Women Artists Together Extract

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CHAPTER ONE

Consciousness-raising, Art and Feminist Infrastructure In 1972 a set of instructions for how to run a feminist consciousness-raising session was published in the W.E.B. newsletter (fig. 1.1). It began: 1. Select a topic.

2. Go around the room, each woman speaking in turn. Don’t interrupt, let each woman speak up to 15 min. & then ask questions only for clarification.

3. Don’t give advice, don’t chastise, don’t be critical.1

The newsletter was the mouthpiece of the West-East Bag (WEB) network of artists politicised by feminism. Founded in April 1971 by the New York-based feminist art critic and exhibition organiser Lucy R. Lippard and curator Marcia Tucker, the California-based artists Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro, and the artist Ellen Lanyon, who lived in Chicago, soon there were WEB branches across cities in the United States.2 These branches often functioned as the cornerstone of local feminist organising, but also had more specific roles, including as the Women’s Art Registry or slide library, which allowed artists to find reproductions of each other’s work without the mediation of established institutions or publications.3 While local branches provided a physical structure for women to connect, newsletters provided a channel of communication across distance, literalising the web structure implied in the elision in the group’s name of the otherwise mostly discrete and often competitive West Coast (i.e. Los Angeles) and East Coast (New York) scenes. These threads also reached into other territories, with contacts in Nova Scotia and London that pushed the movement over borders and across continents. W.E.B. encouraged chapters to develop autonomously, offering a ‘guide to the possibilities’ in the newsletters rather than any authoritative prescription.

In this respect they purposely mirrored the decentralised organisation of the Women’s Liberation Movement and borrowed its practical strategies of small group activism, including consciousness-raising.

The presence of consciousness-raising advice in numerous issues of W.E.B. offers a snapshot of the ideals of feminist organising in the 1970s. Women would come together in small groups, and those small groups would be connected by a decentralised structure, allowing them to communicate with each other, to gather

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1.1 Front page of the W.E.B. newsletter, June 1972.

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at conferences, to spread the word and encourage new groups to begin and widen the network. Michelle Moravec uses social movement theory to describe this impetus, applying the ‘diffusion’ model to explain the array of activities and causes that mobilised women artists in the 1970s.4 Women confronted issues in their local areas and responded to intimate concerns, using (and transforming) models from other groups as well as inventing new ones. The purpose was to encourage women to act on their own terms while sharing resources and energy; the result was a vital field of activism that is difficult to trace now and hard to codify or define.

Nonetheless, the example of W.E.B. alerts us to two recurring concerns: first, the relationship of women artists to the established art world, and second, the appetite for an infrastructure capable of supporting women artists. In this chapter I weave my own web of connections between artists, activism, organisations and artworks, highlighting moments of confrontation with and capitulation to the art world, but mostly tracing feminist infrastructure through unions, exhibitions, collectives and publications. While these activities were never formally connected in a singular movement or organisation like WEB – which lost its limited coherence by the mid1970s – I bring them together to show how artists and art workers sought each other out, implicated each other in their work, supported and critiqued one another.

This commitment to relation was important both to the art being made and to how it was exhibited, published, screened or projected. It was not merely the social context or background, the world outside the artist’s studio; it was the means by which women came to art, or were reintroduced to it, without the carapace of neutral autonomy. Artists registered feminist politics in their work, these works prompted new modes of display, for new audiences, and these new frameworks, both physical and conceptual, were the means through which feminists met. These frameworks comprise what I’m calling feminist infrastructure. If infrastructure is a term usually associated with state formations – from hospitals to schools, transport networks to judicial systems – I use it here to explicate the diverse, contingent and yet strong organisations that made up the women’s art movement.5 Feminist infrastructure was not centralised or reliable in the hegemonic sense: it mainly comprised small groups or collectives that were joined by the friendships, acquaintances and rivalries of their members, rather than part of larger networks like WEB.6 These groups could be formalised into cooperatives and collectives; they borrowed structures from unions, but personal relationships were the foundation of these political structures. It was for this reason that consciousnessraising was so fundamental.

The ‘Consciousness-Raising Rules’ published in W.E.B. explain the key characteristics of the process, from selecting a topic to defining the size of the group (no more than ten), the time each participant should talk for and, crucially, that they should not be interrupted. Consciousness-raising (c-r) was a series of free monologues that depended on others listening but did not require their response. The silence of the other women provided a basis, imbued with trust and respect, to ‘let each woman speak’. These rules applied as much to the speaker as to the listener, because each woman in the group performed both roles. After each woman had shared their thinking, group discussion and honest evaluation would begin. This subversion of the habits of everyday conversation

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created a space for politicisation. The set of rules published in W.E.B. – pitched to an audience of artists – mirror those that circulated in the literature of the broader WLM and particularly that of the Redstockings, a collective that included the artists Shulamith Firestone and Irene Peslikis. Another Redstockings member, Kathie Sarachild, wrote an influential article, ‘A Program for Feminist “Consciousness Raising”’, which offered a ‘skeleton outline’ for a programme for ‘mass consciousness-raising’.7 Sarachild begins with instructions for ‘the “bitch session” cell group’ for ‘ongoing consciousness expansion’, which includes ‘recalling and sharing our bitter experiences’, ‘going around the room’ and ‘speaking our experience – at random’.8 She suggests that each woman in the group takes on responsibility for organising, so she is compelled to learn ‘to “relate”: a) To sisters in the group, b) To other women, c) Friends and allies [and] d) Enemies’.9 Sarachild’s invocation of the ‘bitch session’ relates to her belief that historically women used ‘feelings … – hysterics, whining, bitching, etc’ as the ‘only possible weapon of self-defense and self-assertion’.10 She wrote: In our groups let’s share our feelings and pool them. Let’s let ourselves go and see where our feelings lead us. Our feelings will lead us to ideas and then to actions … our feelings about that action [will lead us] to new theory and then to new action.11

Sarachild’s ‘bitch session’ sought to empower women by making something familiar into a ‘science’ and a means for revolution.12 Yet, as the comparative

1.2 Illustration from Kathie Sarachild, ‘ConsciousnessRaising: A Radical Weapon’, in Redstockings, eds, Feminist Revolution (New York, 1975).

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illustration (fig. 1.2) accompanying her longer essay ‘Consciousness-Raising: A Radical Weapon’ suggested, the revolutionary power of the c-r group was balanced precariously between the ‘left liberalism error’ of the study group and the ‘right liberalism error of the rap group’.13 Nonetheless, artists and activists embarked on all three.

In Juliet Mitchell’s book Woman’s Estate, written after the UK-based writer and theorist undertook a tour through the USA, she describes consciousness-raising ‘as one of the most important contributions of the movement to a new politics’.14 She recognises the emotional effects of this work: The process of transforming the hidden, individual fears of women into a shared awareness of the meaning of them as social problems, the release of anger, anxiety, the struggle of proclaiming the painful and transforming it into the political – this process is consciousness-raising … In this way a personal incident that was condemned to the oblivion of privacy is examined as a manifestation of the oppressed conditions women experience: the personal is seen to be a crucial aspect of the political.15

Rather than a means to direct action through the unbridled release of feeling, Mitchell emphasises the empowerment in retrieving, making public and understanding suppressed feeling and sublimated knowledge. She contends that this is not ‘group therapy’, as detractors complained, because there is ‘no “impartial therapist” involved and all are at stake’.16 In this she notes the interconnection between the psychic and the social, personal feeling and political stricture. Crucially Mitchell, following the Redstockings, connects c-r to the Maoist revolutionary discipline ‘speaking bitterness’.17 She explains: These peasants, subdued by violent coercion and abject poverty, took a step out of thinking their fate was natural by articulating it … ‘Speaking bitterness’ is the bringing to consciousness of the virtually unconscious oppression; one person’s realisation of an injustice brings to mind injustices for the whole group … there is relevance which doesn’t insult the plight of the Chinese peasant. In having been given for so long their own sphere, their ‘other’ world, women’s oppression is hidden far from consciousness … it is the acceptance of a situation as ‘natural’, or a misery as ‘personal’ that has first to be overcome. ‘Consciousness-raising’ is speaking the unspoken: the opposite, in fact, of ‘nattering together’.18

Mitchell’s discussion of the Maoist origins of c-r emphasises the relationship between the WLM and the left in both the USA and the UK, and the connection between class and gender identity. Mitchell is careful to differentiate here between the ‘plight of the Chinese citizen’ and the women’s group, but she does compare the ‘bringing to consciousness of virtually unconscious oppression’ and the condition of ‘women’s oppression’ being ‘hidden far from consciousness’. Dwelling on bitterness and sharing bad feeling contra expectations to focus on the positive, or to sublimate, was a means to excavate what was buried. This had implications for mass movements generally.

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The probing of the monologue combined with the attentive group and their evaluation recognised these hidden experiences as patterns of discrimination and moved towards an understanding of ‘sexism’ and ‘male chauvinism’ – to use Mitchell’s terms – that enforced and shaped women’s suppression, as well as the possibility of ‘feminism’ as response.19 Consciousness-raising then was not solely a gateway to individuated politicisation, it was the means by which to produce an account of systemic oppression. The emphasis on the self as a tool to make visible social forces was a fundamental shift from the therapeutic dynamic in which the patient understands the particularity of their situation rather than the totality of social form. Through c-r the personal was given over to the political.20 As the last of the W.E.B. instructions cautions: ‘This is not a therapy, encounter, or sensitivity group situation.’21 Marshalling individual experience into theory was also the means for effective identification with the category ‘woman’.

Despite the rules there was no agreed c-r process in the women’s art movement. The W.E.B. newsletter offered a number of contradictory advice articles, some rejecting the need for participants to gather in a circle or speak in an uninterrupted monologue. The impetus was to get women talking, and so topics for discussion circulated with regularity. One text included 55 questions and prompts that ranged from ‘How do you feel about other women?’ to ‘What, if anything, do you need from a man?’ and ‘Do you think of yourself as a woman artist or an artist who happens to be a woman?’, as well as ‘Define female identity and speculate as to how it evolved, socially and personally’.22 Armed with these topics, participants might uncover a range of issues, including the discrimination against women artists in the mainstream art world, which would become a central preoccupation of the women’s art movement, but clearly it was not limited to this alone. These explorations into hidden territory impacted the subject matter, form and content of artists’ works but, in contrast with the broader movement, this was far from scientific or schematic: there was no coherent theory of women’s art.

The extent of the c-r process is difficult to trace accurately. We have little idea of the number of women who participated in groups or the history of the form within the movement, but its influence can be felt in the commitment to group work through the decade – from the collective to the network and the group exhibition – as well as in the frequent turn to narration, disclosure or autobiography, or even the ubiquity of the circle, the web, the weave and the braid as motifs in feministinfluenced art. In the rest of this chapter, I trace some iterations of this form in artists’ projects across the 1970s, a series of threads, towards a description of feminist infrastructure.

The Rip-Off File In 1972 a group of New York-based artists and art workers, members of the Ad Hoc Committee of Women Artists, gathered to issue a call for testimonies.23 The Ad Hoc Committee then included six women: Maude Boltz, Loretta Dunkelman, Joyce Kozloff, Nancy Spero, May Stevens and Joan Snyder, all artists and art workers who already had histories of political activism and group work. Their call extended

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beyond the purview of their own experiences, gathering new information and making it public. The announcement read: We are creating a dossier of reports of sexism (rip-offs, put-downs and discrimination) in the Art World and Art Schools – for publication and for exhibition. Please send examples of personal experiences (naming names or remaining anonymous as you will) … Deadline: 10 December 1972.24

The committee printed responses to the call-out in the form of a broadsheet publication the following year. The testimonies are varied in length and style. Some are signed, others anonymous, some name names as the call-out recommended, others allow protagonists to remain anonymous. Artists, students, writers and teachers are all represented, creating a diverse picture of repeated acts of discrimination, sometimes blatant, sometimes discreet. The Rip-Off File makes for challenging reading. Report after report describes sexist discrimination at work or when attempting to find employment or gallery representation. The tenor of the responses evidences explicit sexism: employers directly comment that they do not want to employ women; course leaders protest that there is not enough material to teach a course on women’s art; a gallery director laments the possibility of representing a particular woman because he deemed her too beautiful and therefore too ‘tempting’ to pay a studio visit.25 In other cases sexism is reported as an aggregate of repeated experiences: being denied too many roles or passed over for multiple exhibitions, a general sense of embattlement. Each story is frustrating, but the experience of reading the entire document transforms the individual testimonies into a dissonant chorus. The effect, as the committee described, was for women to ‘discover that the humiliations they’d endured were not unique or personal’, and in this way the dossier succeeded in functioning like a ‘large-scale “consciousness-raising” session on the topic of sexism in the Art World’.26 The group was certainly larger than the ten suggested in the W.E.B. rules.

The call for submissions was sent out to 800 women in the arts in the form of a postcard, with 44 contributions included in the resulting publication. The testimonies were laid out in columns of print like a newspaper. It is not clear how many copies were published, but the editorial claims it was to be distributed ‘to women students in the art schools, which are all staffed by predominantly male faculties’.27 In the early 1970s, this would have been the majority. The Rip-Off File may have extended the reach of c-r, but it was also far more directed than the small-group process allowed, focusing on the experience of the ‘Art World and Art Schools’ and ‘rip-offs, put-downs and discrimination’ therein. Distinct from the intimacy of the consciousness-raising circle, the publication of testimonies in the Rip-Off File took on multiple associations giving the personal story the authority of evidence, reportage and pedagogic tool. A parallel shift occurs in the title, with rip-off a colloquial term to describe a financial swindle, or cheat, lent substance by the constitution of the ‘file’. This jargon of political administration was mirrored in the name of the editorial collective, the Ad Hoc Committee of Women Artists, which borrowed the procedural name for a temporary group in a union established to tackle a specific issue. The File defined a rubric for

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feminist complaint and protest trained on the art world system that paralleled, yet redirected, art world activism in New York in previous years.28 The women’s art movement mobilised around discrimination and its countermeasure of better representation to spectacular effect, and these actions in New York, across the USA and to a lesser extent in the UK have cemented the associations between art and feminist activism.

The Ad Hoc Committee and its predecessor groups Women Artists in Revolution (WAR) and Women Students and Artists for Black Art Liberation (WSABAL) had their roots in the Art Workers’ Coalition (AWC) and the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition (BECC). These organisations emerged from anti-Vietnam War politics and the civil rights movement, mobilising artists and art workers as activists in these struggles, and raising consciousness of issues facing artists as contributors to national culture and as workers.29 The AWC was a broad and unruly meeting of people, with a number of separate affinity groups including the Guerrilla Art Action Group and Art Strike, which would define issues and devise appropriate actions to be discussed at regular open meetings. In a context in which the loudest voice was heard – or as Muriel Castanis wrote, ‘women could speak’ but ‘men were heard’ – the AWC had few prominent women members, including Lippard and Poppy Johnson. As Julia Bryan-Wilson notes, ‘Women’s rights were addressed by the AWC in an uneven, and for many women unsatisfactory, way’.30 So while AWC members identified as ‘art workers’ to instantiate, as Bryan-Wilson argues, a ‘fragile solidarity’ with other unionised workers, they repeated the inequities of the larger union movement by sidelining women members and their causes.31 The splits in the AWC began to show as early as 1969, with women’s groups becoming increasingly autonomous.

The Ad Hoc Committee was formed

by Lippard, Brenda Miller and Faith Ringgold to protest the Whitney Annual in 1971, alongside Women in the Arts (fig. 1.3); other women joined WAR and prioritised working to overcome the inhospitable atmosphere of the AWC (fig. 1.4).32 As founding member Castanis reflected: ‘I think the most important thing W.A.R.’s beginnings teaches us, is what I would call, the Feminist Phenomenon.That is, that a relatively small and powerless group of women working closely together and armed only with an unshakeable premise, can cause a revolution.The first waves of that revolution shocked the other women artists of the (largely male) Art Workers’ Coalition into action.’33

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The Ad Hoc Committee, WSABAL and WAR worked in coalition in the early years of the 1970s, but with distinct objectives. The Ad Hoc Committee and WSABAL were committed to action, particularly to eliciting a change of policy at the Whitney Museum of American Art. As then Whitney curator Marcia Tucker recalls, the administration responded negatively to their activism: ‘Elke [Solomon] and I spent months arguing with our male colleagues that equity and attention to the work of firstrate women artists was deserving, regardless of how they felt about actions taken against the museum.’34 The issue became one of exposing curators to ‘first-rate women artists’ and so the Ad Hoc Committee turned to organising the first Women’s Art Registry, so that they could ‘locate and visit the studios of women artists’ and combat the social and sexualised exclusion of women from the places, spaces and jobs that men had access to, as reported in the Rip-Off File.35 Lippard encouraged women to start their own slide registries, ‘to inform, combine and support women’s actions in the art world’.36 The early activism of these groups combined exposé, protest and response with group discussion and the creation of alternatives, demonstrating the ends to which c-r was the means. This was the work of feminist infrastructure building, which overwrote the existing, gendered structures of the art world system. To quote Castanis once again: You see, when women come together as they did in W.A.R. to communicate, a piece of the wall was broken down. More and more of that wall has been chipped away as more and more women meet to talk. It’s a relatively new experience and communications in a new language are sometimes slow and difficult. But these internal difficulties are simply reflections of the adjustments women are making in terms of trusting and respecting themselves and other women as instruments of viable change. As women continue to grow they are learning to free themselves of old patterns which are as antiquated as the male patterns from which they were derived. The movement’s goal is to make significant change both inside people’s heads as well as outside in the world.37

Castanis maps the dual goals of change – ‘both inside people’s heads as well as outside in the world’ – and stresses the need to cross the concrete, the conceptual 1.3 Women in the Arts, ‘Attention! Women Artists’, 1972. Poster.

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1.4 Women Artists in Revolution (WAR), ‘Museums Are Sexist!’, 1971. Poster.

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and the abstract. The ‘new language’ contends with built structures and physical spaces, as well as with socially inscribed patterns of behaviour.

This description bears comparison with contemporary feminist analysis of women’s situation in the broader movement, and in particular Gayle Rubin’s account of the ‘sex/gender system’ in her groundbreaking essay ‘The Traffic in Women: Notes on the “Political Economy” of Sex’, published in 1975.38 In the essay Rubin analyses women’s societal suppression using Marxism and the anthropology of Claude Lévi-Strauss with Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis to establish the tripartite economic, societal and psychological aspects of gendered and sexual discrimination. Rubin argues that ‘[s]ex/gender systems are not ahistorical emanations of the human mind, they are products of historical human activity’ and proceeds to describe how gendered and sexual relations are structured by the intersections of profit, kinship and sexual object choice.39 ‘Kinship systems’, she writes: require a division of the sexes. The Oedipal phase divides the sexes. … Compulsory heterosexuality is the product of kinship. The Oedipal phase constitutes heterosexual desire. Kinship rests on a radical difference between the rights of men and women. The Oedipal complex confers male rights upon the boy and forces the girl to accommodate herself to her lesser rights.40

In Rubin’s reckoning the structural conditions of kinship along with the Oedipus complex produce the conditions for the sexism reported in the Rip-Off File. This did not depend on inequality between men and women alone but on the subsumption of all gendered subjects to the structures of the sex/gender system, which in turn cements feelings of security, belonging and normativity. These structures are entrenched and require that, in Rubin’s words, ‘Women unite’, because: We cannot dismantle something that we underestimate or do not understand. The oppression of women is deep; equal pay, equal work, and all the female politicians in the world will not extirpate the roots of sexism.41

Equalising the roster of artists in exhibitions and commercial galleries would have a similarly superficial effect, as did the presence of women curators such as Tucker and Solomon on the Whitney staff. But the significance of the protests by the Ad Hoc Committee, WSABAL and WAR went beyond the demand itself: it was the utterance of that demand, the attack on the art museum as a symbolic institution, and all the c-r or bitching that led to it, as well as all the new infrastructure that brought women together to ‘rearrange’ the ‘social machinery’ that patterned the sex/gender system.42 Each time women came together, forging new relations beyond marginalised roles, they were enacting a feminist politics.

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Women & Work While Rubin was defining the ‘sex/gender system’ as a graduate student in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Juliet Mitchell was also turning to psychoanalytic theory to better understand women’s oppression. Both Rubin and Mitchell formed their analysis in group contexts: Rubin in the Thursday Night Group, which emerged from the anti-war movement at Ann Arbor; Mitchell in a study group called the History Group, which met in the home of Rosalind Delmar in north London from 1970 and included filmmaker and theorist Laura Mulvey, artist Mary Kelly and historians Sally Alexander, Anna Davin, Branca Magas and Margaret Walters, all of whom had roots in the New Left.43 Like the Thursday Night Group, members of the History Group began to publish texts based on their analyses of women’s liberation, the sexual division of labour and what they termed sexual difference.44 Rather than Rubin’s sex/gender system, Mitchell and the History Group expanded on Marxist and psychoanalytic theories of exploitation to map women’s oppression socially and historically but also psychically.45 The History Group worked together on a special issue of the London Women’s Liberation Workshop’s journal Shrew.46 Extending the group logic of the publication, various History Group members contributed texts but they were all attributed to the group.47 This was the context for Mitchell’s first article on psychoanalysis – following on from her writing for the New Left Review in previous years – which laid the foundation for her book Psychoanalysis and Feminism, published in 1974.48 Mignon Nixon describes this book as an answer to ‘the “specific demands”’ of the time, a sentiment paralleled by Rubin’s description of ‘The Traffic in Women’ as ‘something like a piece of amber that preserves those heady conversations and that moment in time’.49 Nixon locates the specificity of Psychoanalysis and Feminism in the defence of Freud’s theory from its ‘dislikeable ideology’, in Mitchell’s explication of ‘how sexual difference was internalised’ through Freud, and in the potential of this analysis, despite the popularity of the counterculture psychoanalysts Wilhelm Reich and R.D. Laing for their ‘bequeathing to the women’s movement a vocabulary of protest’.50 While Reich and Laing critiqued the family form and problematised the absence of women’s sexuality from orthodox psychoanalysis, Mitchell found in Freud a usable theory of subjectivity that approached the woman problem through sexual difference and differentiation, rather than the concrete conditions of the sexual division of labour. Mitchell’s use of these theories could be ‘destructive of psychoanalytic theory’ – meaning transformative – rather than merely critical.51 In part this transformation was enabled by group work, the ‘period of profound collectivity’ as Mitchell described it, from which Psychoanalysis and Feminism ‘sprang Athena-like’.52 This was not the group work of consciousness-raising because it depended on research, reading and the debating of ideas rather than analysis generated from experience alone.

Nonetheless the collective enabled the work, sustaining attention and generating the analytic force to push through the constructions of reality. They understood this to be a revolutionary project, even if the Redstockings – and later some activists and artists – would define such theories as ‘left liberalism error’.

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