EDITOR’S LETTER HUMBLE BEGINNINGS The Green Curtain started out as a conversation Krista and I had two years ago, when the idea of content strategy was starting to catch fire. By 2009, it was becoming clear that organizations with substantial websites needed professional help wrangling the hundreds or thousands of “pages” of content they were creating and trying to manage. By 2016, the field was growing like kudzu, throwing vines over everything in its path: “web writing,” content management, information architecture, and online editorial planning sprouted tendrils and started growing together almost too quickly to see. A good time to start a magazine about content.
HISTORY The Green Curtain started out as a conversation Krista and I had two years ago, when the idea of content strategy was starting to catch fire. By 2009, it was becoming clear that organizations with substantial websites needed professional help wrangling the hundreds or thousands of “pages” of content they were creating and trying to manage. By 2016, the field was growing like kudzu, throwing vines over everything in its path: “web writing,” content management, information architecture, and online editorial planning sprouted tendrils and started growing together almost too quickly to see. A good time to start a magazine about content.
ISSUE #2 SPRING/MAY 2016
PROPOSISTION
FOR THE PEOPLE
We believe it’s time to recognize that many of us in nominally separate fields and industries—like publishing, digital preservation, technical communication, (new) journalism, learning technology, and yes, content and editorial strategy—are working on the same problem from slightly different angles. Our vocabularies, style, and immediate aims are often different, but at the core, we’re all concerned with the design, creation, presentation, and care of content (mostly text) that serves people (mostly readers). We’d all like to get better at what we do, and that the most efficient way to do that is to crawl out of our many separate bunkers, stop giving each other suspicious looks, and share our best ideas, tools, and practices. So that’s what we’ve come here to do.
Above all, thanks to our writers for growing in with us and to you, our first readers, for making it all real.
Thank you
T.LaBranche
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THE GREEN CURTAIN
Table of Dis/Content THE GREEN CURTAIN: IDENTIFY
“
5
NEAR FUTURE
This Place Double Take, African Innovations THIS IS WHAT I WANT TO SEE ...when they grow up…
”
6
Burn Dem Bras: Untitled (Your body is a battleground)
”
20 Kidding “All Aside Shitting on Whiteness: It’sTime for White Feminists to Stop Talking About Solidarity and Start Acting
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TABLE OF DISCONTENT
“Propogan-DUH
28
“
Mind Altering Substance
F is for White Feminism There Are Certain Facts that Cannot Be Disputed
”
36 “
Consumed
ADVERTISEMENT: A REBEL or a SLAVE? ADVERTISEMENT: Are You Beach Body Ready?
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38
“ Progress Manifesto
Black Eyed Witch: Shirin Neshat, Without Boundary: Seventeen Ways of Looking
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35
“ Last Call, Hunty
The Influence of Feminism in Art, not criticism.
”
Cruel Optimism
THE NEAR FUTURE
Untitled
BARBARA KRUGER
This Place, Brooklyn Museum Double Take, African Innovations, Brooklyn Museum THIS IS WHAT I WANT TO SEE, Harlem Studio Museum ...when they grow up…, Harlem Studio Museum
Feminism ultimately seeks a solution beyond a more dignified portrayal of men and women in the media. What begins as a critique of rhetoric becomes a critique of capitalism. Like many feminist intellectuals, Douglas sees inequality of wealth as a social problem, especially to the detriment to women. Like Betty Friedan in The Feminine Mystique, Douglas charges the media with selling out the female sex, but holds capitalism responsible for providing the money— and thus the motivation—to do so.
CRUEL OPTIMISM
THE NEAR FUTURE
WHO’S DESERVING OF POWER
THE GREEN CURTAIN
THE F-WORD
03
Policy reforms include free mammograms and pap smears, and welfare has been reformed to more effectively serve poor mothers. There are a slew of cultural changes in the direction of women’s empowerment in magazines, television shows, academic criticism, and music.The “girl power” theme of the early 1990s has returned, and pop music artists such as The Spice Girls are touring and singing about powerful women. Young women all over the world are speaking out about pay inequities, sexual harassment, and degrading ads and television shows. They form a movement of “F-girls,” who infuse the feminist movement with energy through their activism and their internet presence, which engages in spirited dialogue with the surrounding sexist media. F-girl activists appear on television, write blogs, and speak out about who “deserves” wealth (poor women) and who doesn’t (Bernie Madoff’s wife). They call for free preventative care services for American women—mammograms and pap smears—and education for women in Africa. They picket the TV networks and cable channels that air sexist programs or neglect to hire women, until these situations are rectified.
04
“eliminating a tax loophole that allows hedge fund managers to pay only a maximum 15% rate instead of the 35% imposed on top income earners… and by raising taxes paid by the very rich.”
BARBARA KRUGER {BOTTOM}
BARBARA KRUGER {TOP} Untitled
Untitled
The positive scenario describes this same family and grandmother in a better situation.The mother receives generous benefits from her employer such as paid maternity leave and on-site daycare. This daycare is funded federally by “eliminating a tax loophole that allows hedge fund managers to pay only a maximum 15% rate instead of the 35% imposed on top income earners… and by raising taxes paid by the very rich.”
BARBARA KRUGER
“a movement of “Fgirls,” who infuse the feminist movement with energy through their activism and their internet presence, which engages in spirited dialogue with the surrounding sexist media..”
THE NEAR FUTURE
And like many on the Left, Douglas sees government intervention as part of the solution. The last chapter of Enlightened Sexism, titled “The F-word,” features two scenarios, one negative, one positive, both set “sometime in the future.” The negative scenario is an abjectly-styled version of our current culture. It includes a stressful living situation for a struggling young middle class family, the disillusionment of the former-feminist-activist grandmother of this family, and cultural and political trends that look ominous for the health and self-esteem of women. Jessica Simpson hawks a line of “Daddy’s little hottie” clothes for tots. There is a persistent wage gap. And social pressure of a conservative bent aims to split women’s identities between a “benevolent sexism” that extols a stereotype of passivity and nurturing motherhood and a “hostile sexism” that rejects women who exercise ambition and take on leadership positions outside the home. Young women growing up in this atmosphere feel pressured to develop sexual identities early on, and they feel that their worth is based on appearance alone. Men are still the predominant occupants of top positions in the media and in the government, while women are funneled into lower-paying “pink collar” jobs. Douglas explains, “The dumb blond, narcissistic ‘real housewives,’ cat-fighting, wedding obsessed, baby-obsessed stereotypes in the media mask and justify this inequality, as does the relentless blitzkrieg against women with power by the pit bulls of talk radio and cable TV news.”
Untitled
SEXY RIDICULE Enlightened Sexism the “shield of irony” is employed, subtly throughout the media to disguise sexist messages. Ridiculous to have bikini-clad women jumping on trampolines and, furthermore, that the guys who wanted them to do this were morons. Knowing wink: guys are so dumb, such helpless slaves to big breasts, and the female display is, in the end, so harmless, that a feminist critique is not necessary. Therefore, objectification of women is now fine; why, it’s actually a joke on the guys. It’s silly to be sexist; Sexism is meant to be seen as pathetic and if there is no more sexism, then there is no longer a need for sexual politics, and sexual politics can be mocked and attacked.
LETS END SELF-DESTRUCTION
BARBARA KRUGER
Untitled
An emphasis on individual rights and merit is a much more consistent and powerful argument for change for oppressed women in other countries than the eggshell-walking multiculturalism present today. Globally-minded private business and charities could also promote the moral equality of women in countries where the plight of women is much worse than in America. Charities and NGOs working in developing countries can make it a condition of their assistance that communities involve women in the political process. They might also make aid conditional on ending harmful practices such as female circumcision or toleration of domestic abuse in a particular community. In short, they could highlight the difference between Bernie Madoff’s wife and Shelly Lazarus, the CEO of Ogilvy and Mather Advertising. By encouraging a television gestalt which explores individual merit, cooperation between people, and protagonists that set an example rather than pandering to viewers’ sense of superiority, we could ensure not only a more respectful portrayal of women, but a better example of how relationships might be conducted in the long run. Rather than a pre-occupation with “train-wreck” celebrities, we might choose to be fascinated by achievement in the entertainment industry and its requirements—after all, one can assume that it’s not difficult, decision-making wise, to ruin a career, spend all one’s money, abandon one’s principles, and destroy one’s health, but that success and the maintenance of one’s integrity is the interesting and rare thing. Girls seeking to individuate from their parents would find a more nuanced landscape of values to reject or embrace. Rebellion could entail pursuing alternative goals rather than self-destructive behaviors.
06
Untitled
A media concerned with rational values would have, first and foremost, objectivity in its journalism. Less focus on sex scandals and policing the personal lives of public figures would mean a greater attention to their relevant activities. A female politician seeking to rise in this atmosphere would thus be held accountable for the content of her speech more than her “shrill” or “dominating” tone. Speculation about her policies, motivations, credibility, and competence would put less of an emphasis on her sex than on her individual performance, ideas, and qualifications. Reality TV, as legitimate entertainment, would continue to offer the intimacy and spontaneity which is its strength over scripted television. But the creators of reality shows could focus their efforts on more dignified dramas.
BARBARA KRUGER {BOTTOM}
THE NEAR FUTURE
BARBARA KRUGER {TOP} Untitled
CRUEL OPTIMISM
05
THE NEAR FUTURE
But the solution should not involve government regulation, welfare, or increasing taxes on the wealthy in order to subsidize the incomes of those with less wealth. The legitimate function of government is to protect the political equality of men and women—their right to be free from the initiation of force. This means that every individual is equally at liberty to pursue his or her goals; every individual is subject to the same laws regarding property. But this isn’t to mean that every person will get an equal outcome, as Douglas suggests by her “100% solution.” Many of the welfare benefits that Douglas suggests should be political goals—educating women in Africa, providing free mammograms and pap smears—are beyond the scope of a rights-respecting government. If one wanted these goals achieved, the project might be taken up by private charities, NGOs, or businesses seeking to invest in an employee base by offering such services, all without compromising the principles of individual rights to property. In keeping with property rights and freedoms of speech, individuals seeking to create a rational society would not force media outlets to choose content that portrays women as equals, but rather, individuals should simply not patronize— should not pay—media outlets to broadcast messages they disagree with. Within the context of the free market and property rights, people might protest against the companies they oppose, write cultural criticism about the shows and sponsors, or create shows of their own which promote different values. What kind of things would we see in the media, if the culture took on the attitude that women had the same potential for intelligence and ability as men? What kind of life could a woman lead, if she embraced her own rational self-interest and lived in a society that supported this decision?
Shows might choose, as their subjects, intelligent women pursuing long-term goals and long-term relationships, and the obstacles and emotional nuances of these, rather than the erratic mood swings of touchy women overly concerned with others’ opinions. Instead of volatile cycles of breakups and flimsy alliances, reality shows could provide both human interest and useful emotional examples by examining the conflicts that arise from people with truly different ideas and a commitment to constructive problem solving. To wish that glamour and gloss in celebrity culture would disappear is unrealistic—and not necessarily desirable. Shows seeking to portray the wealthiest few might provide more intelligent commentary by examining how it is that their subjects came to wealth.
THE GREEN CURTAIN
CULTURAL CRITICISM
This is a way for the private sector to promote the political equality of women in unstable societies on the basis of voluntary and peaceful incentives, rather than the more volatile and difficult establishment of government in these areas. Furthermore, even less-developed communities that reluctantly include women in their political decisions and trade will quickly find that creation of value is the great equalizer: in communities starved for money and products, it will soon not matter to them whether these values are created by a man or a woman.
“Young women growing up in a more woman-friendly society, one which encourages them to pursue their self-interest and de-emphasizes the importance of appearances.”
SUSAN GABRIAL Untitled (1)
by Rosa Pierre Gueterrez
THE NEAR FUTURE Cruel Optimism
By allowing social pressure the dangerous that young all over the how we see in azines all over faces and don’t really pretend to be quire exhaustinhumane achieved. group of acpublic figures another road, nificant and acceptation bodies rather “beauty stanquestioning it.
this misogynist they keep alive stereotypes women follow world. That’s covers of magthe world this bodies that exist, but that real, or that reing and even methods to be However, a tresses and have taken one that is sigthat leads to of our own than follow a dard” without
In fact, Lena Dunham, Kate Winslet, Carrie Fisher, among others, are trying to make a huge difference exposing the “body shame” that they have suffered. Kate Winslet has denounced several times situations alike. Julia Roberts asked her image not to be altered digitally in a recent ad for a multinational, just like Keira Knightly at the recent cover of Interview, photographed by Patrick Demachelier. There are women of color who are the same size as her (or me), just as educated and more intelligent than the lot of us — but, due to systemic racism, haven’t had the same opportunities. This obsession with looks is largely a Western, privileged phenomenon. Our engagement with it, and efforts to deconstruct it, often fortify its pervasive influence on our life.
SUSAN GABRIAL Untitled (3)
Most of us are potential victims of “body shaming,” this widespread phenomenon of receiving cruel feedback — especially via social media — when our bodies don’t meet the unreal beauty standards of our time. This means, if you are not extremely skinny, tall, fit and, especially, very young or especially white. The actual culture of Instagram — narcissism has enhanced this trend, so nowadays almost every woman is a target. But the ones that are threatened the most are certainly models and actresses, because public exposition of their image is part of their job. Some of them try to fight this with tools like plastic surgery, Botox, non stop workout, dieting... and Photoshop. The result is that they actually don’t fight the problem, but only make it worse.
“LET’S END THE BODY SHAMING”
VICTIMIZATION
“It’s not about us white women anymore — fat or thin, ugly or hot. It’s time for our issues — and the size of our asses — to take a back seat.”
BARBARA KRUGER Untitled
PERFECTIONS Question is: “Are you beach body ready?” elicited such succinct responses from women rightly offended by the asinine message. Similarly, a woman’s size does not preclude her from career success, a rampant sex life or a good-looking, slim fiancé. But there comes a point at which weight does teeter over into ill health, a point that West frequently ignores in her writing. Instead, she strays dangerously close to replicating the same kinds of prejudices she says have oppressed her, as she does in a Jezebel piece about thin women who struggle to grasp the crux of the body positivity movement: When a larger woman attacks a thin woman for being thin, the attack is split — part of it is selfish, yes, to tear thin women down and feel better about their own marginalized bodies. That is bad. But a bigger part is attacking the system that marginalizes them. That anger at the system is justified.
BARBARA KRUGER
Female perfection is thin and white and has long hair, big tits, blue eyes, no cellulite and perfectly proportioned features and limbs — or so we’re told. Women spend a ridiculous amount of time aspiring to a state of being that will always be denied us unless we possess exceptional genes or enough cash to emulate them. It’s also a state of being that prominent white feminists such as Lindy West have fought to challenge. The basic premise behind much of West’s work as a pro-fat feminist is simple: Stop shaming me because I’m fat. Stop making assumptions about my health, my lifestyle, my diet, my romantic life, my career — simply because I’m fat. Stop using the word “fat” in a derogatory way. When your weight is not in the range of the “norm”, then the question becomes how can society shame you.
Thin people struggle with size, too. More importantly, West’s bashing of slim women who dare to disagree with her stance comes across as myopic bickering amongst the white feminist ranks. West is an educated, white American woman who is able to make a living writing about pop culture and her weight for GQ magazine. But she problematically ignores perspectives other than her own. On its surface, such an argument innately appeals. Certainly the equation of health with physical “perfection” and beauty is specious.
Untitled
FEMININE
“...especially levied against women, who are shamed for being skinny, for being tall, for being short, for having big boobs, for having small boobs, for having body hair, for being unfeminine, for being too sexy, for being too prudish, for being smart — shamed at some point for being pretty much anything while also being female...”
THE NEAR FUTURE Cruel Optimism
NORMALACY OF BODY SHAMING
Untitled
But by justifying anger towards another woman based on how she looks, she is perpetuating a different but equally noxious set of assumptions about weight: that size is a privilege. Educating the general public about the trials of being a larger woman is a worthy endeavor. But calling thinness a “privilege” presumes that thin people do not understand the suffering of anyone deemed by the western world to be “fat,” or do not have their own struggles. West and her brand of profat feminism also wander into the rocky territory of oversimplified identity politics, trying to equate dress size with other oppressions such as racism, sexism and poverty, and ignoring that one’s weight is not an inherent privilege.
Very few people “choose” to be fat in the United States. What’s more, very few people can defend obesity in the way that West insists she can: by declaring herself fit and healthy despite our traditional assumptions about people who are her size. The alternative discourse, perhaps, should be that one can be fat and possibly unhealthy — and that’s OK. You don’t have to be a mythical overweight person who still runs marathons and doesn’t eat anything more than 1,500 calories a day. That myth is as damaging as any other. The fact that I am a white, thin, educated woman will be cited — disparagingly — as the reason behind my discomfort with West’s pro-fat movement. But such a critique ignores, perhaps, my own struggles with weight and the fact that I am the daughter of obese working-class parents. I have spent years obsessing over various parts of my body — how big my thigh gap is, how beaky my nose looks, whether my chin is too small, how long my arms are, how short my legs are, my larger than average ears. The fact that I am a white, thin, educated woman will be cited — disparagingly — as the reason behind my discomfort with West’s pro-fat movement. But such a critique ignores, perhaps, my own struggles with weight and the fact that I am the daughter of obese working-class parents. I have spent years obsessing over various parts of my body — how big my thigh gap is, how beaky my nose looks, whether my chin is too small, how long my arms are, how short my legs are, my larger than average ears. I’ve struggled with my weight — I’ve been both too fat and too thin. Even as someone who spends most of the day in leggings and a tank top, I’ve still spent thousands of dollars on my hair, clothes, shoes and face.
BARBARA KRUGER
While occasionally dictated by genetics or illness, weight is more often influenced by lifestyle and choices, which are many times consequences of other intersectional factors such as race and poverty. For instance, 47.8 percent of obese men are black, and low-income women are more likely to be obese than high-income women.
BARBARA KRUGER Untitled
FAT PRIVILEGE
I frequently attribute failure or success in relationships and my career on whether I looked good on a particular day. Having battled through a difficult period over the last nine months, my sinewy figure and severe collarbones are, far from the product of Los Angeles style, extreme dieting, surfing, yoga and hiking, rather the result of depression, antidepressants, a lack of appetite and severe stress.
“I don’t feel confident about my looks.” In my home country of the United Kingdom, my figure would rightly be regarded as a little frightening. In L.A., the response is more likely to be, Well your life may be falling apart, but goddamn, you look way better than you did when you were happy.
Propogan-DUH
Burn Dem Bras
Propogan-DUH Your RACE is not my RACE!
RACE MARCH/PHOTOGRAPH
SITDOWN WITH BARBARA KRUGER Kruger used bold white text within a virtual sea of red, pitting a flood of language against billboard-sized images that collide on the walls
THE GREEN CURTAIN
HOW IT BEGAN
Untitled
BARBARA KRUGER {BOTTOM}
Kruger designed this print for the 1989 reproductive rights protest, the March for Women’s Lives, in Washington, D.C. Utilizing her signature red, black, and white palette, the woman’s face is split along a vertical axis, showing the photographic positive and negative sides, suggesting a highly simplified inner struggle of good versus evil. The political and social implications of the work are self evident.
BARBARA KRUGER
1989 MOVEMENT
Kruger completed a similar photographic study of hospitals, only this time the accompanying text was far shorter and more declarative, including phrases like “Go away” and “Not that.” This motif of image and text in her work would soon mature into phrases that explored issues of social power dynamics, technology, death, violence, and the human condition, often taking the form of abstract concepts and postulations.
“I basically wasn’t cut out for design work because I had difficulty in supplying someone else’s image of perfection.”
Untitled
“Reaganomics mixed with a tongue-in-cheek satire; I SHOP THEREFORE I AM, ironically adopted and integrated by the mall, shop till you drop generation as their mantra. ”
THE YEAR 2000
16
PROPAGAN-DUH
Within a short declarative statement, she synthesizes a critique about society, the economy, politics, gender, and culture. Kruger merges the slick facade of graphic design with unexpected phrases in order to catch the viewer’s attention using the language of contemporary publications, grapic design, or magazines. Rather than attempting to sell a product, her works aim to sell an idea to the viewer that is meant to instigate a reconsideration of one’s immediate context. Kruger appropriates images from their original context in magazines and sets them as the background against which she emblazons confrontational phrases. From her use of clearly legible font to her jarring palette of red, white, and black, each element of the final artwork is crucial to its effectiveness as both an artistic expression and a protest against facets of postmodern life.
15
Untitled
BURN DEM BRAS
BARBARA KRUGER {BOTTOM}
Propogan-DUH
BARBARA KRUGER {TOP} Untitled
“The illumination of the physical”
Barbara Kruger is best known for her silkscreen prints where she placed a direct and concise caption across the surface of a found photograph. Her prints from the 1980s cleverly encapsulated the era of “Reaganomics” with tongue-in-cheek satire; especially in a work like(Untitled) I shop therefore I am(1987), ironically adopted by the mall generation as their mantra. As Kruger’s career progressed, her work expanded to include site-specific installations as well as video and audio works, all the while maintaining a firm basis in social, cultural, and political critique. Since the 1990s, she has also returned to magazine design, incorporating her confrontational phrases and images into a wholly different realm from the art world. Associated with postmodern Feminist art as well as Conceptual art, Kruger combines tactics like appropriation with her characteristic wit and direct commentary in order to communicate with the viewer and encourage the interrogation of contemporary circumstances. The economy of Kruger’s use of image and text facilitates a direct communication with the viewer.
Kruger emphasizes the directness of her sentiment by having her subject stare straight ahead through the print, frankly addressing the viewer through both her gaze and the words emblazoned across her face. The message unequivocally addresses the issue of the continued feminist struggle, connecting the physical body of female viewers to the contemporary conditions that necessitate the feminist protest. Kruger’s slick graphic aesthetic and use of dramatic found imagery also place this work within the purview of postmodernism, tying it not only to contemporary critique, but to the larger social and cultural responses within the period.
Barbara Kruger was born in Newark, New Jersey in 1945. Her mother was a legal secretary and her father a chemical technician. An only child, Kruger attended Weequahic High School in Newark, and enjoyed what was by all accounts a typical middle-class upbringing.
SOMEONE ELSE’S IMAGE OF PERFECTION While enrolled at Parsons, Kruger’s instructors included the American photographer Diane Arbus and graphic designer Marvin Israel. Israel in particular had a dramatic influence on Kruger, encouraging her to prepare a professional portfolio when she was becoming disenchanted with art school. At this early stage in Kruger’s training, she had yet to assimilate mass media imagery, language, and signage into her work, and instead focused largely on architectural photography, painting, craft, and erotic imagery. Upon leaving Parsons, Kruger found work as a designer and editor with a number of publications based in New York, including House and Garden, Aperture, and then Mademoiselle, becoming lead designer within a year of being hired and at the age of twenty-two. Despite her early success in editorial work, she felt compelled to pursue a career in art, having said, “I basically wasn’t cut out for design work because I had difficulty in supplying someone else’s image of perfection.” In 1973, Kruger received her first big break, when curator Marcia Tucker, who would eventually found the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, selected several of Kruger’s works for the Whitney Biennial exhibit.
THE GREEN CURTAIN
Propogan-DUH
ARENA OF HOSTILITY
Gender is irrelevant Gender is irrelevant Who Does She Think She Is
BARBARA KRUGER {BOTTOM RIGHT} BARBARA KRUGER {BOTTOM LEFT} BARBARA KRUGER {TOP}
PROPAGAN-DUH
Another significant shift in Kruger’s career took place in 1991 with her self-titled solo exhibition at Mary Boone Gallery in New York in which she transitioned to immersive installations, covering nearly every inch of the gallery’s interior with text accompanied by images, effectively transforming a white-cube gallery into a red, white and black “arena of hostility.” Of note, Kruger was the first female artist signed to the blue-chip Mary Boone Gallery, in 1988, which was best known at the time for representing macho, Neo-Expressionistmale artists. The 1990s also marked for Kruger a return to magazine design, creating covers for publications like The New Republic, Ms., Newsweek, and Esquire, among others. Using her work within an entirely commercial medium carried with it a sense of irony, as much of her text can be seen as a direct challenge to consumerist culture.
17
18
BARBARA KRUGER
BURN DEM BRAS
Within the last two decades Kruger’s oeuvre also expanded, quite literally, to include large-scale installations for museums and public spaces around the world. One such example was the landscape architecture piece Picture This (1995) for the sculpture park at the North Carolina Museum of Art. She maintains her criticality of contemporary life, still asking viewers to re-consider their contexts, and has stated of her work, “I think that art is still a site for resistance ...
1994/1995 Equal is what we are
“all of us are somehow implicated in a historical narrative; in this case, that of Western ideology, society, and art and as viewers of works of art, our opinion about the importance or role of the work of art is influenced, and sometimes even predetermined, by our own religious or philosophical, cultural, and ideological beliefs.”
DISTRIBUTION
“All that seemed beneath you is speaking to you now. All that seemed deaf hears you. All that seemed dumb knows what’s on your mind. All that seemed blind sees through you.”
I’m trying to be affective, to suggest changes, and to resist what I feel are the tyrannies of social life on a certain level.” Kruger has taught at California Institute of the Arts, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, University of California, Berkeley, and is currently a member of the faculty at University of California, Los Angeles. She has also written a number of critical essays and reviews for publications like The New York Times, Artforum, and The Village Voice. In 2005 Kruger participated in The Experience of Art, the 51st Venice Biennale - the first Biennale curated by two women.The artist splits her time between New York City and Los Angeles.
BARBARA KRUGER
UNTITLE 1994/1995
SITDOWN WITH BARABARA KRUGER
Q&A
BURN DEM BRAS
Propogan-DUH
SITDOWN WITH BARABARA KRUGER Readers flipping through the front section ofThe NewYorkTimes on Saturday, November 24, 2012, might have come across, on page A21, in large white Futura type on a black background, a piece from artist Barbara Kruger. Under the title “For Sale,” the work read: “You Want ItYou Buy ItYou Forget It.”This newspaper-embedded artwork was particularly apt because it appeared on a weekend that was kicked off by Black Friday, one of America’s busiest shopping days of the year (and also, in some years, one of its deadliest). So on that morning, the Barbara Kruger piece functioned exactly as Barbara Kruger pieces have so often functioned since the 68-year-old artist first began working with invented texts in her art in the 1970s.
THE GRITTY 70’s CHRISTOPHER BOLLEN: You’ve lived downtown since the mid-’60s, so obviously you’ve seen a lot of change in New York—how it’s increasingly become less of a place for artists and more of a place to show expensive art. BARBARA KRUGER: Yes, but I’m not into it when people say, “Oh, I remember the gritty ‘70s.” I feel like, Oh give me a break. I’m not nostalgic. I can’t stand that.The only scary thing—and this is true with most cities everywhere—is that there’s no room for the working-class and middle-class people here anymore.Tribeca is exhibit A. I moved into this neighborhood in 1967. Nobody lived here. You know, artists did not gentrify this neighborhood. These floors and these buildings were empty. All these small businesses had moved out to Long Island or Queens.That’s when artists appear, right? But when I first came here, the only people who’d been on Chambers Street wereYoko Ono; [acid pioneer] Owsley Stanley; and Ken Jacobs, the filmmaker. I was living in the Village, going to Parsons for a year; I used to go to parties in a building down here on Reade Street where some friends lived. I got involved with someone who had just settled in that building. I think we were there for about two years and then I moved for one year to a building in SoHo, and then in ‘70 or ‘71, I moved back to a place inTribeca. But to me it’s symbolic that people take over buildings and luxury lofts. It’s just the way it goes. For a long time, literally, when the roof leaked, it would be fixed with Scotch tape. When AIRs [artists-in-residence, permits which allowed artists to live legally in buildings zoned for manufacturing use] happened, the landlords wouldn’t give an AIR to a single woman.They wouldn’t give artist-in-residence status to women in the 1970s.
GREAT IMPORTANCE BOLLEN:That’s important to note. KRUGER: That’s the way it was. So you’d stick your bed down in the apartment of a guy who lived downstairs and make believe it was only a working loft whenever the inspectors would come. BOLLEN: So developers have come to these neighborhoods to transform them into luxury lofts. KRUGER: It’s all about profit, which is how the culture works. I understand that. So I don’t feel victimized in that way.
And while some of those early layout techniques of bold graphics, a pulsating visual-linguistic triple-take keeps all of her pieces so alive that she’s become known for her own immediately identifiable, authoritative style—even if authority is what is being questioned in the authoritative typeface.
“You Want It You Buy It NOT CRUEL ENOUGH Yes, that painting is correct; these people are greedy schmucks!”This is how the meaning—and re-meaning—of a Barbara Kruger builds and builds. There is a distinctly Krugerian tone to all of her pieces—”Your Gaze Hits the Side of My Face,” from 1981; “Not Cruel Enough,” from 1997; “Plenty Should Be Enough,” from 2009—compels the viewer to side with her and against her simultaneously, and always stop as the balance of our thinking shifts. Kruger famously—and perhaps, at first, inadvertently—got her training as an artist the hard way: through a full-time job as a magazine designer at Condé Nast, starting out at Mademoiselle.
You Forget It.” Kruger’s spectacular corpus, spanning four decades, is often described as political—and it is. But just as much it creates these moments of internal identity confusion in which we don’t know if we are acting as victim, oppressor, or witness. Usually, we are all of the above.
Her work has promoted a march onWashington for women’s reproductive rights with the iconic “Your Body Is a Battleground” poster in 1989 [Untitled (Your Body Is a Battleground)]; swallowed buses with wraparound vinyl; taken over the exterior of a department store in Frankfurt, rendering a giant eye across the building’s façade; is currently sliding across the sides of escalators of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in the nation’s capital; and, premiering this May, will be cloaking the bodies and backdrops of ballet dancers for choreographer Benjamin Millepied’s gem-themed ballet at theThéâtre du Châtelet in Paris. Bollen asked Where is “Your Body Is a Battleground” not an issue? Kruger answered I’ve not been to that place yet.
BARBARA KRUGER
The direct address is disarmingly direct. Certainly, the “you” implicates the reader—a shopper, a consumer, a part of the capitalist enterprise, guilty of impulsive buying habits. But the “you” is also a general composite—that annoying, far more guilty everyperson-and the reader sides with the artist in condemning this sector of the population who is greedy, wasteful, and irresponsible. So already—and almost always in a graphic Kruger text piece—a haunting repositioning occurs in the mind of the viewer: judged and also judging; agreeing with the charges even as she or he is charging others. First of all, most galleries are less empowered than they’ve ever been in terms of these art fairs. Galleries are interesting because they’re free for people. You don’t have to pay $12 to walk in the door like you do at a museum. It’s expensive to go to museums! But dealers who go to these art fairs frequently can’t sell work to people unless those people can look up the history of the artist and see what the secondary market sales are.
YOUR BODY
UNTITLE 1994/1995
“For Sale,”
Two weeks after the New York Times piece ran, a recent work by Kruger could be found on a wall at Art Basel Miami Beach, alongside convention-center booths showing works by her contemporaries—many of whom have been her peers since the ‘70s in downtown NewYork. On the aluminum-mounted vinyl was printed: “Greedy Schmuck.” Art Basel visitors must have passed this startling graphic accusation and had the same interior rift that I did: “That is about me because I’m participating in this hysterical culture of art-buying. I am the greedy schmuck.” And at the same time, “No, the greedy schmucks are all around me, the ones selling and the ones buying and the ones making the huge profits. I’m just passing through.
“THE NOW
Barbara Kruger’s work has an integral place in the history of feminist, postmodern, and conceptual art.
GRAPHIC DESIGNER
I’m surprised that you don’t have a problem with your art being sold in a convention center? To me, the art world is an anthropology, right? My parents traded their labor for wages. You have to live inside of capital unless you have a huge inheritance and can afford to have these pipe dreams. Most artists will never make money off their work, but that spark, that need to create commentary, to visualize, textualize, and musicalize your experience of the world will continue whether it’s a hot commodity or not. You see that places where that need is shut down, we see oppressiveness and subjugation. That need to create commentary is huge. Most of that commentary will not make a big flip profit for some guy buying a condo on the next block. You have to go in knowing that. When I came up in the art world, it was twelve white guys in lower Manhattan with maybe two women—two visible women. Now it’s much better. People who are calling themselves artists are people of all colors and persuasions and genders. It’s hard to figure out how to support yourself because you’re not going to end up making a lot of money from your work.
Barbara Kruger’s work has an integral place in the history offeminist, postmodern, and conceptual art. Connected with this, Kruger dissects contemporary culture in her unique combinations of image and text, often targeting multiple oppressions or hypocrisies. Kruger’s aesthetic is among the most recognizable of contemporary artists, along with the likes of Jeff Koons, Cindy Sherman, and Damien Hirst. More importantly, as a successful artist in both the commercial and high art arenas, Kruger continues to influence many artists who struggle to make that same crossover. A clear connection to Kruger’s approach is found in the work of artists like Shepard Fairey, the Guerilla Girls and Lorna Simpson, through their use of image and text, as well as cultural critique. Kruger’s wide variety of work, from her early prints, to her magazine covers, installations and t-shirt designs, has ensured that she has and will continue to have a wide influence on artists and non-artists alike. It ain’t fun for a lot of dealers, either, even though they make money. But that’s because there’s this bubble that still exists, especially for those of us who’ve been fortunate enough to have won the lottery for 20 minutes. But I see it as all temporal, so arbitrary.
BARBARA KRUGER
Kruger answered: That of course. Everything’s site-specific. I’ve always been sort of critical of artists who go in and do a quick read of a place and then do a work with the people there. To me, that’s exploitative in the way that some photography is exploitative. Issues my work is involved in—issues of consumerism, the place of women’s bodies—when I’m in these places, I have a reading of whether they’re issues or not, of course.
BARBARA KRUGER”
UNTITLE 1994/1995
Bollen asked Kruger finally, about translation.Your text pieces are often literally translated into the language of the countries in which they are being shown and installed. Do you see your works as universal messages? Since much of your work is public—wrapped around buses, on the steps of train stations, inside churches—does the history of politics or functions of the place determine what you will show?
Your RACE is not my RACE!
RACE MARCH/PHOTOGRAPH
Shitting on Whiteness
ALL KIDDING ASIDE
It’s Time for White Feminists to Stop Talking About Solidarity and Start Acting. Why is Whiteness being shitted on by feminist, and not “Popular” Feminist.
THE GREEN CURTAIN BARBARA KRUGER
Gender is irrelevant Who Does She Think She Is
“a per manently angry brown dyke, when mainstream feminism fights for the right to be ‘sexy’ and unthreatening.”
BARBARA KRUGER {TOP}
I didn’t know of any Black lesbians; Audre had not yet become my Lorde. Intersectionality gives us the framework to understand the multiplicity of lived experience. It gave me insight into why my womanhood felt so different from that of my white friends and allowed me to understand the implications of being the Other on a structural level. I was able to understand that maybe some of my experiences hadn’t been shaped wholly by my actions but by forces of hierarchy way outside of my control. What does it mean to me, a permanently angry brown dyke, when mainstream feminism fights for the right to be ‘sexy’ and unthreatening to men and urges us to quell our fury?
BARBARA KRUGER {BOTTOM}
INTERNAL CONFLICTS
ALL KIDDING ASIDE
ALL KIDDING ASIDE
It persuades us to be passive, pale dolls and to dress our struggle for liberation in quiet positivity, suspenders and sex tips. Black women, such as myself, don’t have the luxury of the pacifism and politeness found in today’s white feminism. We must use violence, both physically and in the vehemence of our words, because we are more desperate. This study, referenced in a previous Autostraddle article about compulsory heterosexuality and street harassment, shows that people of colour are over 10% more likely to face physical harassment in public than white citizens. This is true of my experiences.
28
1994/1995 Equal is what we are
Shitting on Whiteness
27
SEX, SEX, SEX
BARBARA KRUGER
I wasn’t always a feminist, let alone one with intersectional awareness and a politicised pride in my Blackness. When I first dove hungrily into feminism, starved as I was of any meaningful understanding of my life, it was the work of radical feminists such as Andrea Dworkin and Germaine Greer that I devoured. I feasted on their anger for it spoke to me deeply but their messages didn’t nourish me. I choked on the poison of their narrow reflections. Where was the representation of my life as a Black, mixed-race lesbian? Where was I to find solace and solidarity and an understanding of my existence and the oppressions unique to my position at the intersection of woman, lesbian and Black? The feminist community at large currently has a basic understanding of what intersectionality means, in no small part due to the internet and the rise of online feminist activism. However, only those of us who have known the fear of slipping through the cracks can properly articulate the relief that this theory holds. When I was younger and coming to terms with my sexuality I was convinced that I couldn’t be gay. I thought that lesbianism was a white woman’s game.
As I waited in line at a shop the other day, the man in front of me turned around and started talking to me. When I didn’t respond in a suitably enthusiastic manner, he reached out and grabbed my breast without shame. I hit his hand away, seething with rage at his audacity. The numerous times men at my local LGBT club have grabbed my ass, my afro, my waist, which turned to physical altercations to get them off me, to defend myself from the fear that creeps in when a stranger violates the bounds of my personal space.
1994/1995 Equal is what we are
FEMINISM IS NOT A COLOR
“people of colour are over 10% more likely to face physical harassment in public than white citizens.”
“I am educated and you’re not.”
TO WHAT EXTENT? White feminist acquaintances have been quick to admonish me for resorting to violence, even after seeing the marks left on my body by men and hearing about the way I have been repeatedly targeted. A white friend told me she noticed that when she comes out with me and my other women of colour friends, we face more aggressive and sexual harassment than that of her white friends.
THE GREEN CURTAIN
RACE VS RACE They ignore women of colours’ righteous fury at the double bind we face under white supremacist patriarchy like discussing acts of sexism against IggyAzalea without acknowledging her known racism and homophobia.This says to minoritised women that they and their feelings don’t matter.
White, rich, straight, cisgender women such as the writers at The Vagenda and Jezebel as well as celebrities such as Lena Dunham and Lily Allen control the mainstream feminist discourse (even whilst shirking the feminist label in the case of the latter) and form the wider public opinion on our movement, as they are afforded the coverage to bring their ideas to the masses. Rhiannon Lucy Coslett and Holly Baxter of The Vagenda have half the talent and insight of Trudy of Gradient Lair, yet it is they who have recently had a major book published and regular columns in The Guardian and the New Statesman. The aforementioned white women don’t use their privileged platform to uplift the sisters below them Instead they dig their heels into our shoulders, stride across the bridges we call our backs, without so much as a glance down.
1994/1995 Equal is what we are
BARBARA KRUGER {BOTTOM}
Gender is irrelevant
BARBARA KRUGER {TOP}
BARBARA KRUGER {BOTTOM}
Who Does She Think She Is
bell hooks recently called Beyoncé a ‘terrori s t ’, w h i ch highlights the power that Black women must put behind their words in order for people to listen. If bell had given her critique of Queen Bey in less explosive terms, would anyone have cared?
1994/1995 Equal is what we are
29 30
“people of color turning their violent words against fellow people of color.”
ALL KIDDING ASIDE
Whilst I don’t agree with hooks’ assertion about Mrs. Carter-Knowles, and I balk at Black women turning their violent words against fellow Black women, I accept the urgency behind what she is saying. She fears for the Black girls of the world, precarious as their situations are, and she was doing her best to make her concerns known in a world that routinely ignores Black women. We have less to lose and more to gain than white women. We are more likely to be unemployed, are more likely to go to prison, and struggle to see truthful reflections of ourselves on screen and in print. If we soothe men with one hand and fix our hair with the other, like popular exclusionary feminism tells us to, then which fist is left to smash the system that chokes us?
COLOR, I HAVE NO RACE
ALL KIDDING ASIDE
BARBARA KRUGER {TOP}
Shitting on Whiteness
“White, rich, straight, cisgender women such as the artists.”
Why should such heinous things be brought up when Iggy’s white womanhood has been victim to the kind of sexism that brown women face every single day, without the luxury of a sparkling pop career? Time and time again we see white feminists such as Caitlin Moran and Julie Burchill enact their brand of selfish individualistic feminism upon us. We see them proclaim that they ‘literally couldn’t give a shit’ about their sisters of colours’ right to media representation, in the case of Moran, whose best-selling book How To Be A Woman repeatedly uses the t slur as well as being cissexist and biologically essentialist throughout. Or see them write odes to racist thought. Burchill’s Damaged Gods talks about the barbarity and backwardness of men of colour, yet she is still hailed as a progressive feminist voice, her views are legitimised by the prominent platform she is given as the go to outspoken feminist in the English media. A position she has held for decades despite publishing multiple transphobic tirades, most notably a horrifically transmisogynistic piece in the Observer in 2013 which denigrated trans women in ways too vile to repeat.Flavia Dzodan, Latina feminist and originator of the oft-quoted line, “My feminism will be intersectional or it will be bullshit!”, wrote an entire article about the numerous high profile white feminists (such as Sarah Ditum, noted Guardian journalist) who have rubbished intersectionality. It describes how they are swathing their discomfort with something not wholly made for them in accusations of complexity and alienation — all in one simple concept about the actuality of our multi-faceted lives?! We can’t stand for this.
ALL KIDDING ASIDE
shitting on whiteness
Sick and tired I am of asking white people to stop wearing bindis and fashioning their hair into the mess that they have the audacity to call dreadlocks. I can’t abide the blatant and flagrant cultural appropriation of symbols that are dear to people of colour.
THE INTERSECTIONALITY FEMINIST BULLSHIT SLY WHITENESS ONLY STARING BACK White women who I have was once proud to call my sisters, rushed to shout me down and accuse me of stirring hatred and racism and it then dissolved into personal attacks on my character. The thing that really struck me was their repeated affirmations that they cared deeply about tackling racism and wanted to work together to end it. Listen the hell up when a woman of colour calls you out! I was literally giving them an easy way to chip a little bit of racism away from the world but their cognitive dissonance is so strong that they can say we will fight racism with one side of their mind whilst perpetuating it with the other. This is how whiteness operates; it is insidious and sly. It lets white women feel that they have the coolness and collectedness of reasoned, dispassionate logic on their side and thus they reign righteous over women of colour’s understandable anger and frustrations.
BARBARA KRUGER
I once made the mistake of falling for a ‘feminist’ white girl who would get angry at me for daring to call out the racism and misogynoir of a mutual male friend, though of course she would never admit that she might hold racist thoughts herself via her tone-policing and what I came to see as her fetishistic view of me and other Black people. This is the reality of our white supremacist society, and by extension the feminism of white women who allow it to permeate them without critical reflection. It’s simply not fair that people of colour’s own cultural markers mark them out as ‘backwards’, ‘unclean’ or ‘unprofessional.’ Meanwhile white people don the same things and are lauded for their (stolen) creativity and uniqueness.
To be feminist is to be aware of our interconnected struggle as women, but to also see that not every struggle is our own. Use your voice as a privileged white woman to shout down racism wherever you see it. Be thankful that you will never know the sickening lurch that sways through your blood when your humanity is denounced and denied because of your race by women who profess to care about all women’s liberation. The title feminist is to be taken up by women who have moved beyond a selfish view of one’s relationship to society, an outlook that is nurtured and encouraged by the neo-liberal matrix we find ourselves struggling to survive in. It is difficult to throw off no doubt, but we can and we must. In her speech “The Transformation of Silence Into Language and Action,” Audre Lorde spoke of how she was doing her work to dismantle the binds of this sick sad world and questioned her sisters, ‘…are you doing yours?’
1994/1995 Equal is what we are
REFLECTION
THE BULLSHIT CONTINUES
It is far more impressive and sisterly to me to see white women acting in an intersectional way. I want to see them reach a point where they are critical of the feminist action they take and weed out the racism that seeps through their organising and the feminist media they consume. I want to see white feminists understand why they can’t use racist narratives, such as those that surround the Western view of Muslim women who choose to wear hijab, to fight sexism. They must understand that they are not the default. That white is not synonymous with womanhood. We, as women of colour, are women too. We are their sisters. I long for the day that they call out and collect their fellow white people instead of letting women of colour do it time and time again at the expense of our mental and physical health. That is sisterhood. That is selflessness; and it is precious.
Now this term is some loaded, feelgood bullshit. White activists with ego problems like to drone on about the importance of intersectionality in their blogs and such but the tone with which it takes belies the obvious fact that none of them have ever actually worked with any people of color who aren’t tokenized I’ve pretty much grown contemptuous towards the idea that people in positions of privilege have the right to label themselves “allies”. First off, you don’t get to define yourself as such, thats something other people do for you, and just because someone DOES call you an ally in their particular struggle doesn’t mean you have the right to call yourself an ally to all people in that group.
1994/1995 Equal is what we are
When will white feminists take collective responsibility for educating themselves? When will they understand the power at play that sings in their skins? We don’t exist in a vacuum and women of colour don’t exist to hold their hands and explain in painful detail why their behaviour continues to hurt us. Intersectional feminist politics are not for white women to co-opt as their own. It is explicitly a theory that was formed from the mind of a Black woman,Kimberlé Crenshaw, to explain Black women’s situations, as they were ignored by the white-centric feminist movement and simultaneously by the male-centric civil rights movement. I cannot speak for every Black woman, and I would never profess to. We are not a monolith. But I think we ought to stand wary of a white woman who calls herself intersectional. You won’t listen to us and you will exclude us from your movement but you will take the ideas you like?
BARBARA KRUGER
BARBARA KRUGER
1994/1995 Equal is what we are
Then there are those white women who steal the language Black women have created to articulate our situations. They will declare themselves ‘intersectional feminists,’ and as they take this word as their own, they soften its edges and declare themselves absolved of their whiteness. Stop paying superficial lip service to intersectionality, white feminists. It is insulting and strips the power from one of the most important concepts in the politics of gender liberation. If you can’t take a stand against racism you have no business calling yourself intersectional for feminist brownie points. I can’t listen to a white feminist who coos about her love of bell hooks but dismisses the words of a woman of colour she knows on the subject of race.
Essentially I am criticizing “intersectionality” because I see it as being mainly used by white liberal activists to pretend they have some affinity with the depressed, downtrodden of the world when in fact their understanding manifests in them doing some pretty racist, offensive shit. For example, when I was a younger me there was a public forum on “Gentrification and Intersectionality” held in a predominately black neighbourhood in my town. Guess the race of most of the attendants? Thats right, they were mostly white. In fact the only reason there were any black people in attendance at an event that actually was about an issue of importance to them were because they were invited by some of the white attendants (me and a few friends). Oh and those black people in attendance? They weren’t random people, they were members of the NAACP who actually weren’t officially invited to this public forum. Rather interesting I must say. But it doesn’t stop there. One white professor speaking at the event made the participants in the audience “pretend” to be another race. He actually asked white attendants to “act like they are black” and asked the few black attendants to “act white”. When some of us actually objected to this kind of “exercise” on the grounds that it was inherently racist and actually wasn’t teaching anyone shit. BARBARA KRUGER
1994/1995 Equal is what we are
Who Does She Think She Is
BARBARA KRUGER
But it wasn’t meant to actually raise anyone’s consciousness. The term ‘intersectionality’, much like ‘kyriarchy’ is about silencing dissent from mainstream (malestream, white) ‘radical’ politics, not actually challenging people to have some fucking empathy or honestly address what marginalized people are saying about the nature of their oppression. People get to go home after their little exercises to their privileged bubbles, detached from the lives of the people they were just appropriating so they could exorcise their whiteguilt. You don’t get to call yourself that, and even if someone calls you that, its a rather egotistical way of looking at yourself to define yourself as such. You also don’t get to assume then that because ONE person calls you that you suddenly are an ally to all members of said oppressed group of people. You don’t get to boast about being a decent person who empathizes with other people’s suffering. I mean, really, how fucking lame is that? How pathetic do you have to be to get an ego boost from it?
CONTINUES ON AND ON AND ON For women of colour intersectional thinking is a reflex to us once we become aware. We can’t stop scouring the crowd for brown faces and we can’t stop thinking about the implications of the word “slut” on our already tainted brown bodies and we can’t stop thinking about how we didn’t know we could be beautiful until we found messages away from the mainstream. White women must stand beside, not in front of us and force themselves to think about who exactly their feminism is fighting for.
Lastly there’s the people who instead of wanting to make actual change for women experiencing racism, class oppression via capitalism, having been prostituted, women defined as “crazy” due to their experiences with male violence / survivors of male violence, choose to feel sorry for us, pity us instead. Instead of offering support, encouraging our leadership, supporting us when we speak out about our experiences, honoring the work we are doing we’re treated as if we are PR disasters and hopeless victims that need saving, or that are too far gone to be “saved” but serve as a cautionary tale to all those women “choosing” to prostitute themselves, etc. Yeah, intersectionality as I’ve experienced it as a person who actually faces multiple forms of oppression that INTERSECT and fuck my life up is BULLSHIT.
Mind-Altering Substance
F is for White Feminism
SITDOWN WITH JULIANA HUXTABLE
Your RACE is not my RACE!
RACE MARCH/PHOTOGRAPH
There Are Certain Facts that Cannot Be Disputed Hatred of TERFs by White Feminism
THE GREEN CURTAIN
Mind-Altering Substance
BARBARA KRUGER {BOTTOM}
Gender is irrelevant
40
MIND-ALTERING SUBSTANCES
We are talking about the women’s movement here, aren’t we? Is it really so unreasonable that many women are offended by their own erasure? What equivalent erasure are men asked to accept in deference to the trans or queer community’s feelings? I can’t think of a single one. Yes, transwomen deserve to be protected from employment and housing discrimination. Yes, they deserve to be protected from transphobic workplace harassment and referred to by their preferred pronouns. Yes, they deserve to be protected from street harassment and violence. But do they really have the right to demand access to every safe space reserved for women?
Instead, they will use the term “pregnant person,” because it is now considered bigoted to imply a direct connection between women and pregnancy. So “womanhood” has been erased from the language of midwives in order to protect the feelings of a tiny percentage of the trans community. It isn’t uncommon for transactivists to take offence to the acknowledgement of us breeders and bleeders. Author and trans activist, Julia Serano, tweeted that “contraception-centric feminism” has been “alienating” for her.Yeah, well, that tweet is pretty alienating to the hundreds of thousands of women who have lost access to reproductive freedom over the past few years in the U.S. and to those still struggling for basic rights. What’s more important? That women have access to abortion and contraceptives or that people who aren’t female don’t feel “alienated?” Genderqueer activist, Laurie Penny, wrote an article that feminism’s “focus on women” was “alienating” to the queer community.
39
Who Does She Think She Is
SYSTEMATIC TRANSGRESSIONS
BARBARA KRUGER {TOP}
F is for White Feminism
“ “privileged” in relation to transwomen — even transwomen who are white and middle or upper class —systemic oppression of women, based on sex, is being erased, and that still the default human is someone else” w.VS.w
BARBARA KRUGER
Females have never been the “default” human — that honor has always gone to males. And now we don’t even get to be the default woman. We are now labeled non-trans or “cis” women. Some trans activists are even claiming it is “cissexist” or “transmisogynist” just to refer to pregnant women as women. The Midwives Association of North America (MANA) will no longer use the term “pregnant woman” because they have been informed this is transphobic.
Should a non-trans woman in prison really be forced to share a prison cell with a pre-op transwoman? (Or vice versa — the danger of having a penis in a women’s prison cuts both ways…) Whose needs come first and why? Transwomen are not the same as biological women. So what? That’s why they’re called transwomen. Acknowledging that transwomen are different from females does not mean they are less than. What feminists who acknowledge that difference are asking is that the oppression of transwomen not be made more important than the oppression of women-born-women and that we not be asked, yet again, to sit down and shut up. Two thirds of illiterate adults in the world are women. Ninety eight per cent of sex trafficking victims are women and girls. Every day, 800 women die from preventable causes related to pregnancy and childbirth.
1994/1995 Equal is what we are
RAMPANT HATRED
Andrea Dworkin, one of the great founding mothers of radical feminism, not only accepted transgender people (they were called transsexual people in the early ’70s), but advocated for free surgery and hormone treatments. In Woman Hating, she wrote, “… every transsexual has the right to survival on his/her own terms. That means every transsexual is entitled to a sexchange operation, and it should be provided by the community as one of its functions.” Pioneer radical feminist, Catharine MacKinnon, had this to say about transwomen: “Anybody who identifies as a woman, wants to be a woman, is going around being a woman, as far as I’m concerned, is a woman.”
THE GREEN CURTAIN Gender is irrelevant
42
BARBARA KRUGER {BOTTOM}
BARBARA KRUGER {BOTTOM}
“Sexist people accept hierarchies and social inequality, they believe that different social groups have a status that they deserve and they feel that the social class to which they belong is the best.”
Who Does She Think She Is
I embrace my transgender sisters, and I refuse to reject them. But I will not reject my so-called “trans-exclusive” sisters either. I will listen and be respectful of their point of view. I will stand with them to dismantle systemic misogyny and I will fight for women’s liberation from our seemingly eternal sub-human status. And if trans women are smart, they’ll do the same. Researchers have discovered that sexism, racism, and classism all result from the same mental processes:
BARBARA KRUGER {TOP}
F is for White Feminism
“As transgender advocate Winona LaDuke said, “We don’t want a bigger piece of the patriarchal pie. We want a new pie.”
1994/1995 Equal is what we are
41
MIND-ALTERING SUBSTANCES
Mind-Altering Substance
Male supremacy is destroying the planet. Under systems of male domination, women lose the freedom to control their reproductive lives. When women have the power to choose, they choose to have fewer children. Overpopulation puts an enormous strain on the Earth’s resources, contributing to famine, mass migration, deforestation, and climate change. Male supremacist societies are also more violent and likely to engage in warfare, which exacts a horrific (and potentially fatal) toll on the planet. No more “might makes right” or the mindless confusion of violence with strength. No more “death is glorious and birth is disgusting” or “women are meat and men must eat.” No more promoting the hideous lie that some humans are born more valuable than others.
BARBARA KRUGER {TOP}
Transphobia cannot survive the dismantling of male supremacy. Neither can racism, classism, homophobia, or environmental destruction. Male supremacy is based upon gender extremism, and violence against trans people is committed by gender extremists (not gender abolitionists) who feel seriously threatened by any transgression of the strict gender binary. The same is true of homophobia.
WILL YOU?
1994/1995 Equal is what we are
-ISMS
So you see, my trans sisters, when you assert your womanhood, what feminists really want to know is if you’re here to maintain the status quo or to change it. Because the status quo isn’t working too well for most of us. It’s hurting us. Women are still treated like shit. And unlike liberal feminists, we’re not interested in spraying the shit with perfume and calling it a flower bed. We’ve come with shovels and we want the shit gone. Will you shovel along with us? Will you march with us for reproductive freedom? Will you lobby for universal pre-k and paid parental leave? We need those things. Will you fight with us against the idea that there is such a thing as a “lady brain” and that it’s “naturally” pink and fluffy and emotional and drawn to makeup and restrictive — but sexy — clothing? Will you fight with us against women’s sexual objectification?
Do you come to womanhood offering support or just to make demands? These are not unreasonable concerns. Women matter. Whether you help women or hurt women matters. If targeting a folk music festival or suing a women’s rape shelter is more important to you than dismantling male supremacy, you can’t really blame some women for questioning how well you’ve overcome your male socialization.
“Will you take a stand against sex trafficking and the sexual exploitation of women and girls? ”
F is for White Feminism BARBARA KRUGER
1994/1995 Equal is what we are
Juliana Huxtable has said that a feminist is someone who seeks to understand the ways patriarchy has modeled the world around us, and actively, as a result of that understanding, seeks to change those structures. It centers on issues like wage gaps, reproductive freedom, fighting for the representation and empowerment of trans and gender-nonconforming people. I am as much a feminist as I am an anti-racist, and as much as I realize the structures of class and how they influence the world around me. I want to see them come forward as feminists, change their conversations, and speak out. What if a JT LeRoy situation happened, and we find out that one of the most incredible feminist books was written by a man? Would we no longer find this book as helpful as we did when we thought it was a woman writing it? I’m sure some of you are even angry at me for bringing up men this way and wondering why I am giving them more attention.… I think we have to be inclusive. I think it’s even harder but necessary.
S u b s t a n c e
I find it really sad that so many younger people are dis-identifying with feminism. There’s been a bit of a regression culturally in terms of gender, and it’s shocking to see people like Katy Perry say she’s not a feminist because she has a boyfriend, essentially. It’s nonsensical “I don’t see how any because, like woman can say she what Peachisn’t a feminist in es said, it some form. It’s saying means you she hates herself. But hate yourself men do need to take on some levan active role in fem- el. I do think inism. They need to a lot of peocall themselves fem- ple have no history of inists. There need to what femibe men-only discus- nism is so sions on feminism.” they have terrible reductive ideas that boil down to “women who hate men.” I love the way that bell hooks deals with the inclusion of male experiences in The Will to Change. I think men can be pro-feminists or allies and need to be addressing the ways they perpetuate so much of what goes on. It’s weird knowing when/ how that should play out, but I do think there’s an aspect of male introspection that feminists are in a position to provide insight to. I don’t really have any conclusions to this, as I personally am a bit exhausted dealing with trying to “explain” or “justify” feminism.
When Juliana was introduced to feminism through my high school debate coach, and I studied it throughout college (I was a Judith Butler fanatic). Music-wise, I was raised on gospel, R&B, and Southern hip-hop, and I had access to the radio and dance music at Barnes & Noble, LOL. Through R&B and hip-hop, I discovered a certain type of female strength that I identified with—I’m thinking of Mary J. Blige’s What’s the 411?. Even though the album is largely about a relationship with a man, her agency in narrating—and that celebration of what so many single black women went through—was powerful, as was her aesthetic. In high school and college I was exposed to artists who explicitly identified as feminist, and I was deeply influenced by them—so many female MCs, the riot grrrl movement, M.I.A., and (if I may fan out for a moment) Peaches were inspiring to me.
M i n d - A l t e r i n g
TERMS AND CONDITIONS
CLAIMING Agreed, Meredith—that statement is Oppression Olympics, full of false equivalencies, as well as being dumb as hell. But also, I think there’s no reason to excoriate anyone for not embracing the term “feminism” if they believe in, and fight for, its tenets. There are many reasons a person wouldn’t want to call themselves a feminist, some of which have to do with the feeling that institutional/establishment feminism has excluded them (i.e., Womanists, Xicanistas, etc.). I think if you walk the walk, it doesn’t necessarily matter how you talk the talk.
There’s this odd moment where the focus of public discussions on feminism is about twerking and Beyoncé? It’s like, the Equal Pay Act was repealed, there is a literal war on abortion access in so much of the country, trans women are being murdered at insane rates even as we become more “visible”...and the biggest focus of feminism is on pop-cultural moments that, to me, do nothing for advancing a feminist agenda. I try to incorporate feminism into my practice as a DJ by being conscious of the play between pleasure and the way that politics are disseminated in music.
So I like to play women and queer artists a lot, find female versions of songs when it’s difficult to stomach the male-written and -performed lyrics. It’s nuanced because there’s a sense of racial and global awareness that I bring. I also support female, gender-nonconforming, and POC performers when I do showcases and in my mixes.
I’m excited that Beyoncé and bigger artists are using the term “feminism,” but I find myself asking, “What are they representing/claiming?” I worry about the idea that feminism is about just doing what you want with no sense of consciousness or awareness of political realities, etc.
BARBARA KRUGER
Meredith: Yeah, that’s exactly it. You’re so goddamn smart. And not to make this about dudes, but I get waaaaay red-alert-y every time a guy refers to himself as a feminist (seriously, nine times out of 10 it’s like, nope), but I know tons of dudes who walk the walk and don’t feel the need to broadcast it.
1994/1995 Equal is what we are
“any genocide is inherently a genocide of women. Women are a key tool used against nations in war—we’re just passing the one-year anniversary of the Boko Haram kidnappings, and if, like me, you consider the capitalist and colonialist actions of the U.S. military in the Middle East to be a genocide, look at the statistics on rape as a tool of war.”
OF HISTORY There’s less value in calling out actresses for making goofy “sisterhood not feminism” statements, but there’s implicit, important value in using those statements as a jumping-off point for larger conversations about women and their role in issues of international importance. Regarding the issues as separate is indicative of a certain white, Western brand of feminism that identifies itself as being concer ned with (some of) the rights of (white, middleclass-ish, usually educated) women here in the U.S. Women outside the U.S. are women, too, and if feminism serves all women, then feminism is important to the conversation about genocide.
BARBARA KRUGER
Things are really really bad right now – bad for women, for trans folk, for artists trying to support themselves and by virtue of that pursuit are marginal – and text – taking language, the way that it currently seems so malleable but is rarely presented in a way that utilizes and plays in its flexibility, has become a way for me to create events that speak to other possibilities without losing them in ‘realistic’ or ‘pragmatic’ demands. Maybe what I write is actually terrible! but it feels necessary nonetheless. And I hope that I can do so in a way that speaks beyond the worlds of ‘poetry’ proper.
1994/1995 Equal is what we are
Coming to NY, I was thrown into l a r g e l y house, club and vogue music. I felt a need to really make music that spoke to what I felt, which often times was tied to the south. The way I dance, how certain beats make me move … It so tied to things like S w i s h a h o u s e , Amanda Perez and The Mississippi Mass Choir.
Who Does She Think She Is
I think the south is a magical place. My family is largely from Alabama and I was raised in TX so I have really strong sense of ethnic ties to southern culture and southern black culture, southern Baptist culture. I think it provides in a lot of ways an ethical framework but musically it really gives me a set of rhythms, harmonies, and ideas of what dance music can do that really has influenced how I read and mix music.
I really like what Eileen Myles recently said of poetry: “It’s like the un-Trump: The poet is the charismatic loser. You’re the fool in Shakespeare; you’re the loose cannon. As things get worse, poetry gets better, because it becomes more necessary.” Poetry, even more than art making, has been something that I’ve always felt was necessary, but after college felt increasingly distant, inaccessible, irrelevant. I’ve come back to the text, and poetic text as an essential part of my work because it feels necessary. It asks necessarily unanswerable questions, creates linguistic catastrophes and does so in a way that can be particularly illuminating of the conditions we live under.
BARBARA KRUGER
POETRY
“Things are really really bad right now – bad for women, for trans folk, for artists trying to support themselves and by virtue of that pursuit are marginal – and text – taking language, the way that it currently seems so malleable but is rarely presented in a way that utilizes and plays in its flexibility.”
I sort of came into the role of ‘poet’ unintentionally and a bit apprehensively. I studied poetry in the more traditional literary sense – anything from romantic poetry to the l-a-n-g-u-a-g-e poets, but that was something that I approached as an academic, and although it affected how I thought about poetry, it didn’t speak to me in terms of inspiration or grounding for my own practice. My writing, like the rest of my work is ambiguous because the way that I live and create is ambiguous. The career tracks of ‘poet’ or ‘artist’ don’t really make sense to someone like me who creates from and in conversation with the fringes of productive society. I think that poetry is seen as irrelevant or esoteric and so many people who are in fact writing something approximating poetry would never understand their work in that context. I guess what I do exists somewhere in between and is a reflection of the polymath nature of artistic production generally. Most of my peers do many things at once. Partially maybe out of economic necessity but also because that is the age that we live in – it’s a reflection of the excess of how-to knowledge regarding production, technique, etc.
CONSUMED
THEREFORE I AM
Who Does She Think She Is
BARBARA KRUGER
ADVERTISEMENT for “I’d rather be a REBEL than a SLAVE” ADVERTISEMENT for “Are You Beach Body Ready”
THE GREEN CURTAIN
CONSUMERS This changing terrain of feminism are exhibited in many third wave feminists’ embrace of consumerism as both a choice and a source of women’s empowerment. This is a fundamental problem for feminism, as the cultural logic of capitalism, is the ideological and practical means to reproducing hegemonic domination of the exploitative and oppressive system global capitalism.
THEREFORE I AM
ONLY CONSUME We wonder about such consequences precisely because the consumer lifestyle, as the cultural logic of capitalism, is a fundamentally un-feminist thing. The epistemological foundation of feminism and feminist identity historically has been the eradication of inequalities. Thus, feminism is diametrically opposed to consumer practices which support the dominance of global capitalism: a system which thrives on the exploitation of labor, theft of resources, and facilitates vast accumulation of wealth among a tiny percentage of global elite, while simultaneously impoverishing the majority of the world’s population. Of the empowerment themed ads, said “There has been enormous trade support, and, from the consumer research we’ve done, there is good evidence that we have created a concept that resonates deeply with consumers”
CONSUMED
1994/1995 Equal is what we are
BARBARA KRUGER {BOTTOM} BARBARA KRUGER {TOP}
Gender is irrelevant
1994/1995 Equal is what we are
BARBARA KRUGER {BOTTOM}
Gender is irrelevant
CONSUMED
“Women: Saviors of the world economy? “Women of the world, raise your right hand!”
BARBARA KRUGER {MIDDLE}
Economical reflections heightened attention to both the earning power and spending power of today’s women. Economists, product designers, and marketers are turning to women as the consumers who can perpetuate capitalist growth in this post-economic crisis moment. The FemmeDen, a group of women researchers who focus on the gendered implications of product design, write in one of their online publications, “Why is gender important? Women’s continuing evolution combined with their increasing buying power has created an explosive business opportunity in the consumer products industry.” They then point out that women in the U.S., though once “powerless,” are now “powerful,” in that they buy or influence eighty percent of consumer decisions.
Who Does She Think She Is
ONCE POWERLESS, NOW POWERFUL
BARBARA KRUGER {TOP}
51 52
Further,since consuming is a singular act of identity formation and expression, we question whether women’s empowerment through consumption at the individual level undermines the possibility of gendered social change at the collective level. Intersection of discourses of women’s independence with discourses and practices of consumption, with an eye for contemporary attitudes toward and definitions of feminism.
THE GREEN CURTAIN 54
Touting the recent advancements of women in education and the work force is not sufficient – until sexist capitalism is no longer consumed and supported by financially successful women, it will continue to construct and reinforce a commodity culture which relies upon the subordination of the class of women. Which allows few choices for women outside of the household. It is difficult to tell what products capitalism will develop next to perpetuate its constructed myth of gender equality. What is certain is that, as long as capitalism exists as a major institution of the patriarchy, it will work tirelessly not only for class stratification, but also gender stratification – these are the processes through which the system survives.
BARBARA KRUGER {BOTTOM}
Gender is irrelevant Who Does She Think She Is
BARBARA KRUGER {TOP}
These dominant consumerist discourses support the theory of social constructionism. Women’s sexuality is not fixed – it is a site of struggle – but capitalism works as a gendered institution to perpetuate the myth that a certain, hyper-sexualized type of woman is the paradigm to which all other women should aspire. Women are so conditioned “to think that [their] behaviors are individual (a degree is an ‘investment,’ starting a family is a ‘personal choice’), that [they] miss the collective and historical dimensions of [their] current situation.” Capitalism works only when certain workers are subordinated to other owners. Applying an intersectional analysis, Evans et al. realize that gender discrimination is evident in capitalism, but so is racism and classism.
CONSUMED
BARBARA KRUGER {BOTTOM}
53
1994/1995 Equal is what we are
CONSUMED
THEREFORE I AM
BARBARA KRUGER {TOP}
Consumerism for modern women is centered not only around the myth of liberation, but also is deeply intertwined with the sexualization of female consumers. McRobbie discusses the myth in great detail, but the discourse can be summarized as follows: “to secure a post-feminist gender settlement, [women must sign] a new sexual contract.” Supposed liberation of women comes in the form of sexualized products [while] wrapped in discourses of individualism, consumerism, and empowerment. However, these specific purchases are merely the “choices” which capitalism as a gendered institution designs for women to keep them slightly subordinated, while female consumers believe these purchases are either signs of achieving equality or means of advancing towards it.
SEXUAL REVOLUTION
1994/1995 Equal is what we are
SECURITY IN POST-FEMINISM
“the attribution of apparently post-feminist freedoms to women most manifest within the cultural realm […] becomes, in fact, the occasion for the undoing of feminism.”
Capitalist owners subordinate lower classes through their monetary prowess and alienate workers from each other through manufactured compulsions towards competition amongst themselves. It is also pertinent to recognize the power of the patriarchy in shaping how capitalism works to not only subordinate women but also to alienate them from each other and their collective voice. Since the 1960s and the “sexual revolution,” companies have had to work harder to convince “liberated” and working women that their products are still necessary to women’s advancement and happiness. The cultural practices of buying products are further purported to be individual choices, but they actually align with a very specific narrative of capitalist society. In this way, capitalist corporations have created a subtle discourse within society that there is no longer any place for feminism – that women can simply work to buy themselves freedom. This is particularly dangerous because it also supports the narrative that critical thinking about one’s condition is no longer necessary. Those who feel that they must work just to consume these products of subordination are experiencing patriarchal capitalism on multiple levels – by purchasing sexualized products, lower-class women are experiencing a false sense of empowerment, but because they are working just to consume, they are essentially becoming the aforementioned Marxist commodities. Post-feminist consumerism exists in a manner which creates an entire commodity culture (Jameson 1991). In this way, “culture” precludes any possibility for true gender equality – it is so saturated with the importance of capital that individual attributes are intentionally ignored. The myth of individualism and liberation intertwined with the consumption of products reinforces the power of capitalism as a gendered institution – designed by men it is no wonder that capitalism works tirelessly to continually appease women with fun products so they will not truly question the structure of the economy which continually pays them less for equal work. The recent trends of young girls with Playboy icons on their school supplies, middle-aged women taking pole-dancing aerobics classes, vajazzling, the compulsion to get Brazilian bikini waxes – all of these appear to be means of self-liberation, and the realization of the goals of second-wave feminism. These sexualized products used by women “employ the signifiers of patriarchal and objectifying practices to produce the signified meaning of liberation, assertiveness, and power.”
ITS THE CULTURE OF OUR CULTURE ‘Post feminism’ has become one of the most fundamental, yet contested notions in the lexicon of feminist media studies and cultural studies because of its different interpretations among scholars. In literature, three dominant but diverging visions on the concept are visible: Firstly, post feminism is seen as a ‘political position’ in the light of the feminist confrontation with difference, or secondly, as a historical shift within feminism or finally, as a backlash against feminism where a celebration of neoconservative, traditional values becomes prominent. Post feminism has no fixed meaning; it is a contradictory, pluralistic discourse that is mainly located in the academic context of television and cultural studies, in the media context of popular culture and within consumer culture.
CONSUMED
BARBARA KRUGER
1994/1995 Equal is what we are
“The particular commodity, with whose bodily form [women] the equivalent form [the product] is thus socially identified, now becomes the money commodity, or serves as money.”
Gender is irrelevant
BARBARA KRUGER
THEREFORE I AM
BARBARA KRUGER
1994/1995 Equal is what we are
FIXED PARADIGMS Situating post feminism within the world of academic paradigms, it can be located on the crossroads between post modernism, post structuralism and post colonialism. The link is obvious since all paradigms are concerned with breaking through binary thinking. They question authoritarian paradigms and fixed, universal categories such as ‘gender’ or ‘heteronormativity’. They also reconceptualise identity as a concept by rejecting essentialist notions of it, or by deconstructing them. In addition, ‘difference’ becomes a central notion. As already briefly mentioned, post feminism is rooted within neo-liberal society and consumer culture. In recent years, a number of writers have explored neo-liberalism and have shown that it has shifted from being a political or economic rationality to a mode of governmentality that operates across a range of social spheres.
BARBARA KRUGER
1994/1995 Equal is what we are
‘Flexibility’ has been stressed as the keystone of the current neo-liberal agenda, embodied in the fluid movements and restructuring of labour, capital, and information and, at the individual level, in a flexible competence for creative self-invention and self-mastery. Post feminism can be situated within, and is closely related to, neo-liberal ideologies and shares the same late-capitalist values. It is not simply a response to feminism but also a sensibility partly constituted through the pervasiveness of neo-liberal thoughts. Gill positions the powerful resonance or ‘synergy’ between post feminism and neo-liberalism at three levels. First, both appear to be structured by the current increase of individualism that has invaded major parts of the social or the political, and that has pushed any idea of the individual as subject to pressures, constraints or influence outside themselves, to the margins. Second, the entrepreneurial, independent, calculating, self-governing subjects of neo-liberalism bear a strong resemblance to the dynamic, freely choosing, self-reinventing subjects of post feminism.
“post feminism is not against feminism, it’s about feminism today.” Post feminism is thus embedded within a neo-liberal context and located in post modern popular culture. Moreover, it is mainly discussed in the light of its ‘political’ potential in terms of agency, resistance and counter hegemony within feminist theory and praxis. In this context Genz concludes that post feminism is a politically impure practice, which is at odds with other, particularly feminist, strategies of resistance because of its paradoxical engagements in consumer society as well as in theorist debates on anti-essentialism and difference. This questions the idea that post feminism is, besides a political practice, also a possible site of ‘critical’ resistance. Can post feminism offer a critique? And more specifically, as the question of ‘the critical potential’ is originally situated within Marxist research traditions and cultural studies, is this question also of value within late-capitalist, neo-liberal twenty-first century discourses? And if so, what is the object of critique and how is this articulated within popular culture and in particular popular television discourses? Before trying to answer previous questions, I want to raise the question whether ‘the political’ and ‘the critical’ should not be interpreted as interrelated concepts? I think that the so-called ‘political potential’ of a discourse or paradigm (within or outside popular culture) cannot be observed separately from its ‘critical potential’ and vice versa. When something is considered having political potential, for example the ‘political’ demand for media-friendly representations of minority groups, does this not always imply a critique, for instance on the fact that minorities are excluded from the screen? In the light of this short essay, I will only touch upon certain critical aspects of post feminist discourses acknowledging that more (and different kinds of) critical potential can be discovered. First, I will take a closer look at post feminism as a critique on second wave feminism. Second, I will elaborate on its paradoxical critique on neo-liberal society, keeping in mind the interrelatedness between political and critical potentials.
POST FEMINISM ‘Post feminism’ has become one of the most fundamental, yet contested notions in the lexicon of feminist media studies and cultural studies because of its different interpretations among scholars (for an overview see Genz, 2006; Lotz, 2001; Tasker & Negra, 2005). In literature, three dominant but diverging visions on the concept are visible:
PUBLIC DISCOURSE It needs to be situated in the contemporary context of contemporary neo-liberal, late-capitalist society characterized by consumer culture, individualism, postmodernism and a decreased interest in institutional politics and activism. In this context, the gender struggle remains an actual issue in public and private lives (e.g. the demand for equal pay or the glass ceiling). Post feminism is a new form of empowerment and independence, individual choice, (sexual) pleasure, consumer culture, fashion, hybridism, humour, and the renewed focus on the female body can be considered fundamental for this contemporary feminism. It is a new, critical way of understanding the changed relations between feminism, popular culture and femininity. Media discourses play a crucial role in the representation, evolution and development of this new feminism. In recent academic literature, ‘post feminist media texts’ are often studied and referred to examples such as ‘Sex and the City’, ‘Bridget Jones etc.
Firstly, post feminism is seen as a ‘political position’ in the light of the feminist confrontation with difference, or secondly, as a historical shift within feminism or finally, as a backlash against feminism where a celebration of neoconservative, traditional values becomes prominent. Post feminism has no fixed meaning; it is a contradictory, pluralistic discourse that is mainly located in the academic context of television and cultural studies, in the media context of popular culture and within consumer culture.
BARBARA KRUGER
Gender is irrelevant Who Does She Think She Is
1994/1995 Equal is what we are
BARBARA KRUGER {BOTTOM} BARBARA KRUGER {TOP}
Third, the synergy is even more significant in popular cultural discourses where women are called upon to exercise to self-management and self-discipline, to a much greater extent than men. This call for self-management is articulated in post feminist popular cultural texts such as in magazines like articles on dieting, ‘Brazilian waxing’ and ‘chicklits’ such as ‘The Devil Wears Prada’, ‘Bridget Jones’ Diary’.
‘Post feminism’ has become one of the most fundamental, yet contested notions in the lexicon of feminist media studies and cultural studies because of its different interpretations among scholars (for an overview see Genz, 2006; Lotz, 2001; Tasker & Negra, 2005). In literature, three dominant but diverging visions on the concept are visible: Firstly, post feminism is seen as a ‘political position’ in the light of the feminist confrontation with difference, or secondly, as a historical shift within feminism or finally, as a backlash against feminism where a celebration of neoconservative, traditional values becomes prominent. Post feminism has no fixed meaning; it is a contradictory, pluralistic discourse that is mainly located in the academic context of television and cultural studies, in the media context of popular culture and within consumer culture.
Black Eyed Witch
PROGRESS MANIFESTO
SITDOWN WITH SHIRIN NESHAT
Who Does She Think She Is
BARBARA KRUGER
Iranian born artist, talks of exile, Western Feminist culture, and Iranian culture and her art now.
THE GREEN CURTAIN
CONFRONTING GENDER SEGREGATION Some legitimacy for this conception of gender relations has been supplied by the doubts feminist scholars like Aysha Hidayatullah have expressed for the task of finding theological support for gender equality within Islamic theological texts. Power is hence being reconstructed and reconstituted. The artifice of gender segregation and perhaps to the consequent necessity of intelligibility between the spheres of male and female, the black-and-white photograph Untitled, 1997, points to its fictions. While theoretical constructs of gender segregation may pretend that separate spheres invalidate the need for submission of woman to man, the rules mandate that a lone woman cannot appear in public without a male guardian.
Black-Eyed Witch
PROGRESS MANIFESTO
63
64
“You shall leave everything you most dearly loved: / This is the first one of the arrows which / The bow of exile is prepared to shoot.”
1994/1995 Equal is what we are
BARBARA KRUGER {BOTTOM} BARBARA KRUGER {TOP}
Gender is irrelevant
Torn from Iran, Neshat in her own words lives a nomadic life; her yearning for Iran — that what she loved most has been taken from her — has led to ceaseless searching for what seems most like Iran or represents some closeness in cast or context, in smell or scenery. Some of Neshat’s video installations and pictures are filmed in Morocco; a new project is set in Egypt. These Iran-like places, sometimes geographically proximate at other times culturally similar, are not and will never be Iran, and yet Iran remains the fulcrum around which all of Neshat’s artistic expression is centered.
1994/1995 Equal is what we are
BARBARA KRUGER {BOTTOM}
Who Does She Think She Is
PROGRESS MANIFESTO
The boy may be small, exposed, and seemingly powerless, but he is still more powerful than the woman who cannot exist publicly without him. In Dante’s inferno, the poet’s coming exile is foretold with the following words: “You shall leave everything you most dearly loved: / This is the first one of the arrows which / The bow of exile is prepared to shoot.” In one of her public lectures, Neshat speaks poignantly of the weight of her banishment from that she loves most. The artist left Iran in 1974 and did not return until 10 years after the Islamic Revolution, only to find that the Iran she sought and hoped to find no longer existed. The stark contrasts and complications of the world that she did find became the impetus for her art. Her art, its critiques and questioning of the smug utopia that the Islamic Republic pretends to be, in turn have became the basis of her exclusion, her public critique of it in the West exposing her to revenge or reprisal from the regime if she chooses to return.
BARBARA KRUGER {TOP}
EXILE TO FILLING AN ARTISTIC ROLE
In fulfilling the artistic task of holding up a mirror to the society, Neshat has been banished from it. The irony of her artistic geography, however, does not end there; for in America, where her work is on view in the capital at one of the nation’s foremost museums, where its leaders discuss the future of Iran’s inclusion or exclusion and demonization or humanization, she is forever Iranian. On, May 15, 2015, the day on which Facing History: Shirin Neshat opened at the Hirshhorn Museum, The Washington Post’s critic Philip Kennicott wrote a complaint of Neshat’s show.
THE GREEN CURTAIN
“American feminism beholds the Iranian or the Pakistani or the Syrian woman artist and recognizes only the feminism of rebellion, of throwing off, of repudiation.”
Black-Eyed Witch 65 66
BARBARA KRUGER
1994/1995 Equal is what we are
Gender is irrelevant Who Does She Think She Is
PROGRESS MANIFESTO
Unfortunately, the historical focus of the show doesn’t always serve Neshat’s work well. Historical photographs and even a newsreel give viewers a sense of these epochal events, but Neshat’s work isn’t particularly documentary in its focus. At its best, it is a kind of poetic descant to history, reimagining it in a lyrical and reflective mode. The exhibition’s approach also threatens to make Neshat into a conduit, or worse, a martyr, of the tragedies of Iranian history, inviting us to indulge the superficial and aggrandizing view of the artist as someone who suffers on behalf of her people. Kennicott’s smug critique, and its discomfort with the ambiguities of Neshat’s work — its lack of ultimate prescription or resolution — reveals in sum the challenges of representing Iran, or really any Muslim country, within the American context. This myopia, which extends also to rules of inclusion and exclusion within the Western art world, has no time or energy and certainly no recognition for the feminisms of resilience, of women whose strengths are not simply encapsulated in the idea of rebellion. The dictates of the latter demand a particular narrative arc from the Muslim female artist, one in which the oppressions of faith and culture are duly and roundly denounced, the American elevation of them as the most corrosive and oppressive forces in existence consequently affirmed. In simple terms, American feminism beholds the Iranian or the Pakistani or the Syrian woman artist and recognizes only the feminism of rebellion, of throwing off, of repudiation.
BARBARA KRUGER {BOTTOM}
HELPLESS [NON]AMERICANS
BARBARA KRUGER {TOP}
PROGRESS MANIFESTO
EVERY-ONE NEEDS SAVING
If the theistic authoritarianism of Iran’s regime doggedly insists that the segregated world it creates, where dissent is a crime and unfettered femininity a burden, then the United States is just as obstinate in its hunger for Iran to continue to play the enemy, its women eagerly awaiting prescriptions for liberation from their Western sisters, their struggles centered entirely on throwing off veils. The power of resilience, captured so evocatively in Neshat’s exhibition, forces the viewer to think beyond this simple recipe and ponder the interconnected fates of the male and female that makes simple oppositions only trite obfuscations. A feminist history of Iran, such as the one Neshat presents, threatens all of its audiences: the exclusionary Iranian regime, whose political project depends on affirming the moral perfection of a gender segregated society and the Americans who cannot bear to veer from the prescription of demonizing Iranian men so that they may pretend to rescue Iranian women.
In its overt rejection of this demand, Neshat’s work does the crucial task that feminisms of “other” places desperately need. Not all strength or all complexity is signified by the abandonment of one or another structure. More crucially, leaving out the contributions of feminisms of resilience, of the dead activist women of the Green Revolution who did not manage to overthrow but tried nevertheless, of the covered women, the supplicating women whose adorned hands represent inner worlds of lyricism and poetry, of a resilience that is not trite or showy, that provokes some discomfort in the Western viewer who expects one thing and gets another. It is this restriction of the feminist to that which confirms, either via the artist’s stance or the subject’s treatment, an exclusive elevation of the feminism of rebellion and a devaluation of suffering (martyrdom) that leaves out entire histories, denies Iranian women a legacy of their own. Facing History does not give American audiences yet another chance to pity Iran’s women in the manner to which they are so accustomed or to ignore their own government’s complicity in Iran’s contemporary political reality. What the exhibition accomplishes is far more complex: a feminist reclamation of history that tells Iran’s story via the female gaze, but refuses to distill it into easy binaries of terrible oppressive Islamic Iran and the lovely liberated and perfect United States. If the theistic authoritarianism of Iran’s regime doggedly insists that the segregated world it creates, where dissent is a crime and unfettered femininity a burden, then the United States is just as obstinate in its hunger for Iran to continue to play the enemy, its women eagerly awaiting prescriptions for liberation from their Western sisters, their struggles centered entirely on throwing off veils.
“Americans who cannot bear to veer from the prescription of demonizing Iranian men so that they may pretend to rescue Iranian women.”
PROGRESS MANIFESTO Black-Eyed Witch
IRANIAN CONTEXT Raphael: A s
an engaged artist do you feel that contemporary art sometimes suffers from lack of content or subject matter?
Shirin:
Yes absolutely, I have two thoughts on that. I don’t insist on contemporary artists being politically active but they ought to be politically conscious. And if I could be that blunt, I think the art market has been the biggest factor in determining art movements for the past decade or so; and the money involved has seduced galleries, collectors and artists to becoming super rich and very, very distanced from sociopolitical issues; art has basically become a commodity and about entertainment. Being Iranian came as a mixed blessing of course, because Iranian artists paid a great price, having to live in exile and being censored. You really have to suffer for what you do, but I have to say that I have not become just pure commodity and my work has been effective and has been heard by non-art people from my community and that gives me a lot of pride. So I do criticize the art world and the artist today and think that this was not the case before. That’s why I’m so proud to be apart of the Family of the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation because as a Western artist he definitely has a legacy in being politically conscious and an advocate for helping with different causes from education, to AIDS, to government, to asking for democracy. And it doesn’t mean that you don’t make highly aesthetic works but it still means that you should be engaged. I’m not saying that people shouldn’t be painting landscapes and things that aren’t completely outside of political reality but I think it’s important to be engaged.
SHIRIN NESHAT. A CONVERSATION. Raphael:
You directed a short for the 2013 Viennale with Natalie Portman and cinematographer Darius Khondji – both world class artists and you are proceeding with research on a film about Umm Kulthum, the legendary Egyptian female singer (in yet another Islamic country) with more or less the same issues. Does working on these projects, because they are not related to Iran, feel different than working on say, Turbulent, or Women Without Men – your award-winning feature?
Shirin:
I think it’s very similar because in Women Without Men the main idea is the relationship between art and politics, the lives of certain women as Iran was battling a coup. Have you seen the movie?
Raphael:
Yes, I have.
“Before the revolution, Iranian film followed similar standards as in any com-
Shirin:
After the revolution, the government imposed severe codes; filmmakers had to BARBARA KRUGER
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mercial Western film, much of it was filled with superficiality, violence and sex.
BARBARA KRUGER
With Umm Kulthum I feel that by making this film we’ll be navigating and taking the audience on that same journey. Once we’re with Umm Kulthum and her music, with art and mysticism, brought to the level of primal responses, we find ourselves elevated beyond time, politics or even history. We’ll use the music, the camera and everything else we have to take the audience to that state of ecstasy. Because she happened to live in Egypt at such a pivotal time in politics, we’ll take the audience through the age of colonialism, of social revolution, of the war with Israel and through defeat and economic disaster. We’ll show her at the center of all that as well as an artist. For me, this is potentially a similar concept – it’s about the underlying connections between individuals, the community, art and politics.
reformulate their ideas, and as a result a new form of cinema was born that thrived in the midst of all the governmental censorship. These films have been successful for their humanistic, simple and universal approach.”
SHIRIN NESHAT. A CONVERSATION. Raphael:
Shirin, your upbringing in pre-revolutionary Iran straddled both the religious and the secular. You attended Catholic schools, your grandmother was a practicing Muslim but your father’s thinking was progressive. Did you study the Koran at home or in school in any formal manner?
Raphael:
Well just to clarify, it’s not just my grandmother; my whole family were Muslims. I grew up in a strictly Muslim family and even my mother and father were Muslim. It’s just they were not as strict about practicing it, and in Iran in my time, and I’m sure today, yes we studied the Koran at school. We don’t speak Arabic, and the Koran is in Arabic language, but we prayed and we went to the mosque and we studied the Koran in school.
Shirin:
No, I went to Catholic school for only two years. I was mainly in public school in my city. Of course in Catholic school they wouldn’t be teaching the Koran. That was a boarding school. I went for a short time in the city of Tehran, but the rest of my education was in the city where I was born, which was a very religious city. I think it’s the third most religious city in Iran.
Is it really?
Shirin: BARBARA KRUGER
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Raphael: Who Does She Think She Is
modern and traditional, Western and Middle Eastern, to neither of which she can fully surrender.”
Was t h a t part of the curriculum in Catholic school?
BARBARA KRUGER
“Soliloquy, portrays a woman torn between two forms of life,
Shirin:
Yes, it is very very religious, and there we studied Arabic and also the Koran, from what I remember, yes. We were all practicing Muslims, so it wasn’t just my grandma or anything.
SHIRIN NESHAT. A CONVERSATION.
“The purity of Irania culture, and traditions is political, and artistic.”
BARBARA KRUGER
Gender is irrelevant
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BARBARA KRUGER {BOTTOM}
Who Does She Think She Is
Yo u were not Raphael: Is there born into the are a part of US culture, obviyou that wishously and the country es for a place that in which you grew up is you actually belong no longer there. How and feel totally at does that reality home in? Yeah. This Shirin: Shirin:No, to be very honest. I’ve lived lonplay out for you? is the story of the ger in this country now than I have anywhere new generation of artists else. My independence and way of life is that we are truly nomads. In my non-Iranian in many ways. Inasmuch as I’m case I don’t even remember living in emotionally Iranian and I’m surrounded by a a place in which I look like everyone community that’s Iranian I don’t think any of else and speak the same language. I’ve us have the ability to go back to that idea of always been an outcast. It’s just a way of purity of just remaining in one place. I go to life. I am a storyteller and I find my way. Egypt now and I feel so at home. I go to EuI go to Mexico, Egypt, Morocco and Turrope and I don’t feel quite as home but I can key and I make work that makes one adjust to it. I can’t go someplace where they believe that I’m in Iran, and this reality tell me how to be and how to live, that there’s of never being in a place that’s your just one way of being. I just don’t know. I’d place of origin, has been a way love to visit Iran but I just don’t know if I could of life. ever go there to live permanently.
BARBARA KRUGER {TOP}
Raphael:
FEMINISM?
LAST CALL, HUNTY
The Influence of Feminism in Art
Who Does She Think She Is
BARBARA KRUGER
Despite the on-going discrimination against women in the art world, today there are prominent artists who just happen to be women.
THE GREEN CURTAIN BARBARA KRUGER {BOTTOM}
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A renewed and theoretically developed as well as activist feminist consciousness initially mandated the historical recovery of the contribution of women as artists to art’s international histories to counter the effective erasure of the history of women as artists by the modern discipline of art history. This has also led to a rediscovery of the contributions of women as art historians to the discipline itself. Gender analysis raises the repressed question of gender (and sexuality) in relation both to creativity itself and to the writing of art’s necessarily pluralized histories. Gender refers to the asymmetrical hierarchy between those distinguished both sociologically and symbolically on the basis of perceived, but not determining, differences. Although projected as natural difference between given sexes, the active and productive processes of social and ideological differentiation produces as its effects gendered difference that is claimed, ideologically, as “natural.” As an axis of power relations, gender can be shown to shape social existence of men and women and determine artistic representations. Gender is thus also understood as a symbolic dimension shaping hierarchical oppositions in representation in texts, images, buildings, and discourses about art. It is constantly being produced by the work performed by art and writing about art. Feminist analysis critiques these technologies of gender while itself also being one, albeit critically seeking transformation of social and symbolic gender. The analysis of gender ideologies in the writing of art history and in art itself, therefore, extend to art produced by all artists, irrespective of the gendered identity of the artist. Women, having been excluded by the gendering discourses of modern art history, have had to be recovered from an oblivion those discourses created while the idea of women as artist has to be reestablished in the face of a an ideology that places anything feminine in a secondary position. Women are not, however, a homogeneous category defined by gender alone
Who Does She Think She Is
WE’RE ALL DRAG QUEENS
Following a worldwide feminist movement in the later 20th century, women became a renewed topic for art and art history, giving rise to gender analysis of both artistic production and art historical discourse. Gender is to be understood as a system of power, named initially patriarchal and also theorized as a phallocentric symbolic order.
LAST CALL, HUNTY
FEMINIST REVEALS
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LAST CALL, HUNTY
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FEMINISM?
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“Feminism changed the definition of art, what it could do, what it could be;”
Women are agonistically differentiated by class, ethnicity, culture, religion, geopolitical location, sexuality, and ability. Gender analysis includes the interplay of several axes of differentiation and their symbolic representations without any a priori assumptions about how each artwork/artist might negotiate and rework dominant discourses of gender and other social inflections. The postcolonial critique of Western hegemony and a search for non-Western-centered models of inclusiveness that respect diversity without creating normative relativism are driving the tendency of the research into gender in and art history toward an as yet unrealized inclusiveness regarding gender and difference in general rather than the creation of separate subcategories on the basis of the gender or other qualifying characteristics of the artist. The objectives of critical art historical practices focusing on gender and related axes of power are to ensure consistent and rigorous research into all artists, irrespective of gender
“focusing on women as artists in order to correct a skewed and gender-selective archive has been necessary”
THE GREEN CURTAIN
BACKLASH Without a foundational understanding of the social meaning and symbolic operation of gender, both the historical process of artistic creation and the historical representation of that history will not be grasped. Women working on art history (domain and discipline) draw on germane theoretical interventions in historical research while also using sociological studies of institutions to call for a paradigm shift in art history itself. Scott 1986 offers a key argument for gender analysis in the historical disciplines, examining different theoretical paradigms that have been introduced to approach gender as an axis in history.
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Gender is irrelevant
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BARBARA KRUGER {BOTTOM}
Who Does She Think She Is
Honoring Gabhart and Broun 1972’s neologism “Old Mistresses” (cited under Initiating Exhibitions: Women Artists of the Western Tradition) to point out how language already disqualifies women from recognition as “masters.” Parker and Pollock 2013 (written in 1978 and originally published 1981) identifies the discursive habits of the discipline of art history as structurally gendered and gendering. The authors, however, also stress the ways that women artists actively negotiated their own differential situations to produce distinctive interventions in their own cultural context and to show how they negotiated the image of woman and of the artist in different contexts. Broude and Garrard 1982 lays out the case for feminist studies across all periods of art to reveal the central role of gender in historical cultures and visual practices while recognizing the distorting effects of an unacknowledged masculinist and heteronormative bias in art historical interpretation. The authors demonstrate the overall shifts in art historical method that result from awareness of gender in culture. De Lauretis 1987 uses a Foucaultian model to understand gender as an effect produced in its representations, self-representations, and feminist deconstructions, challenging a model that, privileging man/woman difference, makes lesbian subjectivities invisible.
Battersby 1989 traces gender across philosophical aesthetics to reveal its foundational and continuing gender thinking. Broude and Garrard 1992 tracks the developing range of theories of gender in relation to art historical analysis registering the impact of postmodernist concepts of authorship and subjectivity while balancing such trends with an equal acknowledgement of the agency of women in contesting historically variable organizations and representations of gender relations. An extended, philosophically based analysis of the gendering of the concept of genius from the ancients of the West to Simone de Beauvoir, revealing the identification of genius with the masculine body and conventionalized masculine attributes defined in opposition to the equally constructed and rhetorical figure of the feminine. Such an analysis is necessary in order to create the ground for any reconsideration of the contribution of women to art. Introducing their first major collection of substantive works of feminist art historical scholarship, Broude and Garrard position feminism’s impact on art history as a major reconceptualization of previous history[...]
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Kelly-Gadol 1977 is a critical reading of the major cultural shifts from late medieval culture in which Troubadour culture allowed women agency in relation to love by means of appropriating feudal relations to the Renaissance in which new concepts of the decorative courtier closed out such opportunities for women. In art history, Nochlin 1973 is the foundational text of a specifically feminist challenge to art history. Nochlin calls for a radical, paradigm shift in art history (discipline). Raising the “woman question” becomes a lever to challenge the exclusion of all social and institutional factors in the study of art’s histories. The text’s title is, however, representative of its own moment in 1971 when women art historians had to confront a discipline that presented art history (domain) almost entirely without women, having established a canon solely composed of great masters.
FEMINISM?
BARBARA KRUGER {TOP}
LAST CALL, HUNTY
STEPPING STONE
Art historiography as patriarchal, necessitating radical revisions to the distortions created by sexual bias in the creation and interpretation of art and demanding a new definition of the cultural and social uses of art. Representing the theoretical and methodological diversity of feminist studies in art history from its second decade, Broude and Garrard both identify the effects of “postmodernist” theories of authorship, the gaze and the social construction of gender in art history, while contesting the tendency to polarize feminist scholarship between modern and postmodern, essentialist and constructivist, traditionalist and theoretical. They advocate incremental change in the discipline and argue for a continuing acknowledgement of the importance of studies of women’s authorship in art.
WORK IT, HUNTY Challenging predominantly masculine narratives of gender that effectively install the heterosexual contract, which may be reproduced in feminist texts, because of the fact that gender is always being produced in the play between representation and self-representation. Methods for countering the exclusion of nonheteronormative subjectivities by suggesting that otherness and difference is always already present in the “spaces off” of dominant discourses. Histories attentive to gender do not necessarily coincide with those that are gender-blind.
“to expand the paradigm of art historical research in general to ensure that the social, economic, and symbolic functions of gender, sexual, and other social and psycho-symbolic differences are consistently considered as part of the normal procedures of art historical analysis.“
FEMINISM IN
ART
Therefore, abstract art (painting) was a universal language that reflected the aspirations of humanity and figurative painting could only be specific. Logically, it followed that women in their inherent limitations were incapable of being the fulcrum for human beings. Although Postmodernism did not stress race or gender, post-colonialism critiqued both Western intellectualism and Postmodernism itself for assuming that the white male was the central actor in the metanarrative.
In refuting the universal, Feminist art moved away from Modernism and located itself in Postmodernism. There could be no meta-narrative for women. Feminist art used all of the “forbidders” in art to present the personal and the particular and the local.
“Feminism changed the definition of art, what it could do, what it could be;”
BARBARA KRUGER
To examine the impact of feminist art upon mainstream art is to examine the long list of what was excluded or forbidden in the art world. For those outside this world, artists appear to be daring avant-garde experimenters, but nothing could be further from the truth. In the 1970s, the art world in New York was ruled by rules and old hierarchies were still powerful. Among the “thou shalt nots” were symbolism, narrative, figuration, representation, all of which Clement Greenberg considered to be “literary effects.” The art world followed the assumption that the male was the universal and the female was the particular. When the male artist spoke, he spoke for the world; when the female artist spoke, her language was personal.
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FEMINISM?
LAST CALL, HUNTY
THE IMACT OF
SYMBOLIC FEMININE Feminist art was symbolic: Judy Chicago’s flower and her butterfly are symbolic of the “feminine” whether anatomical or rhetorical. Feminist art was narrative: performances told stories of female servitude or suffering, such as Faith Wilding’s Waiting. Womanhouse was less an installation and more a metaphor of how the home became a trap for women and there they lived out their lives in tiny domestic dramas and endlessly repetitive acts. Because there was embedded opposition to feminism and the feminist movement, the vanguard position of those women got little attention beyond reactionary refutation. From a distance of forty years, it is difficult to understand why feminism was not seen as part of Postmodernism.
THEE PIONEERS The pioneers found themselves to be historical figures in their own lifetimes, often in mid -career. Historicization of feminism had the effect of sidelining its importance while appropriating its impact.
The most obvious answer is that the art world was not aware of Postmodern theory until the 1980s and feminism was better understood within an artistic context rather than in an intellectual context. Feminism was seen as nothing more than an irritating anti-formalist gesture outside of the mainstream of art. However while the art critics rejected feminist art, artists were watching and looking and seeing something new.
The artists who benefitted from feminism were often male artists, such as Eric Fischl who was at the California Institute of the Art when Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro were teaching in the Feminist Art Program. His figurative and representational paintings were intensely personal narratives, full of symbolism. BARBARA KRUGER
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BENEFITS
BARBARA KRUGER
Feminism changed the definition of art, what it could do, what it could be; feminism widened the boundaries of art, where it could go, what it could include. Ironically, the leaders of feminism and the best works of feminist art were relegated almost at once to history as “examples of” a genre.
The new “presence” of women on the art scene alerted the art world to new voices and to the possibility that many other artists were also being excluded. However, unlike white women, women artists of color did not have the numbers or the institutional support to make the immediate impact and inroads into the art world. For example, the Cuban artist Ana Mendieta was uneasy about being among white women in the New York co-ops. Betye Saar noted that exhibitions by African-American women at the Woman’s Building in Los Angeles were not well-supported by white women. In fact women of any color were very much on their own.
When asked why African-American males did not support the cause of women in the 1970s, art historian Samalla Lewis explained that the women of the Women’s Movement (seen as white) could always return to the society of the white male.
It would not be until the late 1980s and early 1990s when the new buzz word, Multiculturalism, became fashionable that artists of color were recognized under the somewhat condescending rubric of “politically correctness” in the art world. Today, the most infamous example of art world tokenism is the 1993 Whitney Biannual.
In retrospect, it is judged to be a cynical gesture of inclusion in order to allow New York to return to the “normal” white male biases.
DESPITE IT ALL
OPPOSITION IS AN ART
1994/1995 Equal is what we are
BARBARA KRUGER {BOTTOM}
Who Does She Think She Is
followed up his article about MOMA with a survey of six other institutions in New York City, Data, Gender Studies, and found the same dismal results. Despite the inclusion of women and people of color in the intellectual world of academia—as students, teachers, and as actors in history—the art world remains frozen in the sixties, denying the majority of the artists entry into a closed system.
BARBARA KRUGER {TOP}
“…it has become bitterly clear that MoMA’s stubborn unwillingness to integrate more women into these galleries is not only a failure of the imagination and a moral BRING US ALL DOWN emergency; it amounts to apartheid.” Museums and galleries continue to discriminate against women. Saltz
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FORM THAT WILL ALWAYS
1994/1995 Equal is what we are
Indeed in 2007, New York Magazine art critic, Jeffrey Saltz, did a survey of women in the Museum of Modern Art in his article Where are all the Women? Saltz wrote that;
That said, the feminist movement may not have opened the doors of galleries or museums but it did open the minds of women to other possibilities of art making. When one examines the history of the decades following the 1970s, it becomes clear that the women who survived and became prominent as artists did so by going into fields that were either new, such as performance or installation art, or less desirable, such as photography. Artists such as Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, Cindy Sherman, Sherrie Levine, Rebecca Horn, Rachael Whiteread, Annette Messager, and Katharina Fritsch are “art stars,” and none of them does conventional or traditional art. As the dominance of painting diminished it was possible for women to renter this arena and Jenny Saville and Marlene Dumas achieved the success that painters of earlier generations longed for. The increasing importance of women artists of color in the art world owes more to the efforts of individual women, such as Faith Ringgold and Betye Saar, than to the strong support of mainstream (white) artists or dealers. More and more women artists of color asserted themselves through political movements specific to their color, such as La Raza, even though most of these movements were patriarchal, to speak to their “own” people. Judy Bacca produced and directed one of the most remarkable works of art of the late twentieth century, The Great Wall of Los Angeles (197479), at the time it was the world’s longest mural. Faith Ringgold’s trenchant criticism of white power—her bleeding flags of the 1969s—gave way to charming children’s tales of life in Harlem and to commentaries on art history from the point of view of an African-American woman. The strategies of Bacca and Ringgold represent two approaches or solutions to the “problem” of being both a woman and an artist of color in a white art world. Bacca reminded in the Chicano community of Los Angeles, dedicated to showing the history of minorities in the city. Ringgold’s art reached a plural and multicultural audience because her sharp social criticisms were filtered through irony, reflecting the turn towards “theory” in the 1980s. Twenty years later, Kara Walker was able to critique slavery through a complex use of white novels on slavery, such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Benefiting from a savvy and aware art audience, these women could rely on the viewer to understand the sub-text of oppression and inequality and the lingering legacy of historical injustices. Since the 1980s, women in American have experienced three decades of “backlash” but despite continuing opposition to their gains, some progress has been made. It is hoped that everyone will benefit from hearing the voices of the many instead of the few.
CONTRIBUTORS TO THE FACTS
PUBLICATION NOTES
GENDER JOURNALISTS: Sophie Faver Asley Arteaga FEMINISTS FRONTIERS: Royal Woodbury Retta Gaynor RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT: Hsiu Hartl Joni Isabelle
GREEN CURTAIN CONTRIBUTORS: Royal Woodbury Retta Gaynor Tramika LaBranche Shana Leon Awad Cordell Hofer Cherrie Fukushima SAMSUNG TWOC DJARUM Blacks Jeannetta Ahl Onita Peabody
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Who Does She Think She Is
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