The Cover Controversy
In September of 2009, the graphic designer at the University of Minnesota Press presented an idea for the cover of my book on Suzanne Lacy. Suzanne and I had both agreed that one image from her “Anatomy Lessons” series might be a good choice. The designer chose one that was a close-up of her in a pool, from the mid-70s, and then also flipped the image. I loved it, but Suzanne understandably had reservations. She objected to the manipulation of her work by placing it upside down as a double. She also (again rightly) felt that this one work was not representative of her entire oeuvre and that it was removed from the context of her lengthy visual consideration of violence against women. While I agreed with her on all counts, I also felt strongly that the cover worked powerfully and that its effectiveness made it worth the distortions. I am still not sure that I did the right thing pushing for this cover, but here is what I wrote several months ago, in support of the cover.
September 29, 2009
My relationship with Suzanne Lacy has been one of the most important of my life. (Did I say thank you?) One of the basic points of my book is that art exists in the relationships among people, who are anything but easy and straightforward. So this conversation is both “only about a cover” and about “everything” at once. Given the time crunch, the anxiety levels on all sides, and the importance of the issues, I think it helps to say that this is challenging work!
Here’s why I want to proceed with the current cover (beyond my own personal response of “I love it”):
This book is for an art audience. Using this work makes sense because it is beautiful and repulsive and not well known. Suzanne’s work is not merely pretty or gentle, and often edgy. This work is beautiful and repulsive, calm and alarming, and difficult, one reason why it is so powerful. Film historian Bruce Elder noted that Stan Brakhage [and Lacy in turn] set up a “tension between responding with horror at the images [in his film], and responding to the real beauty of the images (for they are astoundingly beautiful); that this is the character of the film’s central tension [and] suggests that beauty and horror lie close to one another, an idea that has long been a key to radical aspiration in the arts.” This is radical art. I don’t use “radical” lightly—by “radical art” I mean that art challenges glib assumptions and damaging values that have otherwise been normalized and are invisible.
By turning the image upside down, while it is not what Suzanne did, in a way brings out another aspect of the original: that floating can be like flying, disorienting, that bodies turn in water and air, that shadows in water alter forms. That bodies exist in space.
This is a work from early in Suzanne’s career—one of a series that is aesthetically very strong. On the cover, it provides a jumpstart to the beginning of the book. On the cover it supports the themes of the book: body, feminism, space.
I think this is an award-winning cover. If it won a design award, of course that wouldn’t hurt me or Suzanne that I can conceive of, but more importantly, I think it would be a small triumph for art of the seventies that was informed by feminism. Now of course it doesn’t represent all of that decade and certainly not all of Suzanne’s work. I don’t think there is one image that can do that, particularly because Suzanne has worked across scales, media and issues.
If feminism is a political position that analyzes power relations among people in order to foster social justice, how does this cover support that? I think it works more like a tactic than anything else. It is a beginning. People pick up the book to find out what that image is about, and look at the color plates in the middle. (Libraries will bind the book so the cover won’t show, so that eliminates some readers from this cover discussion.) They might even read some of the text!
Suzanne Lacy: Spaces Between
Book on artist Suzanne Lacy
At long last, my book on Suzanne Lacy is coming out next month from the University of Minnesota Press. I will be tweaking my website over the next month to feature it more prominently, because this project was a very long haul and I am delighted to have it completed. I first corresponded with Suzanne in 1991 and worked with her a bit in Chicago in 1993. By 2000, I had made sufficient space in my life to start research on her work in earnest. From 2000 until 2008, then, I was immersed in archives, travel, article-writing, and generally trailing around after Suzanne, which was an intense, exhilarating endeavor.
I had long wanted to connect myself to someone whom I admired and learn their process from the inside. Because Suzanne is a most generous and amazing soul, I was able to be a participant-observer for a number of activities, as well as visit sites of many of her projects. I was able to fund Suzanne’s ten-day residency here in Urbana in 2001, and I visited her in Oakland and Los Angeles a lot.
Suzanne has just been awarded the Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement from the College Art Association and will come to Chicago to receive it in February 2010. Congratulations to her and many thanks to Jerri Allyn for spearheading the nomination process.
Ubuntu
Last Thursday (December 11), I attended a panel organized by a working group at the University of Illinois called Ubuntu. Computer scientists kind of colonized the word by using it to describe a Debian-based Linux distribution. But in any case, Ubuntu is a Xhosa and Zulu word describing a philosophy of community and sharing. And the UI Ubuntu has come together in the aftermath of the shooting death of 15-year-old Kiwane Carrington of Champaign. Kiwane died after being shot by a police officer in October 2009 at close range, as he was trying to enter a house where he had been staying. His friend who was with him, Jeshaun Manning-Carter, has been charged with aggravated resisting arrest (a felony) for trying to avoid the police. Jeshaun just turned 16, and will be on trial in early 2010. There has been a lot of news coverage (in several publications and online), so I won’t repeat what is covered elsewhere.
Ubuntu participants want to reclaim the Black Studies tradition of scholar-activism, and I applaud them! Historian Clarence Lang talked about the continuum between academic excellence and social responsibility; campus and community; study and struggle. Historian Sundiata Cha-Jua spoke about reviving a Black United Front that would bring about an annual report issued on the police use of force; a petition to Congress to make the police use of excessive force a federal crime; and a citizen’s police review board in Champaign, among other ideas. Imani Bazzell, who wears many hats, mentioned her program, “At Promise…of Success,” which sees youth as promising success rather than “at risk” of failure. She advocated for workshops for public school teachers to increase their knowledge of the black intellectual tradition. Sociologist Ruby Mendenhall spoke about the oral histories that she has been gathering with her students. County Board member Carol Ammons spoke movingly about her anguish and her frustration with teen-police relationships. I cannot even begin to do justice to the powerful words she voiced. Other speakers included Brendeesha Tynes, Ken Salo, Kerry Pimblott, Barbara Kessel, William Kyles and Pastor Nash. Barbara Kessel spoke about her research into “domestic rendition,” the removal of prisoners from Cook County Jail to Kankakee in order to use tasers on these men. Taser use in Cook County is illegal.
The room was packed. There is such a need for coordinated effort and continued conversation. Thanks to Ubuntu for taking up the challenge. I hope we can build a strong wall, with varied bricks and stones, that will collectively support each other and resist disunity in the face of inevitable differences.
Perpetual Peace Project
Perpetual Peace Project is organized by the Slought Foundation, based on Immanuel Kant’s Perpetual Peace: A Contribution to Political Science (1795). The project “is a two-year initiative of the European Union National Institutes of Culture’s ‘Series in New European Manifestos,’ which re-revisits and re-writes European political texts that have profoundly shaped our modern world.” Kant noted that the phrase “perpetual peace” was posted near a cemetery, with the recognition that death might be the only human way of achieving peace. Kant’s preliminary articles from the late eighteenth century bear listing here, in the same week that Barack Obama accepted the Nobel Peace Prize while increasing the numbers of US troops to be deployed to Afghanistan. I have much to learn about Kant, because I find these statements surprisingly radical. But then 1795 was a radical time in western Europe. It’s possible that Kant wrote this as irony, and intended to cast doubt on there ever being such a thing as Peace.
Article I. No conclusion of Peace shall be held to be valid as such, when it has been made with the secret reservation of the material for a future War.
Article II. No State having an existence by itself–whether it be small or large–shall be acquirable by another State through inheritance, exchange, purchase or donation.
Article III. Standing Armies shall be entirely abolished in the course of time.
Article IV. No National Debts shall be contracted in connection with the external affairs of the State.
Article V. No State shall intermeddle by force with the Constitution or Government of another State.
Article VI. No State at war with another shall adopt such modes of hostility as would necessarily render mutual confidence impossible in a future Peace; such as the employment of Assassins or Poisoners, the violation of a Capitulation, the instigation of Treason and such like.
Kant says of the modes listed in Article VI that “these are dishonorable stratagems.” Indeed. The Slought Foundation and its collaborators encourage us to rewrite this possibly satirical manifesto in light of contemporary events.
My rewriting of Article I: We must constantly remember that an open hand can become a fist.
Other rewritings to follow. Thanks so much to Aaron Levy of the Slought Foundation for our conversation yesterday!
Women Hold Up Half the Sky
by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn
A number of friends have read the book by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide. There’s also a movement by that name. The book was excerpted in the New York Times Magazine recently, which is where I first learned of it. Then my friend Carol interviewed Sheryl on WILL Radio, after reading the book.
My sister Gail compiled a short list of groups from the book that we all have the opportunity to support:
Afghan Institute of Learning operates schools and other programs for women and girls in Afghanistan and in the border areas of Pakistan.
Apne Aap battles sex slavery in India, including in remote areas in Bihar that get little attention.
Campaign for Female Education (CAMFED) supports schooling for girls in Africa.
Fistula Foundation supports the Addis Ababa Fistula Hospital in Ethiopia, established by Reg and Catherine Hamlin.
Global Fund for Women operates like a venture capital fund for women’s groups in poor countries.
Heal Africa runs a hospital in Goma, Congo, that repairs fistulas and tends to rape victims.
Worldwide Fistula Fund works to improve maternal health and is building a fistula hospital in Niger.
With all the bad news in the world, it is gratifying to know of these amazing, tenacious efforts to support women, and men.
Loss within Loss
Last night I sat listening to the New Orleans Hot 8 Brass Band play “St. James Infirmary.” While I sat there I felt inconsolable about the losses experienced recently by friends, strangers, and acquaintances. This has been a particularly hard summer and fall for many in this community. Loss Within Loss: Artists in the Age of AIDS (University of Wisconsin Press, 2002) is a collection of essays edited by Edmund White. While I read it a while back, the title brings to mind a spiral of losses, loss upon loss, loss moving inward to our vulnerable centers, losses piling up, one after another with no time to process or adequately grieve. The New Orleans Brass Band “drummer Dinerral Shavers was shot and killed in late 2006 while driving with his wife and child in New Orleans. In addition, two other members of the band have lost their lives due to violence on the city streets. In response to these tragic setbacks, The Hot 8 Brass Band has recommitted itself to bringing people together through their unique brand of music to celebrate, to heal and to learn.” While it was weird to sit in a theatre listening to street music on a chilly autumn evening, I appreciated the opportunity to feel this band’s energy and to ponder the weight of violent death while feeling the beats of drums and hearts.
Hot 8 Brass Band
Community Informatics as “Activist” Social Informatics
Larry Stillman
Larry Stillman of Monash University wrote the original drafts on community informatics for Wikipedia. He just posted this comment to the “ciresearchers” listserv:
Larry Stillman and Henry Linger
There is an ongoing debate in Community Informatics about the need for a stronger conceptual and theoretical base in order to give the field disciplinary cohesion and direction. By investigating the body of reflective thinking in Information Systems, researchers in Community Informatics can develop a more rigorous theoretical context for their work. Information Systems can be considered as a fragmented adhocracy that allows many intellectual communities to co-exist under its umbrella. A sympathetic reading of Information Systems offers an opportunity to Community Informatics, in spite of its different orientation, to address both social and technological issues in its theoretical framework. This framework would be based on a common language that expresses a shared ontology and epistemology with Information Systems. Such a framework then allows Community Informatics to fully address its information systems problem solving agenda as well as its community problem solving activities. Strengthening this dual agenda will allow Community Informatics to work effectively with both the technical and social design and implementation problems. But it also provides Community Informatics with an opportunity to contribute to a discourse within Information Systems in order to broaden the traditional Information Systems concept of organisation and social action.
Guerilla Art Action Group
Five booklets from Half-Letter Press
Temporary Services (TS)–through Half-Letter Press–has been producing wonderful little booklets of interviews, which now number five. One of the “Temporary Conversations” was with Jean Toche of the Guerilla Art Action Group (GAAG). Formed in 1969 and enduring through 1976, GAAG consisted of Jean Toche, Jon Hendricks, and Poppy Johnson, with occasional others. The bright orange booklet (2008) that features TS’s interview with Toche has illustrations provided by Jon Hendricks.
I really enjoyed driving back from Chicago with Brett Bloom of TS and hearing more about the process of this interview. The entire interview was conducted using snail mail!
One excerpt from the booklet–which you can buy from Half-Letter Press–that has been sticking with me, is a 1971 communique by Hendricks and Toche called Esthetics and Revolution:
TO BE INVOLVED WITH USEFUL LABOR–AS A REVOLUTIONARY ARTIST–YOU MUST:
- BE AVAILABLE WHEN NEEDED
- FORGET ABOUT IMPRINTING YOUR OWN STYLISTIC ESTHETIC ONTO THE REALITY
- DEAL WITH DAY-TO-DAY REALITIES, NOT FANTASIES
- BE ABLE TO OVERCOME YOUR PERSONAL HANG-UPS
- DEAL WITH ISSUES, NOT PERSONALITIES
- BE ACTIVE, NOT REACTIVE
- BE ABLE TO WORK ALONE OR WITH OTHERS
- BE FLEXIBLE
- BE ABLE TO TAKE INITIATIVE WHEN NEEDED
- NOT BE AFRAID OF MAKING MISTAKES
- NOT BE AFRAID OF BEING INCONSISTENT
- BE VERSATILE
- BE IMAGINATIVE
- GET RID OF PRECONCEPTIONS
- CONSTANTLY REDEFINE YOUR ROLE AS REALITY DICTATES.
Seems like a good description for getting through life in general.
Every Body! Again
Artist Bonnie Fortune, organizer and curator of the exhibit “Every Body!,” asked some of us to reflect on these questions, or similar ones:
- How feminist health movements challenge/change the images of women and/or men and health?
- Where do you think the visual representation of bodies in feminist health movements needs to go, and/ or the new concerns they must grapple with?
- What is the future feminist health movements in general?
Here’s what I wrote:
Dorothy Roberts pondered in Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty, “how is it possible that Black women’s reproduction has been subjected to so much degradation and intrusion?” Roberts published her book in 1997, but after more than a decade, I still agree with her that we in the feminist health justice movement must focus “on the connection between reproductive rights and racial equality.” This is not an abstract connection, given that entrenched social injustices prevent many women the choices that the government supposedly protects. These deep injustices mean that we white, well-off women also have to examine our own collective past–organizers in the birth control movement who collaborated with eugenicists; or opposition to sterilization reform by Planned Parenthood and the National Abortion Rights Action League because the reforms seemed to make access to sterilization difficult for middle-class women. We must expand what we mean by “reproductive rights” beyond “right to abortion” and tackle other hard realities: the rights to a healthy pregnancy and parent-child relationships along with safe, fail-proof, and non-coercive birth control. My own challenges include coming to terms with artificial reproductive techniques: While not discounting the emotional costs of infertility, I’m not sure that anyone should use them. But that only the wealthy can do so, points to a profitable and questionable system of access that again excludes the poor and not white.
Dorothy Roberts
Every Body! Visual Resistance in Feminist Health Movements, 1969-2009
Health Care is for People not for Profit
Artist Bonnie Fortune is tremendous! She conceptualized, organized, and raised funds to produce a two-city, multi-event extravaganza called Every Body! This past week I have gotten the flier for the public performance of Terri Kapsalis’s “The Hysterical Alphabet,” and the flier for the series of “Every Body!” events. In addition to Kapsalis’s performance, there will be a display of Feminist Health Political Graphics at the Women’s Resource Center on the campus of the University of Illinois in Champaign, and a small display of books and posters by the History Library up the street. The books will include publications by UIUC scholars like Sarah Projansky, Leslie Reagan, and Ruth Nicole Brown, as well as some of our inspirational books by Andrea Smith, Dorothy Roberts and Suzann Gage. In addition to Terri Kapsalis’s books, there will be some zines and posters in that case too. Suzann Gage is coming from California to give an artist’s talk on September 12 at the I-Space Gallery in Chicago where the main exhibit will be held. Artist Christa Donner will give a presentation in Champaign on October 5. So the next month will be a flurry of activities around women’s health justice! Melissa Mitchell of the UI News Bureau wrote a nice publicity piece too. Congratulations Bonnie!
