Saartjie, Judy, Lady
Saartjie, Judy, Lady
Resurgent feminism in art
For some years now, there has been a resurgence of interest in feminism, but as of yet no sign of any real activism. In relation to the opening of the exhibition REBELLE in the Arnhem Museum for Modern Art, Clare Butcher spoke with several curators and an artist about their views on feminism in today’s art.In 1810, the brother of a slave trader, whose own trade was organizing the big world fairs, brought a Kohekohe woman from the Cape colony to Europe. Sarah Baartman, given the diminutive form of her name, ‘Saartjie’, with her voluptuous gait, imposing stature, exotic features and large buttocks, was received by the European exhibition-goers with a pseudo-scientific interest that soon earned her the nickname ‘Hottentot Venus’. At one point, Saartjie Baartman’s case was brought before a court by an abolitionist pressure group. Here the ‘Venus’ stated, in fluent Dutch, that she was aware of her circumstances and expected to receive fifty percent of the profits she brought in. Following her death, after five years of being studied and painted, an autopsy was conducted and Baartman’s remains were put on display at the Musée de l’Homme until the 1970s. The disturbing presence of her bottled organs and skeleton was later discretely stored away in the museum’s depot until Saartjie Baartman was finally repatriated to South Africa almost two hundred years after her departure. Baartman’s apparent agency over her own anatomy, at least while living, has been heralded by a number of feminist poets, theatre and filmmakers, who paint her as a kind of ‘mighty Aphrodite’.1 Her physical presence in these early world expositions is – via the work of the feminist philosopher Judith Butler – an important link with the subject of this article: the representation of women artists and feminist practice in western art history. In the foreword to her book Bodies that Matter, Butler wrote of an instance where someone asked, ‘What about the materiality of the body, Judy?’ This diminutive of the formal ‘Judith’ reminded her of the physical limitations of her own womanhood, and by the same token, of the authority within the male-dominated structure around her.2 The implications of this for the representation of female ‘material’ (texts, artworks, methods of working) prompted Butler to define the body’s materialisation, or process of mattering, as a performance that must be continually repeated in response to all sorts of societal demands and projections. Recently, a number of large-scale art shows have taken these repeated projections and performances and sought to find new forms for exhibiting feminism and contemporary women’s art practices. Exhibitions such as WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution at the MOCA in Los Angeles and Global Feminism in the Brooklyn Museum (both in 2007) and Cooling Out: On the Paradoxes of Feminism in the Kunsthaus Baselland (2006) tried to resurrect and recontextualize feminist art practice by placing historic artworks next to contemporary works. More regional examples of this development are the five-year-old curatorial platform If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want to be Part of Your Revolution and the upcoming REBELLE: Art and Feminism 1969-2009 curated by Mirjam Westen at the Arnhem Museum for Modern Art.
From the Inside
The Netherlands-based responses to feminism and ‘women’s art’ find their genetic code in the socio-political activities of second-wave Dutch feminist groups. In 1977, the Foundation of Women in the Visual Arts (SVBK) protested the under-representation of women artists on the sidewalk in front of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. The intrusive physicality of their intervention resulted in the multi-phase exhibition Feministische Kunst Internationaal that travelled around the Netherlands from 1978-81. The show ended, however, with the SVBK’s withdrawal due to public backlash concerning the exhibition’s addressing of ‘non-art’ issues and aesthetics, as well as the number of bodies on display, one example being Valie Export’s breaking of sexual taboos with her explicit video works. This moment marked a distinct shift in sentiments toward the relationship between ‘feminism’, art and the political in the Netherlands. While certain contemporary art museums, such as those in Gouda and Arnhem, continue to adhere to their 50% women’s art acquisition policy, many contemporary practitioners have distanced themselves from any kind of repetition of the SVBK’s political enactments in the fear of being regarded as nostalgic. According to Annie Fletcher, artistic director of If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want to be a Part of Your Revolution, the above-mentioned exhibition WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution successfully ‘re-categorized the layers of feminist experience’ at a time when the disturbing presence of second wave feminism has been relegated to the domain of white middle-class existentialism or exploited by right wing rhetoric (such as Geert Wilders’s comments concerning the patriarchy of Islamic fundamentalism). This survey exhibition substantiated an imposing body of work from 120 second wave feminist artists across the world and challenged the ‘cooling out’ 3 of the feminist debate by reactivating the corporeality of everyday performance and putting public interventions back into discussion within the space of the white cube. Together with Frederique Bergholtz and an expanding group of artists and thinkers, Annie Fletcher attempts with If I Can’t Dance… to conduct further discussions around locally implicated feminism(s) and the lack of visibility of women artists in institutional structures. If I Can’t Dance… distinguishes itself by problematizing the notion of ‘exhibitionism’ rather than genderizing the artistic responses to their commissions. Rather than collecting and displaying artworks, they commission new pieces from both male and female artists, such as Karl Holmquist, Maria Pask and Esther de Vlam. The platform expressly avoids pitting itself against male-dominated institutional practice, instead seeking to present these works within a dynamic, ever changing infrastructure. Their exhibition forms range from the white cube and the black box to the city square, and even a reading group, like the one started in 2006. Using feminism as a dynamic discursive frame, the specifically located, physically involved artistic exercises ‘build up a body of expertise’, says Annie Fletcher, that will help in ‘finding appropriate responses to contemporary practice, while fracturing common conditions’.4Frederique Bergholtz, co-artistic and financial director of If I Can’t Dance…, says that the platform’s flexibility is strongly motivated by the American author bell hooks (1952), with her vision of feminist movement rather than ‘The Feminist Movement’. Through physicality, cognitive agility and content-driven formats, multiple ‘feminisms’ may be performed and thus embodied within the platform. The personal nature of creative responses to If I Can’t Dance… ’s commissions, such as that of Suchan Kinoshita’s intimate conversation at the Frascati last year, confirms the suppleness of the project. However, it is also because of this constant formal and focal metamorphosis that the platform’s activities have been called overly hermetic. Precarity is precisely their aim. If I Can’t Dance… seeks to activate open-ended questions of exhibition and the body through subjective intervention, rather than present a homogenous political front which, according to Bergholtz, would most likely become fraught with institutional politics, as in the case of SVBK. While the feminists of the 1970s fought at the doors of institutions for better representation, contemporary women practitioners are bashing their heads against the walls from the inside.
Worldwide
For Mirjam Westen, curator of the upcoming REBELLE: Art and Feminism 1969-2009 exhibition at the Arnhem Museum for Modern Art, this antagonism remains. Having been present at the interventions of the SVBK and the Feministische Kunst Internationaal exhibition, Mirjam Westen maintains that the resurrection of feminism’s various embodied forms over the past forty years is also necessary today. In her exhibition, Westen intends to expose the synapses between the media and content in work by contemporary women artists and those of the 70s and 80s. While the work of each of the 80 artists on the exhibition is bound to the locality and social conditions of its creation, Westen sees the aesthetic of Gina Pane, for example, as reflected in the work of young Guatemalan artist Regina Galindo. Westen considers the redressing of race and gender as critical to positioning identities in contemporary feminist art discussion, saying that, historically, the ways in which women artists have profiled themselves – through new media and extra-institutional self-organisation – matter more than the standard artistic identity-politicking associated with feminist art. As a result, REBELLE includes a number of non-Western artists such as Gülsün Karamustafa, whose work explodes art historical notions of Orientalism, materializing the subjectivity and sensuality of marginalized women in globalisation processes.5 Westen intends to juxtapose a weighty series of postures, which quite apparently gesture towards current debates around feminism and the Muslim world. With this geographical and ‘generational jumping’ 6 between various contexts and feminist waves, REBELLE may provide the overdue sequel to the ‘Feministische Kunst’, were it not for the fact that the aesthetic relationship claimed by Westen is not so easy to suture within the critical frame of post-globalism. The show’s emphasis on the universality of female experience conflicts with a recent call by groups such as If I Can’t Dance… to distinguish the ‘organs’ of the feminist ‘anatomy’ from each other.Feminism, portrayed as a homogenous, collective political experience, is something impeding many younger women from identifying themselves as a kind of ‘third wave’, says Annie Fletcher. The ‘intensely individualistic consumer society’ in which 21st century Western art practitioners have grown up has resulted in a lack of awareness of the politics their presence plays within and outside of institutional structures.
Sooner Marketing than Protest
The Eindhoven-based artist Toos Nijssen (1961) is part of a generation who have benefitted from the historical feminist actions in the Netherlands, such as the measure enacted by the Beeldende Kunstenaars Regeling (BKR) to award subsidies to female as well as male artists. Nijssen sees the so-called third wave as being more a case of competitive marketability of one’s practice via the employment of femininity than as a form of protest, such as that of the SVBK.7 For Nijssen, individual agendas have overtaken any sense of community with other women artists. It is this loss of solidarity that motivates her video work, in which she interviews members of marginal social groups, such as immigrants, about home, notions of body and belonging in particular spaces – be they institutional, infrastructural or even national. It seems that, rather than nostalgic displays of a younger feminist ‘physique’, the next stage in critically presenting feminism in art is in the unabashed exhibiting of the professionalism and subjectivity of women in institutional and artistic practice. Third wave or post-feminist: whatever the terminology, the materialisation within exhibition structures of women’s contemporary working processes and creative economies would bring into balance the second-wave notions of womanhood, which have grown a little plump with inactivity over the last decades. Like the uncomfortable weight of Saartjie Baartman’s remains, the memory of the Dolle Mina’s placement of rose garlands* around public urinals in protest of unequal amenities in the 1960s is often bottled in archival history and labelled as ‘over-zealous or irrelevant to the current social climate’. Yet it is this very history which constitutes the vital organs of today’s complex anatomy of feminism. A kind of biopsy of their corporeal evidence could serve to inform and repatriate contemporary attributes of feminist knowledge and experience to a place of belonging, both within and outside of the institution. Barack Obama’s recent admission that he considered himself a feminist acknowledges the necessity of a public exposure, as in the style of Lady Godiva,8 riding naked into territory outside the safe havens of academic artistic discourse. This almost indecent exposure of feminism’s present condition – weighted by its pasts, and equipped with its current concerns – would incite those in artistic and institutional careers to respond to the notion of creative solidarity in ways that do not diminish 21st century notions of authority or agency but herald the question, ‘who will do this, and how will I do this?’9Clare Butcher is a member of CTP de Appel, AmsterdamREBELLE: Art and Feminism 1969 – 2009Arnhem Museum for Modern Art, 30 May through 20 August 2009Elles@centrepompidou, artistes femmes dans les collections du Centre Pompidou,Centre Pompidou, Paris, from 27 May 2009
Clare Butcher
