Images from College Art Association 2010
The College Art Association’s annual conference met this year in Chicago. Apparently there were 4000 registrants, but many were unable to get there because of bad weather. Suzanne Lacy was awarded the CAA Distinguished Artist Lifetime Achievement Award, Griselda Pollock received the Distinguished Feminist Award, Holland Cotter received the Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing on Art, and Dawoud Bey was the convocation speaker. A terrific start to the conference, in my book. The conference ended with an all-day series of panels organized by the Feminist Art Project, open to the public.
Artists Heather Ault and Bonnie Fortune at Feminist Art Project, Chicago
Sharon Irish and Suzanne Lacy at Minnesota Press booth
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.
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.
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! 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!
Aim High
Aim High poster
I have been obsessing about this challenge today. This photo, taken by a student in a first-year class that I am co-teaching, captures it well. There’s the goal on a pole, but the pole is rusty and without a top. The conflict I feel is that the efforts I and many others make to “engage” with “community” fall so far short of appropriate responsive-ability (as Meiling Cheng called it in her book, In Other Los Angeleses) that I almost don’t want to aim at all. Meiling meant that reciprocity in relationships–built on trust with some equity of power if not equality–is crucial for partnerships that address key social concerns. The homeless know about being homeless, I do not. The poor know about poverty, I do not. The hungry know about hunger that I can only imagine, and not very well. Compassion and empathy of course matter. Listening matters. But when it comes to action, how do we create a give-and-take that taps into economic and social resources without taking away power from those who must access it to move out of painful, systemically-nurtured situations? How can I be part of the solution and not part of the problem? It takes courage to “aim high” because one so often misses the mark. So many people have no choice but to keep on aiming, despite the high failure rate. Giving up is not an option.
Out in the Country
I just met Mary L. Gray and heard her talk about her new book, Out in the Country (NYU Press, 2009). She spent about three years living in smallish towns in Kentucky, West Virginia, and Tennessee, as a participant observer of LGBTQ youth. The subtitle of her book is “Youth, Media, and Queer Visibility in Rural America.” She told a story of young people driving for over an hour to meet at a regional Wal-Mart, one of the few places open 24 hours, to dress in drag in the store, show off their outfits, photograph each other and then upload the photos, with the final upload culminating the event. While she talked about the negative images of “rural” that folks in less populous places have to work against–from the bumpkin-ness of “The Beverly Hillbillies” to the violence and hatefulness of “Deliverance” to the bleakness of “Brokeback Mountain”–she suggested that for most rural youth the Internet was less of an escape than a place of connection. Further, that the connections on- and off-line had a continuity that helps support a young person’s identity explorations, since there are so few models of “how to be trans” or “what gayness in a small town looks like.” Mary gave me a whole new understanding of “Deliverance”–a movie I watched once and never cared to think about much after that, and also of “Brokeback Mountain.” Apparently youth in small town USA did not find the homophobic violence believable, nor did they accept the opinion of the Heath Ledger character that two men living together just would not work in their towns. Definitely a book to buy and read. Thanks, Mary!
Beyond the Chief by Edgar Heap of Birds
We are privileged to have an installation by Hock E Aye Vi/Edgar Heap of Birds on the campus of the University of Illinois. I wrote about being a docent with the work in the previous post. But I wanted to reflect a little more on this powerful work. The backwards writing (FIGHTING ILLINI), which refers to the name of the University of Illinois sports teams, struck me first as mirror writing, which then led me to think about reflection. The way in which Heap of Birds prompts reflection by the use of official-looking signage along an ordinary campus street strikes me as a supremely effective way to repetitively insert the question of “who is hosting whom” in the landscape. It not only encourages reflection, but a reflexive query, “how do I fit in this picture?” because the pedestrian IS in the scene as one walks by.
All of the peoples named in the signs at one time lived in and with this land. Many were forcibly removed, or killed, but of course their descendants continue to live today, mostly not in Illinois. This land grant university is built upon land that does not belong to it…as various broken treaties and outright theft attest. So, Heap of Birds prompts us to reverse the post-colonial claims by reversing the writing. Further, he reclaims the land, in a sense, by installing signs that remind us of those who have come before, and the land that nurtures us. We re-read the landscape.
The signs are declarations: straightforward statements that subtly prompt questions. The metallic, highway- sign surfaces seem official yet make the observer wonder about other directions and instructions that should be questioned. They are ironic and funny too. I like the juxtaposition of the signs with the regular no parking sign and the parking meters. Heap of Birds’ signs are street furniture that call for attitudinal shifts and policy changes. I fully support the purchase of this work so that we can have permanent reminders of the history and present/ce of indigenous people on campus in the form of this public art work.
Street Librarianship
Today I stood outside the Native American House as a volunteer docent to answer questions from passersby about the art installation, “Beyond the Chief,” by Edgar Heap of Birds. “Beyond the Chief” is a series of twelve signs posted on both sides of Nevada Street on the University of Illinois (UIUC) campus, where the Native American House and American Indian Studies offices are located, along with Asian American Studies, La Casa Cultural Latina, African American Cultural House and African American Studies. The theme is one effort by an internationally-known artist to address the damage wrought by over 80 years of a sports mascot at UIUC known as Chief Illiniwek, a racist depiction of a fictional chief, invented by a band leader in the 1920s to support the “Fighting Illini” teams. Genocide and land theft are among many other deeds and ideas that the European invasion wrought on indigenous peoples.
Heap of Birds’ red and white metal signs, which at first glance look like official informational signs, include the words “Fighting Illini” written backwards, over the words “Today your host is…” and then the names of twelve tribal groups. This area was the homeland of Peoria, Piankesaw, Wea, and Kaskaskia peoples. Others passed through what is now Illinois, including Kickapoo, Odawa, Sac, Peoria, Ho-Chunk, Potawatomi, Myaamia, and Meskwaki people. The signs line both sides of Nevada Street, starting at the corner, on the lawn in front of the Department of African American Studies, and then they are placed near the sidewalk so that one can move along to view each one. The Pienkesaw sign in front of La Casa is in Spanish; other signs in English, Japanese and Korean, if I remember correctly. While Heap of Birds has produced these textimages on other campuses, this is the first time he has used languages other than English.
As Heap of Birds has written: “As we install these 12 sign panels, we walk forward on the University of Illinois campus to honor these ideals and intertribal brothers and sisters from a circular position of respect.” The signs will remain through December of 2009, unless the university purchases them.
My friend, the writer Carol Spindel, who wrote Dancing at Halftime: Sports and the Controversy over American Indian Mascots (NYU Press, 2000), joined me for our two-hour “street talk.” She stood on the corner by a stop sign, and I stood between two signs across the street, in front of Native American House. Carol seemed engaged in quite a few conversations; I myself talked with sixteen people, singly or in pairs, over the course of a sunny afternoon. ShinJoung Yeo, a doctoral student in Information and Society, inspired this “street docent/librarian” idea when we had dinner together last week. She described a group that she helped start in 2004, Radical Reference. Volunteers basically took to the streets during the Republican National Convention in New York City and helped people get the information they needed—from where the nearest bathrooms were, to how to find a lawyer, to where there were clashes with police. People who weren’t on the street provided information via cellphone to those who were fielding questions. I thought it was a brilliant solution to everyday people’s needs.
Last week, artist Edgar Heap of Birds returned to the UIUC campus because his signs were vandalized three times since their installation in February. Director of American Indian Studies Robert Warrior invited him back for a brief visit for a forum to address the campus climate and vandalism. Sadly, this is the first campus installation in which his art has been damaged. Professor Heap of Birds encouraged those of us in the audience to take action, to make offerings to honor those who have gone before, to bring gifts to tie to the signs to help protect them, and to talk about the art around campus. Thus, ShinJoung’s idea of a “street librarian” prompted Carol and me to stand by the signs and interact with those pedestrians who paused to talk with us. While I didn’t have lengthy conversations, it was good to be able to talk with people about their thoughts about the art, and answer a few questions about the artist. I hope to do this again regularly.
