Bad at Sports » feminism

Episode 316: Maud Lavin

Christopher — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 13:46:55 +0000

Author insert a music with WS Audio Player.
(Download) this music.
download

This week: We talk to Maud Lavin about her most recent book and more!

Lifted from elsewhere:

In the past, more often than not, aggressive women have been rebuked, told to keep a lid on, turn the other cheek, get over it. Repression more than aggression was seen as woman’s domain. But recently there’s been a noticeable cultural shift. With growing frequency, women’s aggression is now celebrated in contemporary culture—in movies and TV, online ventures, and art. In Push Comes to Shove, Maud Lavin examines these new images of aggressive women and how they affect women’s lives.

Aggression, says Lavin, is necessary, large, messy, psychological, and physical. Aggression need not entail causing harm to another; we can think of it as the use of force to create change—fruitful, destructive, or both. And over the past twenty years, contemporary culture has shown women seizing this power. Lavin chooses provocative examples to explore the complexity of aggression: the surfer girls in Blue Crush; Helen Mirren as Jane Tennison in Prime Suspect; the homicidal women in Kill Bill and artist Marlene McCarty’s mural-sized Murder Girls; the erotica of Zane and the art of Kara Walker; the group dynamics of artists (including the artists group Toxic Titties) and activists; and YouTube videos of a woman boxer training and fighting.

Women need aggression and need to use it consciously, Lavin writes. With Push Comes to Shove, she explores the crucial questions of how to manifest aggression, how to represent it, and how to keep open a cultural space for it.

Episode 287: Emily Roysdon

Christopher — Mon, 28 Feb 2011 15:59:51 +0000

Author insert a music with WS Audio Player.
(Download) this music.
download

This week: Patricia Maloney sits down with queer feminist artist and writer Emily Roysdon, as well as Phyllis Wattis MATRIX Curator Elizabeth Thomas. The conversation took place on December 10, 2010, as Roysdon was in the final stages of preparing for her exhibition at the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum’s Emily Roysdon: If I Don’t Move Can You Hear Me?/MATRIX 235, on view through March 6, 2011. Topics range from nostalgic delusions in Berkeley to hallucinations of the apocalypse on New York’s West Side. Along they way, they cover regulation, claiming space, collaboration, ecstatic resistance, and opening up language to find meaning. http://www.bampfa.berkeley.edu/exhibition/235

This interview is part of the ongoing collaboration between Bad At Sports and Art Practical.

Emily Roysdon is an artist and writer living and working in New York and Stockholm. She completed the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program in 2001 and an MFA at UCLA in 2006. She employs wide-ranging methods in developing her projects, including performance, photography, installation, text, and video, among others. Roysdon’s concept of “ecstatic resistance,” which reflects on the impossible and imaginary in politics, was featured in simultaneous exhibitions of Grand Arts in Kansas City, and X Initiative in New York. Recenlty, her work has been included in the 2010 Whitney Biennial, Greater NY at PS1, Manifesta 8, and the Bucharest Biennial 4. Roysdon is editor and co-founder of the queer feminist journal and artist collective, LTTR.

Half the sky, and just a bit more of your attention.

Guest Blogger — Tue, 04 May 2010 13:17:10 +0000

GUEST POST BY DAMIEN JAMES

Part two of two.

If you haven’t already, you may be wondering by now what this has to do with art, why you’re reading about a humanitarian crisis on an arts weblog? I’ll tell you.

During the community conversation and throughout the reading of Half the Sky, there were several thoughts insisting on my full attention, one of which was how different my world would be minus any single one of the incredible women I’ve known, either personally or exclusively through exposure to whatever their art may be – painting or parenting, writing or teaching, cooking or counseling, making films or music. Each has been essential in some way, small or large, to my evolving understanding of the world I live in, no less my understanding of myself.

How many people would have less full lives if even a few of the women they know went missing or were never known to them at all? How would our own country be diminished intellectually, emotionally, artistically, if a million women were simply gone?

Women like Lynn Hershman Leeson, who, as a female artist trying to assert herself on the male-dominated art scene of the late 1960’s and 70’s, had to review her own work under a pseudonym because critics weren’t giving women artists a single column inch.

Leeson went on to invent what is commonly known as Second Life, to pioneer the use of blue screen technology in film making, to become Emeritus Professor of Digital Art at the University of California, and to have work in many major collections, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Yet there was a time that her work simply didn’t get reviewed.

Lynn Hershman Leeson, Roberta's Construction Chart #2, 1975. Dye Transfer Print

What Leeson gave to me, however, was a film she made in 2007 called Strange Culture, a brilliant hybrid of documentary and dramatic re-enactment with a bit of comic book thrown in, which I first saw excerpted on issue four of Wholphin. The films revolves around Steve Kurtz, professor of art at SUNY Buffalo, founding member of Critical Art Ensemble, and exactly the kind of guy you’d like to smoke pot with and talk to about how to fix the world, knowing in advance that whatever lunatic THC-induced long-shots and utopian fantasies you might imagine, Kurtz was quite possibly one of the few people you’d ever know who could make those fantasies real.

When Kurtz’s wife and collaborator of 25 years, Hope, suddenly and unexpectedly died of a heart attack and the police responded to his phone call, what they found and how they reacted turned the next few years of Kurtz’s life into nothing less than a battle with the government for his freedom.

Strange Culture is a time capsule of our subjugated civil rights under an unelected president, a record of our most recent and surreal dark age – which, as we can currently see, will take some time to come out of.

Leeson’s film inspired and enraged me. It introduced me to new ideas, people, problems. It literally influenced the way I live. (Can anyone say that about Avatar?) When I think back to the time before I had seen the film or learned about Leeson, it seems like I was in my own cultural dark age, or at least a bit more naive.

Women like Pamela Michele Johnson, an artist who perfectly illustrated my feelings about our consumer/capitalist society with six-foot tall paintings of Hostess cupcakes with glistening whipped lard centers, stacks of waffles with glowing oceans of syrup pooling in their crisp golden pockets, and toppling towers of ketchup-stained limp hamburgers looking so heavy and giant that you suddenly can’t help but wonder how much of that shit you’ve stuffed down your gullet.

Johnson’s art so poetically paraphrased every thought that I’ve never been able to put eloquently into words about how and what we eat, that I was instantly smitten with the paintings. She often shares people’s responses to the work with me, and I’m continually surprised by how many people view these monoliths as objects of nostalgia, tributes to simpler times, especially since I see them first and foremost as satirical critiques. I can’t help but view those “simpler times” as farces of progress spun into our heads by corporations disguised as clowns and farmers and cute little animals.

Pamela Michele Johnson, Waffles, 2007. Oil on canvas.

Her work is important to me for those two reasons; that it was the first and most personal example of how someone else’s image could so singularly define my thoughts about a certain issue, and that it offered to renew my appreciation for just how differently we all interpret information, for better or worse.

Women like Pam Bannos, Senior Lecturer in the Department of Art Theory and Practice at Northwestern University, who uncovered the wholly neglected an incredibly relevant history of Lincoln Park, something which the current residents of the neighborhood might prefer to have left underground.

During the Civil War, Lincoln Park was a burial ground – The City Cemetery, not only for Confederate soldiers but also the diseased – and it is quite possible that there are still plenty of bones beneath those lovely lanes.

Bannos’s extensive research made quite a bit of noise, and the city of Chicago worked with her to place several markers throughout Lincoln Park which illuminate it’s history for hundreds of thousands of visitors a year.

The project, Hidden Truths, is currently being developed into a book, and having read a few of the early chapters, the potential is exciting. There are so many strange stories within the whole that Devil in the White City comes to mind, yet with far more immediate import.

The metaphors inherent in this story – of sweeping the dead under the carpet of history (akin perhaps to not showing us the coffins of our fellow patriots as they come home from war), of affluence planting it’s roots in the toil of drones (not unlike the 1 percenter’s who have made their money on the backs of the 99 percent of us who have none) – fit so snugly over the template of today that Bannos really cannot go wrong.

Her photography often beautifully aims its sweet spot at the idea and nature of truth, and I have no doubt that Bannos will apply the same focus, light, and personality to her book.

Experiencing the evolution of this project, from rigorously documented research to articulate narrative, has been an education in the creative endeavor for me, an education I intend to take full advantage of.

Marjane Satrapi

And there are so many others, like Marjane Satrapi, whose masterpiece Persepolis is the crest of the wave of a woman-made cultural revolution in Iran; musician Rachel Yamagata, formerly of Bumpus, whose residency at Schuba’s a few years back still resonates with unbelievable integrity and passion; Rebecca Solnit, an author who has not only chronicled but participated in some of the monumental social demonstrations of the last decade; Vandana Shiva, the brilliant activist and intellectual who has united the people of India in rejection of agri-monsters and ecology eaters like Monsanto and Coca Cola.

Women like – though there is really no other woman like her – Cassandra O’Keefe, one of the very first contributors to BUST Magazine, a staff member of GirlsRock! Chicago, and a gifted intuitive. O’Keefe is one of those unsung heroes who constantly crashes into our ever-expanding lack of civility and refuses to accept it.

She is an activist who has marched in every anti-war demonstration in the city of Chicago for the last decade, a creative autodidact who once decorated with handmade party hats and noise makers the smoked white fish which was to be eaten for a New Years brunch; and more importantly, a parent who decided to home-school her two daughters when No Child Left Behind became the prevailing but fundamentally flawed logic of the day for our public schools.

Not only has O’Keefe fought intolerance in her own neighborhood by simply engaging everyone she meets, but she has enriched my entire vocabulary for compassion. Those two daughters are mine as well, completing a trio of amazing women in my own home, none of whom I could imagine my life without.

Any of the millions of abused, abducted, murdered women in the world could easily be this important, this provocative, this enriching, for any number of people in their own lives. If given the chance. Their influence and intelligence could reach across the globe and touch all of us. Any one of the missing could profoundly impact someone near to them, if only they were truly valued.

There is an overwhelming amount of daily proof that our current values are failing us; our resources are withering, our environment is changing dramatically, and the same destruction that we’ve visited upon ourselves throughout history exists today, only with more politically acceptable terms. The word genocide is used far less than the phenomenon of genocide is employed. More women have to accept rape than men have to pay for the crime.

These are truths only because of our collective lack of involvement. And there is no one I know who can’t spare at least ten minutes to take the first step toward changing these truths. How much time can you spare, and to what end?

Damien James is a self-taught artist and writer living (barely) and working (constantly) in Chicago. He has contributed to Chicago Reader, New City, Saatchi Gallery Online, Art Voices, and the general goodwill of mankind, among other things. His art has been seen in Chicago’s Around the Coyote Gallery and Aldo Castillo, Brooklyn’s 3rd Ward Gallery with Art House Co-op’s Sketchbook Project and Rhonda Schaller, various apartments in Berlin, London, Mumbai, and a tiny village in Romania.

Jeff Koons Has a Bad Case of ‘Radical Scopophilia’

Claudine Isé — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 15:49:53 +0000

“Just what the hell does ‘radical scopophilia’ mean anyway?”, you might have wondered, if you happened to have read the New York Times article on Jeff Koons’ private collection that ran in last Sunday’s Arts & Leisure section. I chuckled a bit when I read the phrase, which New Museum curator Massimiliano Gioni used to describe Koons’ visual approach to art as well as, I gather, the intense visual pleasure Koons derives from his own personal collection. Here’s the key excerpt:

“I like this type work,” [Koons] said simply about the Courbet, then pointed to a brown patch on the bull’s fur vaguely shaped like the state of New Jersey and explained that he stares at the patch often and wonders whether it might represent “some form of, you know, soul or really a personal part” of Courbet’s own being. His main fascination with Knüpfer’s “Venus and Cupid” seems to be the spilled chamber pot at Venus’s side. Looking at a Manet nude, he talks about his appreciation for the “lack of violence” in Manet’s work and refers on separate occasions to a crease in the nude’s stomach, which he believes resembles a long-tailed sperm.

Lisa Phillips, the New Museum’s director, said in an interview that one reason she and the museum’s curators made the unusual decision to hand the Joannou show over to Mr. Koons was precisely because of his unconventional and compulsive way of looking at art, what the New Museum curator Massimiliano Gioni calls his “radical scopophilia.”

In work sessions as the show came together, Ms. Phillips said, he would use examples of work, new and old, “pointing to things that often would be the peripheral things in them, things that you might not see that were actually the things that were the most interesting to him — a monkey under someone’s foot, something like that.”

It’s interesting, to say the least, that Gioni chose this particular phrase to describe Koons’ eye (as it were), given that Koons’ approach to art is idiosyncratically a-historical in its embrace of visual pleasure. Gioni uses the term ‘scopophilia’ to describe a gaze that is voracious in its viewing habits, that takes what it wants from each work of art it encounters. But what Gioni doesn’t seem to get (or at least wants to skirt, by way of his pointless and uber-pretentious insertion of the term ‘radical’ in front of it), is the fact that, although scopophilia is a psychoanalytic term employed by Freud to describe a ‘love of watching,’ the term was also taken up in the 1970s and thereafter by feminist film theorists to account for the predominance of a specifically ‘male gaze’ in classic Hollywood cinema. (Think Hitchcock’s Psycho, then go read Laura Mulvey’s classic essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ to see what I mean). Scopophilia implies an active male gaze and a passive female subject. It’s a type of gaze that has, of course, occasionally been reflected in the history of Koons’ own work, most notably Koons’ “Made in Heaven” collaboration with his ex-wife Ilona Staller.

I’m all for voracious looking, and I don’t mind a little a-historicity in the name of visual pleasure, either. But I don’t at all care for the way that Massimiliano Gioni’s stray quote, and its placement in this article, serves to whitewash the history of important work done by feminist film theorists in this area. Gioni’s blithe attachment of the term “radical” to his use of the term scopophilia only makes it worse. Please. There’s nothing ‘radical’ about the fetishistic power dynamic at play in the scopophilic gaze–or at least, in a straight man’s version of it. It’s the opposite, in fact.

The question is whether it is accurate or not to describe Koons’ curatorial eye as ‘scopophilic’ in nature. That I don’t know. One would have to actually see the show he curates, and the bulk of his collection in person, and, you know, brush up on your feminist theory a bit before you throw around terms that have a fair amount of history behind them, before hazarding a worthwhile opinion on that matter.

Jeff Koons in his Upper East Side Home, via New York Times

Tony Perkins in Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho"

Kathleen Hannah Interview on GRITtv

Claudine Isé — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 18:02:18 +0000

Kathleen Hannah was first-wave feminism, for me. I took all the requisite women’s studies classes when I was in college, but it wasn’t until I started listening to bands like Bikini Kill (and later, Le Tigre) that I ever felt any kind of emotional connection to feminism and its larger history. So I pretty much revere Kathleen Hannah and I lap up every interview and what not with her that I come across. Watch this video, and take note: Ms. Hannah doesn’t need to get all pretentious with the theory (though she totally respects it, too) to be crystal clear about who she is and what she’s all about. Also note: you can talk like a Valley Girl and still be super fucking smart. Kathleen makes some important points about the dangers of mistaking bullshit insecurities-cum-personal politics for authentic politics. So true. And also has some interesting things to say about zines vs. blogs, and the state of female political leadership today.

via Girldrive.

Off-Topic | Stacia Yeapanis

Guest Blogger — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 15:15:09 +0000

Off-Topic invites artists, curators, writers, and cultural workers to discuss a subject not directly related to the practice of making art. We would like to welcome Stacia Yeapanis as our latest guest with her post, “My Feminism is 80s Teen Movie Favored”. Stacia is a Chicago based interdisciplinary artist who’s first monograph was recently published as part of The Museum of Contemporary Photography’s Midwest Photographers Publication Project this past spring.

My Feminism is 80s Teen Movie Flavored

Stacia Yeapanis

Not many people remember the teen movie The Legend of Billie Jean. Expected to be a box office hit in the summer of 1985, it disappointed producers, earning a measly $3.5 million, and has yet to be released on DVD. This movie is why I still own a VCR.

The plot is simple: Billie Jean Davy is a teenage girl from a trailer park, who becomes an outlaw after being involved in an accidental shooting. She goes on the run with her friends and cuts her hair and becomes a celebrity hero seeking justice. The tagline, according to IMDB, is “When you’re seventeen, people think they can do anything to you. Billie Jean is about to prove them wrong.”

I was 7, not 17, when it was first released. I can’t remember exactly when or where I watched it for the first time. I remember that I believed the main conflict was between kids and adults. There’s no doubt the movie was marketed to the MTV generation. The theme song, Invincible by Pat Benatar, had already made it to #10 before the movie was released. I probably related to the movie because I was a kid and because life constantly feels unfair when you’re a kid.

But when I re-watched The Legend of Billie Jean at age 31, it was obvious to me that this overlooked teen movie is about more than a rebellious teen’s sense that her parents aren’t fair because they make her clean her room or get off the phone and do her homework. For me, it’s one of my earliest feminist texts (and a scathing critique of capitalism, but that’s another post). Watching it was like having myself and my experience of the world mirrored back to me. I don’t mean that I’ve ever cut my hair short or been an outlaw or slept at an abandoned mini golf course. I just mean that I must have learned something watching this movie over and over again. And it’s something I value.

The opening sequence is common in many 80s teen movies: a group of carefree teens rides down the highway in a convertible, whooping and hollering. But this is different. The convertible teens are not our protagonists. They are bullies: our first representation of Patriarchy. Billie Jean and her brother are positioned as the disadvantaged. They live in a trailer park, a fact that is emphasized repeatedly. They ride a scooter instead of driving a car. They are poor, while the convertible bullies are probably middle class. One of the boys is taking pictures of Billie Jean. She seems to be enjoying it, or at least, she doesn’t mind it. The use of the camera represents the constant presence of the Male Gaze. The gaze is emphasized in the way Hubie Pyatt, a local bully, harasses them further. He sexualizes Billie Jean by leaning in really close and licking the straw from her milkshake. He feminizes Binx in the way all homophobic jocks from 80s teen movies do: by calling him a faggot. Later, Hubie and his friends continue this harassment by stealing Binx’s Honda Elite and trashing it. This is just the first of many examples how the dominance of Patriarchy can lead to an unethical use of power.

Repairing the scooter will cost $608. Billie Jean goes to the shop owned by Hubie’s father to get the money that is owed to them. The class-based power relations are emphasized once again when Hubie denies his culpability. ”Don’t believe her, dad. She’s from the trailers… She’ll say anything.”

For a moment, it seems Mr. Pyatt will right Hubie’s wrong. He sends his son away and tells Billie Jean the money is upstairs in the safe. Mr. Pyatt’s idle conversation quickly escalates into dangerous territory when he offers to give her the money in exchange for sexual favors.

Luckily Billie Jean manages to escape. This is not a movie about rape. But the possibility of it does emphasize the power discrepancy between Billie Jean and Mr. Pyatt. He is an older, male business owner. She is an impoverished teenaged girl. Billie Jean’s femaleness is equated with her poorness. Both are qualities that the despicable Mr. Pyatt can take advantage of. When he doesn’t succeed in actually raping her, he later does so metaphorically by selling unauthorized merchandise bearing her image for his own profit (reiteration of the male gaze). Although I don’t think that the experience of rape is at all like the experience of have one’s image exploited, both emphasize ways in which our bodies are often the sites of the struggle against Patriarchy.

So when Billie Jean cuts off her long blonde hair, it is a symbolic gesture. It signals a shift in self-identity. Billie Jean has a new way of seeing herself so she changes the way she presents herself to the world. She throws off the trappings of femininity, subverting the Male Gaze that she welcomed in the opening sequence. This gesture brings to mind the image of women throwing their bras and corsets into trashcans in 1968. She gets rid of the clothes that Mr. Pyatt had fingered lecherously saying, “This looks real good on you. Bet you drive them boys crazy, don’t you?” She dons fingerless gloves and parachute pants instead. According to tropes of 1980s teen movies this attire states emphatically I’m not the nice girl you think I am and I’m not gonna let you push me around anymore!

After Billie Jean changes her appearance, she records what amounts to a video manifesto, which she mails to several local news stations.

What’s important here is that she now chooses to record and disseminate her own image. Soon girls all over Corpus Christi, TX have cut their hair off in a feminist sign of solidarity. This is emphasized later when random girls turn themselves into the police, saying they are Billie Jean, and when we see the underground railroad of punk-looking, shorthaired girls, shuttling Billie Jean around TX in their cars so that she can evade capture.

Another striking scene emphasizes the female body as a site of power. The gang has just been involved in a car chase/shoot-out. Right at the moment when I imagine the teenage boy viewers were really enjoying themselves, Putter gets her first period. Considering the menstrual taboo in most teen movies, this is an amazing occurrence. At first everyone thinks she has been shot. When they all realize the mistake, the girls are happy and Binx is grossed out. “You keep quiet, Binx,” admonishes Billie Jean. “It’s wonderful!”

This is a plot device to get Billie Jean worried enough about her friends that she turns them in to keep them safe. But this could easily have been accomplished with the shoot-out alone. The next scene is bizarrely awesome. Putter is wrapped in a huge blanket at the end of a very public pier. Her hair is wet and she appears to be naked, as if she has just bathed in the harbor. Billie Jean is helping her towel off in a very maternal way. Putter looks at her blankly and asks, ”When can I get a diaphragm?” The insertion of such distinctly female concerns, especially ones that are usually absent from mainstream movies, into an action sequence serves as a reminder of what’s really at stake: a woman’s right to do what she wishes with her body.

At the end of the movie, Billie Jean finally confronts Mr. Pyatt directly, calling him out in front of a crowd of potential customers. His attempted rape of Billie Jean is more directly equated with his unethical appropriation of her image for his own financial gain. She gazes at her own image surrounding her. Mr. Pyatt tries to pay her off, keep her quiet. She grasps a handful of bills that he shoves into her hand, staring at them, remembering the last time he tried to give her money for something she wasn’t willing to do.

Mr. Pyatt just doesn’t get it. “You’re the one to blame,” he says. “You’re the one going ‘round, thinking you’re so damn hot.” Even now, he cannot accept any responsibility for his actions, for his misuse of power.

Mr. Pyatt doesn’t get off completely free, as evidenced by the burning of his merchandise, but there’s a tragic sense that he will never really understand what he is guilty of. Patriarchy doesn’t budge easily. Billie Jean herself is different though, and so are all the people who witness the scene. They throw their branded merchandise into the fire, suddenly understanding what it means to have participated in Mr. Pyatt’s exploitation. Even Hubie seems to have learned that his father’s way is not the right way.

Our values come from everything we encounter: our parents, our friends, our teachers, and the texts we read, watch, and hear. There’s no way to prove just what came from where. I’m willing to admit that my memory of early childhood is weak. An exact copy of a movie I watched repeatedly over 20 years ago might only seem to be the origin of my current values, because I can see the circumstantial evidence right before my eyes. Who knows what I actually understood at the time or what the director, writer and actors intended. Whether I learned something about feminism from Billie Jean or whether I’m reading too much into the text, one thing is true. Whenever I witness the continued dominance of Patriarchy, I see Billie Jean in her video manifesto, shaking her clenched fists above her head:

Fair is fair. We didn’t start this. We didn’t mean it to happen. But we’re not giving up ‘til you pay. Fair is Fair.

Out of context, this might sound vengeful. But Billie Jean isn’t out to hurt anyone, and she never allows her righteous anger to steer her into vengeance territory. On a literal level she only wants what is owed to her: the $608 it will take to repair the scooter. No more, no less. But taken as a feminist battle cry, these words are a call to action, a call to stand your ground for what you deserve. Fair is fair.

About the poster:

Stacia Yeapanis is a Chicago-based interdisciplinary artist and a media fan. She received her MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in May 2006 and is a member of the Chicago-based artist collective Henbane.

Using strategies of accumulation, collection, appropriation and juxtaposition, Yeapanis explores the emotional, political, and philosophical significance of cultural participation. By creating hybrid works that employ the histories and languages of both popular and fine art culture, she reveals the cultural and personal spaces where these binaries overlap. Yeapanis currently uses embroidery and video to explore how individuals create meaning from mass media products.

Yeapanis’ first monograph was recently published as part of The Museum of Contemporary Photography’s Midwest Photographers Publication Project (Spring 2009). Recent exhibitions include Losing Yourself in the 21^st Century (Atlanta and Baltimore), MP3: Midwest Photographers Project (Chicago) and RE: Figure (Chicago). Please visit her website at www.staciayeapanis.com.

Got a response to this post? Let us know! Email your comments to mail@badatsports.com. We’ll feature thoughtful responses to issues generated by our posts in our Letters to the Editors Feature on Saturdays.

Reading, Writing, and Jana Leo’s Rape New York

Claudine Isé — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 15:29:56 +0000

This week, Jana Leo’s Rape New York, subtitled An Open Archive, went on view at Invisible Exports in New York City. The exhibition consists of boxes of photographs, documents, transcripts and other material relating to the artists’ rape seven years ago.

The gallery’s press release describes the project as follows:

The documents assembled here, seven years in the making, accompany the release of (Leo’s) book RAPE NEW YORK. The archive consists of photographs from her emergency visit to the hospital, police reports, crime scene photographs, notes from her therapist, as well as records from the civil suit and other assorted items and documents related to the rape and the legal case that followed, none of which can be reproduced, or even reviewed without the victims’ consent. The documents are kept in organized boxes to be retrieved by the archivist, not displayed on the gallery walls. The archive is not presented to the visitor; instead, each guest must fully identify oneself (photo ID is required), and request materials from the archivist. This way, the visitor takes responsibility for what’s requested, making private again what was made public by Leo—the latest revolution in a cycle of public and private that began with the rape itself.

The outlines of Leo’s project recalls that of a number of 1970′s era feminist works dealing with traumatic exposure–Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece (link is to a video of the performance) and 1968 film Rape come foremost to mind–but the heart of Leo’s piece seems to lie within the viewer’s decision to take responsibility, in a public way, for looking at material that is private in the deepest sense of the word. Does the artist’s complicity in the exposure negate its voyeuristic qualities? Does the decision to study Leo’s rape archives signal compassion, curiosity, or cruelty on the part of individual viewers? Perhaps, a bit of all three.

Yoko Ono, Cut Piece, performance

Yoko Ono, Rape (still from film)

Lately I’ve been mulling over a bunch of questions that essentially revolve around blogging and personal responsibility. Yesterday I came across mention of Leo’s show in a brief blurb on one of the art news blogs. I initially decided not to reblog the item, because there was only minimal information about the show itself. It felt sensationalistic, somehow, to just shoot the item out there once again without providing any further context. As coincidence would have it, this morning I randomly came across Caitlin Roper’s lengthy and fascinating interview with Jana Leo on Bomb’s blog, which contains a few reproductions of images and documents from the archive. Roper’s piece, I think, provides enough background context to give Leo’s project meaning even to those who can’t see the show in person.

To be honest, I feel somewhat relieved that I don’t live in New York and therefore don’t have to decide whether or not I want to visit Leo’s show and read her archives. I have an easy out, this time. But I did have to make the decision about whether and how I should write about it, particularly in the zippily superficial context of a blog post. So in that sense, I am still a participant in Leo’s project, still accountable for my decision to engage it from a distance in the manner that I have.

Here’s a last, chilling postscript. Eva Rhodes (nee Eva Majlata), the unnamed woman who was the subject of Ono’s aforementioned film Rape, was bludgeoned to death in 2007 by one of her employees, set on fire, and buried not far from an animal sanctuary she had established in Hungary. Sukhdev Sandhu writes movingly about Rhodes’ death, and Ono’s film, here.

Cruising for Chicks at the Modern Wing

Claudine Isé — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 21:58:21 +0000

How much does gender equality matter when it comes to museum permanent collections? How much is ‘good enough’?

I’ve been mulling these and other questions over the past week while following the discussion that’s been taking place on Jerry Saltz’s Facebook page and on a few art blogs that posted in response.

On Facebook, Saltz charged The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) with practicing a form of “gender-based apartheid,” based on the paucity of work by women artists hanging on the walls of the 4th and 5th floors of the Museum (the pre-1970 galleries). Here’s what he wrote:

Of the 383 works currently installed on the 4th and 5th floors of the permanent collection, only 19 are by women; that’s 4%. There are 135 different artists installed on these floors; only nine of them are women; that’s 6%. MoMA is telling a story of modernism that only it believes. MoMA has declared itself a hostile witness. Why?

The subsequent discussions that take place in the comments are really interesting and if you aren’t already aware of this whole brouhaha and want to be, I recommend you skim through it all and join in.

I have to admit I have mixed responses to the issue, as a post-post feminist or whatever the hell it is that I am. I think what I am, actually, is the lazy type of feminist who never thinks to count how many works by women artists are hanging on the walls of the museum shows I attend, including during my first visit to the Art Institute’s Modern Wing. So last week I went back again to take another look, and to get better sense of how the Modern Wing stacks up when it comes to issues of gender representation. (Note that due to lack of time I didn’t take account of the work in the Architecture and Design galleries).

On the third floor containing the European and Modern Art galleries, I counted just four works by the following female artists: Maria Elena Vieira da Silva, Suzanne Duchamp, Nathalija Gontcharova and Leonora Carrington. On the 2nd floor gallery featuring Contemporary Art from 1945-1960 there was Joan Mitchell‘s gorgeous City Landscape from 1955.

(So-called Modern works by women in the Modern Wing are kind of tricky to account for, because the period is divided multiple ways, between works exhibited in the Modern Wing and those installed in the American galleries in the main building, where, for example, a number of works by Georgia O’Keeffe are installed).

Unless I missed it, no female artist has been given monographic (i.e. dedicated gallery or grouping) treatment in the Modern Wing in the way that Robert Ryman, Bruce Nauman, Robert Gober, Kerry James Marshall, Mel Bochner, Constantin Brancusi and several others have. The closest was Eva Hesse sharing a gallery with Richard Serra in the Contemporary galleries (There are two sculptures and a drawing by Hesse here).

Women fare better on the post-1960, Contemporary side of things, as would be expected. Works by Mary Heilman, Ellen Gallagher, Sherrie Levine, Marlene Dumas, Cindy Sherman, Sue Williams, Cady Noland and Barbara Kruger hang in proximity to one another. In a gallery of contemporary paintings, there’s one work each by Margherita Manzelli and Lisa Yuskavage. Elsewhere in the Contemporary galleries, there’s a Vija Celmins near Sylvia Plimack Mangold‘s In Memory of My Father, an Agnes Martin and a Hanne Darboven (I actually missed the Darboven myself, but Lisa Dorrin mentioned it in the podcast and its listed as being on view on the AIC’s collections page).

The first floor photography gallery has another largish cluster of female artists, including works by Jeanne Dunning, Barbara Kruger, Liz Deschenes (2 works, including one that’s part of Gaylen Gerber’s piece), Rineke Dijkstra, Zoe Leonard, Diane Arbus, and Patty Carroll (also part of Gerber’s piece).

That’s my tally of female artists currently on view the Modern Wing. (Though I tried to be meticulous, I might have missed one or two works–please let me know if I did). So, you know, overall not great, but not completely dismal either. Their representation of women artists in the pre-1960 Modern & European gallery needs beefing up, but the great thing about permanent collection hangings is that they can always be altered and revised, along with the stories they tell.

But the question that’s really on my mind is this one: how much is “good enough?” Do male/female ratios always need to be close to 50/50 to get it right, or can the impact of female artists be measured in other ways, for example in the space and overall presence a female artist’s work is given in a gallery installation (a la the juxtaposition of Hesse and Serra)?

I’m curious about what readers here think about “the female issue” when it comes to permanent collections, in Chicago particularly. I’m especially interested in what female art students (if there are any reading this) may have to say – are you thinking about male/female ratios when you cruise the Modern Wing? Does it bother you that so few women appear in the pre-1960s galleries, or do you derive satisfaction from their collection in other ways?

Feel free to discuss your experiences at the MCA as well.

**Above image credit: Suzanne Duchamp, Broken and Restored Multiplication, 1918-19. Art Institute of Chicago.

Wednesday Clips 5/27/09

Claudine Isé — Wed, 27 May 2009 23:34:23 +0000

A webchat with Andy Warhol, Oliver Laric (http://oliverlaric.com/webchat.htm)

Here’s what’s got my attention, web-wise, so far this week:

*San Diego Museum of Art director Derrick R. Cartwright appointed director of the Seattle Art Museum.

*Art Institute of Chicago director James Cuno hopes to initiate massive fundraising drive for free Museum admission.

*No Boys Allowed: yearlong exhibition at the Pompidou Center is for women-only.

*Barack Obama: The Freshman.

*Now on Vimeo: watch the NYFA Panel Discussion on ‘How the Recession Has Impacted the Art World’ (featuring Edward Winkleman, Sean Elwood, Stephanie Howe, Kay Takeda; via Edward_Winkleman).

*Scope Basil is only three weeks ago away, and still ‘aint got no permit.

*”I spent a year asking why the contemporary art bubble was the biggest, bubbliest bubble of them all”: Ben Lewis’ The Great Contemporary Art Bubble preview clip on YouTube ( ART21′s Ben Street has a funny post on the film too).

*Boing Boing writer Joel Johnson chides Wired Online for being clueless about the importance of online media–a great post, but look to the comments for the real dirt. (via ArtFagCity’s Twitter).

*Speaking of Twitter, it could be coming to a t.v. near you.

*Grrr. Argh: Monster Kid Home Movies (via Boing Boing).

*Pierogi’s famed flat files now searchable online. (via Art Fag City).

*A live conversation with a dead Andy Warhol, via psychic via webchat (via Rhizome.org).

*Beautiful/Decay needs YOU to help pick the theme for its next limited-edition publication. Winner gets a copy of the book. For free!

*Applications for the 2009 William H. Johnson Prize are now available. Due date is July 31st. (Via Artipedia).

Bad at Sports » feminism

Episode 316: Maud Lavin

Related Posts

Episode 287: Emily Roysdon

Related Posts

Half the sky, and just a bit more of your attention.

Related Posts

Jeff Koons Has a Bad Case of ‘Radical Scopophilia’

Related Posts

Kathleen Hannah Interview on GRITtv

Related Posts

Off-Topic | Stacia Yeapanis

Related Posts

Reading, Writing, and Jana Leo’s Rape New York

Related Posts

Cruising for Chicks at the Modern Wing

Related Posts

Wednesday Clips 5/27/09

Related Posts