 2001

Maja Bajevic’s videos are part of a series of collective performances that bring attention to women’s labor, history, and the juncture between public and private realms. In Women at Work — Under Construction (1999), Bajevic and five women refugees from Srebrenica perform a domestic activity in a public place, activity that seems directed to mend the wounds left by war. The performance takes place over five days, on the scaffolding that covers the façade of Sarajevo National Museum; the building had been damaged during the war. At the end of the day, when the construction workers have finished, the women, who make their living by embroidering, climb the scaffolding and start stitching patterns on the protective net. The work progresses, and we see that they are creating a secluded space in the public view, restarting a cycle of visibility and concealment.

Women at Work — Washing Up (2001) is a document of a private performance in a public bathhouse for women in Istanbul. Since the space did not allow men, the piece was accessible only to women during the bathhouse’s hours of operation. For five days, Bajevic and a group of Bosnian women washed pieces of fabric hand-stitched with quotes by Tito (“We aim for peace, but we prepare for war”). The women unsuccessfully try to wash out the text, as if trying to come to terms with their nation’s recent conflicted history.

Akosua Adoma Owusu
Intermittent Delight, 2007.

The intersection of identity and cultural appropriation is at the heart of Akosua Adoma Owusu’s video Intermittent Delight (2007). This carefully constructed work juxtaposes close-ups of batik textiles, fashion and design from the 1950s and 1960s, images of men weaving and women sewing in Ghana, and fragments of a Westinghouse 1960s commercial—aimed to instruct women on the how-to of refrigerator decoration. Constructed from a combination of 1960s Afrobeat, traditional Asante Adwa music, and field recordings of West African men and women during production of cloths and garments, the soundtrack pulls the piece together and imbues it with a jolty and festive tone. The work touches upon the idea of feminism’s uneven geographical and historical development, and the nuances of labor conditions women face depending on where they live.

Ali Naschke-Messing
Ode to Kristeva: A Treatise On We, 2007.
Dirty Love Poem, 3, 2007.

The source material for Ali Naschke-Messing’s threadwork pieces is the written word. To create her delicate webs of language the artist starts by handwriting fragments of texts chosen from different authors, such as psychoanalytic feminist Julia Kristeva and the structuralist literary critic Roland Barthes. After transcribing the quote, the text is sewn onto fabric, following the curves and angles of her calligraphy. The fabric that supports the needlework fades away, and, without its support, the writing stretches and dangles. The legibility of the passage is blurred, with the exception of a few words that remain here and there. These indecipherable texts point to the fragility of language, but also to the underground, hidden, and invisible systems of knowledge that one builds for oneself.

Matilde ter Heijne
Small Things End, Great Things Endure, 2001.

Mathilde ter Heijne’s video, Small Things End, Great Things Endure (2001), from which this show takes its title, shows the artist as a modern-day Joan of Arc engulfed by fire, flames eating at her clothing and hair. Yet her costume and hairstyle locate the events in the recent past of the 1960s, suggesting that this is not exactly a modern-day scenario. A voice-over intones: “Be patient, fast, pray. ‘Til this war is over,” inviting us to locate these images within the historical context of the Vietnam War.

ter Heijne took inspiration from Margarethe von Trotta’s film adaptation of Uwe Johnson’s novel Jahrestage. Part of that film describes a year in the life of the character Gesine Cresspahl who we find living in New York circa 1967/1968. Amidst media reports of the Vietnam War, the German-born Gesine recalls her mother’s profound guilt over witnessing Nazi atrocities, which culminated in the older woman’s attempt to atone for those crimes by setting fire to herself in the family’s barn in Mecklenburg. In Small things end, great things endure, ter Heijne adapts von Trotta’s version by casting Gesine as the one who cannot bear the knowledge of the wanton violence perpetrated in Vietnam. A voiceover borrowed from von Trotta’s film accompanies Gesine’s repetition of her mother’s suicide by fire. von Trotta’s film doubles back to Johnson’s novel, just as ter Heijne’s video doubles back to von Trotta’s. Gesine becomes the historical double of her mother, while ter Heijne serves as the double of Gesine. ter Heijne seems to ask: are we doomed to repeat the histories of past generations? If the artists in this exhibition are any indication, the answer is a resounding “no.”