ORIGINAL VISIONS SHIFTING THE PARADIGM. WOMEN’S ART. 1970H996 ' \ /I A r^_ A 1 MAGDALENA ABAKANOWICZ MARY BETH EDELSON lANET EISH AGNES MARTIN PAT STEIR CARRIE MAE WEEMS MCMULLEN MUSEUM OE ART BOSTON COLLEGE ORIGINAL VISIONS SHIFTING THE PARADIGM, WOMEN'S ART 1970-1996 MAGDALENA ABAKANOWICZ MARY BETH EDELSON lANET FISH AGNES MARTIN PATSTEIR CARRIE MAE WEEMS Essays by Alston Conley and Katherine Nahum Interviews by Mary A. Armstrong, Alston Conley, Lisa M. Cuklanz, Jennifer S. Grinnell, Marianne LaFrance McMullen museum oe art BOSTON COLLEGE JANUARY 26-MAY 18. 1997 This publication is issued in conjunction with the exhibition Original Visions: Shifting the Paradigm, Women’s Art ig/0-ipg6, at the Charles S. and Isabella V. McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, January 26 to May 18, 1997 - The exhibition was organized by the McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, Alston Conley, Curator. The publication was supported by Boston College. Copyright © 1997 by the Charles S. and Isabella V. McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA. Library of Congress Catalogue Card Number 96-79911 ISBN 9640153-6-6 Edited by Alston Conley, Jennifer Grinnell and Katherine Nahum Copy-edited by John Ombelets Designed by Boston College Office of Publications and Print Marketing; Monica DeSalvo, Senior Graphic Designer; BCP952- Text typeset in Mrs. Eaves, Trajan and Scala-Sans Printed by Champagne/Lafayette Front cover: (no. 2), Magdalena Abakanowicz, Self-Portrait, 1976, fiber and glue, 9 * 7 * 5 Anne & Jacques Baruch Collection, Ltd., Chicago photo: Jerry Kobylecky Back cover: (no. 5). Mary Beth Edelson, Fire Flights in Deep Space, 1977' black and white silver print, triptych, 21 in. X 21 in. each. Collection of the Artist, New York CONTENTS 4 Director’s Preface Nancy Netzer 5 Acknowledgments Alston Conley 6 Original Visions Alston Conley 9 Color Plates Essays and Interviews 19 Magdelena Abakanowicz Essay by Katherine Nahum, Department of Fine Arts, Boston College Interview by Marianne LaFrance, Department of Psychology, Boston College 27 Mary Beth Edelson Essay by Alston Conley, McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College Interview by Jennifer S. Grinnell, McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College 37 Janet Fish Essay by Katherine Nahum Interview by Mary A. Armstrong, Department of Fine Arts, Boston College 47 Agnes Martin Essay by Katherine Nahum "Mystery is the Beauty of Life,” by Agnes Martin 53 Pai Steir Essay and Interview by Alston Conley 61 Carrie Mae Weems Essay by Katherine Nahum Interview by Lisa M. Cuklanz, Department of Sociology, Boston College 70 Objects in the Exhibition 72 Bibliography DIRECTOR’S PREFACE The McMullen Museum of Art at Boston College is pleased to present, Original Visions: Shiflingthe Paradigm, Women’s Art, igyo-iggG, examining the contributions of six outstanding artists rarely shown in the Boston area; Magdalena Abakanowicz, Mary Beth Edelson, Janet Fish, Agnes Martin, Pat Steir, and Carrie Mae Weems. One of the goals of this exhibition was to show a broader range of art by women than is usually represented. In pursuit of that goal, the Museum has arranged, by decade, contemporaneous works by women of different generations, working in a variety of styles ranging from abstraction to representation, and addressing a variety of issues from the feminist to the non-political. This innovative conception owes its origin to the vision and enthusiasm of our curator, Alston Conley, who assembled a formidable group of professors in the Department of Fine Arts and the interdisciplinary program of Women’s Studies at Boston College to serve as advisors and con- tributors to the catalogue. The essays were written by Conley, himself a painter, and by Katherine Nahum, an art historian. Interviews with the art- ists were conducted by Mary Armstrong, a painter; Lisa M. Cuklanz, a rhetorical critic; Jennifer Grinnell, an historian of women; and Marianne LaFrance, a social psychologist. A larger group including Mary Sherman, an artist, and Elizabeth Kowaleski -Wallace, Lorraine Liscio and Judith Wilt, all literary critics, aided in the discussion of issues to be addressed in the exhibition and in the initial selection of the artists. We extend thanks to all of them for their keen support of this project. Special acknowledgment is due the indefatigable Jennifer Grinnell, who, as the Museum’s manager of publications and exhibitions, oversaw editing and production of this catalogue and arrangements for loans. We are grateful to John Ombelets for his thoughtful and careful copy-editing of the text, to Monica DeSalvo for her handsome design of this book, and again, to Alston Conley for the inspired design and installation of the exhibition. As always, we are indebted to other members of the Museum staff for their dedication to this project: Alice Harkins, Heather Fryer, Kerry Leonard, Rachel Mayer, Gabriella Palmieri and last but not least, to our ever-efficient administrator, Helen Swartz. To locate and bring together an exhibition of such varied works has been complicated. Without the generosity of the many lenders, we could not have succeeded. We extend our deepest gratitude to each of them. It would have been impossible to realize this exhibition without the support and generosity of the administration of Boston College. We wish to thank, in particular. Univer- sity President William P. Leahy, S.J.; University Chancellor J. Donald Monan S.J.; Vice President Margaret Dwyer; Academic Vice President William Neenan S.J.; Executive Vice President Francis Campanella; Dean of the College of Arts & Sciences J. Robert Barth, S.J.; Associate Dean of Faculties Richard Spinello; and Associate Director of Development Lynne Prosser. We also extend thanks to the Friends of the McMullen Museum, chaired by Nancy and John Joyce. Finally, in addition to its scholarly mission, the exhibition aims to focus on the role of women’s creative expression in a broader sense. It is hoped that an examination of the work of these six exemplary artists will inspire a greater apprecia- tion in New England of the female contribution to our collective culture. Nancy VeRei LENDERS TO THE EXHIBITION Anne andjack Baruch Collection Ltd., Chicago TTie Collection of the late Edna S. Beron, Boston Mary Beth Edelson, New York Joost Elffers, New York Alvin and Barbara Krakow, Boston Marlborough Gallery, New York Robert Miller Gallery, New York DC Moore Gallery, New York PaceWildenstein, New York P.P. O.W. Gallery, New York Riverfront Office Park, Cambridge Private Collections ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This exhibition was shaped through a collabora- tive effort by faculty from both the Women’s Studies Program and Eine Arts Department of Boston College. Several of the faculty volun- teered to meet and discuss the concerns and themes addressed by this exhibition. I am grate- ful to Elizabeth Kowaleski -Wallace, Lorraine Liscio, Mary Sherman and Judith Wilt for their time, ideas and interest at the formative stages. In addition, 1 would like to thank Mary Armstrong, Lisa M. Cuklanz, Jennifer Grinnell and Marianne LaErance for their continued involvement and participation in the catalogue. In their interviews with the participating artists, each has brought unique interests, passions and insights to the project. Likewise, special thanks are due to Katherine Nahum for her involvement on many levels, especially her research, essays and editorial prowess. 1 owe a particular debt of gratitude to my colleagues at the Museum: exhibitions and publications manager Jennifer Grinnell, for her commitment, attention to detail and persever- ance which helped bring this project to fruition; director Nancy Netzer, for her continued support of this exhibition; and the staff— administrator Helen Swartz, undergraduate research fellow Gabriela Palmier! and graduate research assistant Heather Eryer — who assisted with the myriad details that kept the exhibition on track. 1 am grateful to the Boston College Office of Publications and Print Marketing and design director David Williams for our catalogue and invitation, and especially to Monica DeSalvo for her graceful design and John Ombelets for his thorough copy-editing. The life blood of exhibitions are the artists and galleries that lend their artworks for display, and particularly the private lenders who share their collections with the public, despite the resulting blank walls in their homes. We owe a debt of thanks to all of them, and to those who assisted with the loans, compiling information for the exhibition and the catalogue: Magdalena Abakanowicz, Dr. Elissa Arons, Anne and Jack Baruch, the late Edna S. Beron, Scott Catto, John Cheim, Elaine Cohos, Mary Beth Edelson, Joost Elffers, Janet Eish, Arnold Glimcher, Marc Glimcher, Michele Heinrici, Alvin and Barbara Krakow, Heidi Lang, Agnes Martin, Jack Mognaz, Mary Morris, Pat Steir, Brian Vaas and Garrie Mae Weems. Alston Conl^ 5 ORIGINAL VISIONS BY ALSTON CONLEY The exhibition, Original Visions, brings together six women artists: Magdalena Abakanowicz, Mary Beth Edelson, Janet Fish, Agnes Martin, Pat Steir and Carrie Mae Weems. Their pursuit of individual expression over a period of a quarter century, and in some cases longer, has brought each of them to a high level of accom- plishment documented in numerous exhibitions, and constituting a record of achievement by women artists not found any time earlier. This exhibition and catalogue explore the complexity, variety and development of their work. TTe history of sexism in the visual arts, as well as in art history, has now been well documented. Women have been denied the education, support and access to the financial rewards that were necessary to accomplish and sustain a high level of achievement in the most competitive arena. Linda Nochlin in the early 197OS challenged the "whole erroneous intellectual substructure upon which the question, 'Why have there been no great women artists?’ is based,”’ and she opened the doors for a new generation of feminist art historians to deconstruct prevailing biases and to present new paradigms. Lucy Lippard noted during these years that women’s exhibitions "as a framework within which to exhibit good art... are no more restrictive than, say, exhibiting German, Cubist, black and white, soft, young or new art.”^ The wealth of art, and the variety of new art forms produced by women subsequent to such comments, necessitate an examination of the presentation of women’s art. Historically, curators organized shows without the rubric "an exhibition of male artists,” and presented their often discriminatory views under the pretext of quality. An all-woman show, such as the one presented here, serves as a celebration of the work of six women artists, as well as an educational role, by presenting individual exemplary artistic achievement and potential role models for our students, and, in particular, female students. Across the country, a large majority of the under- graduate art students are female, while most of their teachers are male. Although the numbers of female art faculty members have grown since the early ’70s (when only two percent of art faculty were women), ^ the low ratios of female- to-male faculty still hold. A similar situation exists among art history students and faculty, and discrepancy of opportunity also exists for all women who pursue careers in the field. Despite an improvement in the exhibition opportunities for women in the last quarter century, a situation far short of equality still exists today. Women, compared to men, are exhibited less frequently in major galleries and museums. They are given fewer major survey exhibitions. The pertinent statistics have been culled and promoted in posters, political actions and books, notably by the Guerrilla Girls. This politically active group of feminists who maintain their anonym- ity by wearing gorilla masks when in public have become the conscience of the art world. ^ The lack of women as role models, in exhibitions and as teachers, has had an undermining effect as characterized by Eva Hesse, one of the best artists of her generation, in a letter to Ethelyn Honig in 1965- A woman is "at a disadvantage from the beginning. . .She. . .lacks conviction that she has the 'right’ to achievement. She... lacks the belief that her achievements are worthy. Therefore she has not the steadfastness necessary to carry ideas to the full developments. . .A fantastic strength is necessary and courage. 1 dwell on this all the time.”® If the doors, opened since the ’70s, remain open for succeeding generations, it is because of continuous political engagement, organized exhibitions, critical reevaluation, historical revisions and new paradigms presented by feminists, and especially women s pursuit of their own original visions. 6 Agnes Martin’s (b. 1912) first influence when she was studying in New York in the 194OS was Abstract Expressionism. This avant-garde movement tried to reconcile Surrealism’s spon- taneous tapping of the unconscious through "psychic automatism,” unlimited emotional content and modernist abstraction free of utopian visions, while rejecting the politically concerned subject matter of the ’3OS. Abstract Expressionism became the dominant school of the ’50s through discussions at the Tenth Street Club, through new venues for exhibition and through critical acceptance during the post-war period of rising American world influence. The New York School had earned international acclaim by the end of the decade. Martin’s expo- sure to this work in the early ’5OS (she returned twice more to New York) led to her assimilation of the ideas of Abstract Expressionism. Her less gestural style allowed her to be recognized along with the ’6os Minimalists, who found literal meaning in the physical attributes of pure form and rejected symbolism, or any reference outside the art object. In 1967- Martin, by then a mature artist, left New York and sought isolation in New Mexico. She never experienced or embraced the ’70s feminist movement. Janet Eish (b. 1938) was schooled in a late phase of Abstract Expressionism, yet she moved on. While aware of the Pop Art imagists of the late ’50s and early ’60s, she developed a representa- tive style based on the observation of domestic items, especially those demonstrating the percipient effects of light on transparency. After three decades dominated by successively more reductive schools of abstraction, a revival of imagery and representation emerged during the ’70s. While feminism was not the subject of ber painting, the feminist revelation that "the personal is political” is apparent in the choice of Eish’s subjects. Pat Steir (b. 1940) also studied art during the peak of the Abstract Expressionist movement, but was influenced by a nonconformist figura- tion. Although not the subject of Steir’s art, gender may be a subtext of ber appropriation of historical styles that excluded women. Both Minimal and Conceptual Art of the ’60s influenced her imagist paintings, a synthesis of contradictory concerns. Conceptual and Minimal Art are related in that both emphasize the underlying conceptual basis of art, and both concur with Marcel Duchamp’s rejection of the dominant "retinal” orientation of early Modern painting and sculpture. The Minimalists relied on reductive forms and material qualities to make an object of thought. The Conceptualists eliminated the object altogether, and used textual discourse, sometimes combined with documentary photographs, to convey their associated ideas. Conceptualists (along with Performance artists) challenged the entire commercial structure of museum authentication and gallery promotion of art as a commodity. Mary Beth Edelson (b. 1934 ) embraced the ’70s women’s movement, making feminism the subject of her art and her performances. Per- formance Art grew out of divergent influences, including the ’6os "Happenings,” experimental dance and improvisational theater. Edelson’s rituals created new myths through individual or group activities that were meant to fulfill collective social, political and spiritual needs of women, and project positive gender images. The use of photographic documentation of her ritual performances reveals the influence of Conceptual Art, while manipulations of figura- tive photo images are ccasionally associated with the earlier genre of Body Art. Carrie Mae Weems (b. 1953 ) uses her socialist and feminist political beliefs, informed by the Black Consciousness movement of the civil rights era, to shape her art. Her earliest work was documentary in the tradition of street photography. Although interested in reinvent- ing the leftist photo essay, she rejects the documentary style established in the ’30s and ’40s by the Farm Security Administration photographers as presenting distorted views by outsiders. An alternative tradition was disclosed by the publication during the ’70s of The Black Photographers Annual , examining the work of three generations of Black photographers stretching from the Harlem Renaissance to the Kamoinge Workshop of the ’6os. Weems was especially inspired by Roy DeCarava, whose photo essay. The Sweet Flypap cro/Ii/e (1955), included a narrative by Langston Hughes. Weems’s own use of narrative has ranged from the personal to the folkloric. Largely eliminated from modernist art of the first half of the century, narrative and some political content was revived in the ’70s. 7 Weems’s examination of racial stereotypes have precedents in an earlier generation of black visual artists. Some of Weems’s emblematic combinations of images with text examine the racist and sexist representations presented in the culture and through media. Other narratives explore the rich folklore representing personal and shared histories of black culture in America. Magdalena Abakanowdcz (b. 1930)' ^ Polish artist, was shaped by her childhood experiences during World War II and post-war communist Poland. When she studied at Warsaw Fine Arts Academy in the early ’5OS, it was dominated by Stalinism and an orthodox Social Realism against which she rebelled. Avant-garde Polish Constructivism and utopian idealism from the prewar period survived in a circle of artists and intellectuals around Henry Stazewski (l 894 “ 1988). For Abakanowicz, his influence wasn’t stylistic, but attitudinal; she was inspired by his ideas, his commitment to experimentation and his uncompromising morality. Nonconformist art was barely tolerated during the creative upheaval of the post-Stalin era, and many artists fled the continuing communist censorship. A ’60s exhibition of Abakanowicz’s paintings and small weavings in Warsaw was closed for its "formalist” tendencies. Encouraged to make a large weaving to submit to the international jury for the first Biennale International de la Tapisserie in Switzerland, Abakanowicz’s concerns challenged the prevailing craft tradition of artisans who wove from others’ cartoons. Abakanowicz approached weaving as an artist, directly creating works in response to the materials, forms and her imagination, challenging accepted disciplines in both the craft and art world. During the ’4OS and ’5OS, the "formalist” approach to art criticism, developed around the Abstract Expressionist and later Minimalist schools, established those artists within a critical tradition. Dominant for two decades, formalism was successfully challenged by new concerns that allowed for greater experimentation and reinvestigation of content. These diverse concerns eventually became knovm in the ’yos as "pluralism,” reflecting the lack of a single dominant artistic ideology. Feminism and international trends have been major influences in broadening the artistic discourse that took place in exhibitions. Content has expanded to include, along with the private expression, conceptual linguistics and political concerns, as well as more recent post-modern ironic reflection. At the same time, there has been a reinvestigation of representation and figuration as forms vdth expressive content. Political art, in eclipse since the ’3OS, has had a revival in the early 199OS exploring the issues of gender, race, class and identity. The pluralism embodied in this exhibition is possible because of femi- nists’ and internationalists’ insistence to be heard in earlier decades. These artists represent six "originals” whose exhibited "visions” are amongst the most innovative of the last quarter century. Notes 1. Linda Nochlin, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?,” 1971, in Woman. Art, and Power and other Essays, New York: Harper and Row, 1988, p. 176. 2. Lucy Lippard, Prefaces to Catalogues of Women’s Exhibitions, (Three Parts), I. 1971, "Twenty Six Contemporary Women Artists,” in From the Center. Feminist Essays On Women's Art, New York: E. P. Dutton, 1976, p. 38. 3. Ibid. p. 44. 4. For a discussion of obstacles presented to women artists earlier in this century see Ellen C. Landau’s article “Tough Choices: Becoming a Woman Artist, 1900-1970,” and for documentation of continuing career discrimination see “Career Markers,” by Ferris Olin and Catherine Brawer, both in Making Their Mark: Women Artists Move into the Mainstream, 1970-85, New York: Abbeville Press, 1989. 5. For a selection of political actions and posters document- ing sexism and racism in the art world see Confessions of the Guerrilla Girls, New York: HarperCollins, 1995. 6. Quoted in Lucy Lippard’s, Eva Hesse. New York: NYU Press, 1976, p. 205. 8 plate I (no. 3) Magdalena Abakanowicz Incarnation Series: Magduwa, Magubi, Magdeta 1988 bronze, unique 25 in. X 25 3/4 in. X 25 in. Courtesy of Marlborough Gallery, New York photo: Robert E. Mates 9 plate II (no. 7) Maty Beth Edelson Double Agent 1995 transfer on chiffon 204 in. X 120 in. Collection of the Artist, New York plate III (no. 8) Janet Fish Maud’s Classes 1976 oil on canvas 56 in. X 44 in. Courtesy of DC Moore Gallery, New York 11 plate IV (no. n) Agnes Martin Untitled 1978 watercolor and ink on rice paper 9 in. X 9 in. Private Collection, Boston photo: Greg Heins, Boston 12 , 4 *. “'■j •. -s^’ • ' fT f plate V (no. 13) Agnes Martin Untitled # 7 1995 acrylic and graphite on canvas 60 in. X 60 in. PaceWildenstein, New York photo: Ellen Page Wilson 13 H plate VI (no. 15) Pat Steir Dark Passion Flower 1989 oil on canvas 48 in. X 144 in. Courtesy of Riverfront Office Park, Cambridge photo: Dana Salvo BURNT ORANGE GIRL plate VII (no. i8d) Carrie Mae Weems Color People Series: Burnt Orange Girl 1990 toned silver print MAGDALENA ABAKANOWICZ Magdalena Abakanowicz emerged as a powerful and rebellious artist in the 196OS when her weavings were exhibited both internationally and in her native Poland. Although sometimes misperceived as "feminine” craft, these monumental webs of coarsely woven, or rich, fleshy fabric, could stretch from ceiling to floor, hang pendulously threatening, or create mysterious environments that the viewer was seduced to penetrate. The forms were woven of startling materials — sisal, rope, hemp, flax, wool and horsehair — and, like Les Desert Rouge (no. l), the smaller-scale example in this exhibition, they could be brightly colored; but often Abakanowicz worked naturally colored material into tactile, darkly looming presences that filled gallery spaces and challenged categories of art. Abakanowicz’s Abakans are weavings and sculptures, and when produced in large scale, they become installations. In the ’yos, Abakanowicz isolated skeins of rope as a material that could span distances and assume evocative shapes. She felt rope was "like a muscle devoid of activity... an echo of the banished organic world.’” 'Rope is to me the condensation of the problem of thread, the thread composed of many fibers whose number nobody tries to establish,” Abakanowicz said in the early ’70s.’^ It is not surprising that in these years she made a few self-portraits comprised of glue-hardened threads of fibrous linen, either busts or merely the head, like the Self-Portrait (no. 2) of 1976. in the current exhibition. The threads form a floating, dense, vascular web that both suggests a mask and also stimulates the viewer to supply imaginatively the absent parts of the figure to the empty space. The cycle of bronze "anonymous” self-por- traits, called /ncarnafions, (pi. I, no. 3 a-c) evolved in the ’80s. Bronze suggests the most noble and enduring traditions of sculpture, but Abakanowicz exposed its primitive and mutative qualities. Creating a mold of her face, Abakanowicz filled it with hot wax, producing a "positive” for the final bronze casting of the porcelain mold. She interrupted the pouring of liquid molten metal into the mold, or other- wise altered the hardening process to radically simplify the features — an eye socket became a shaded hollow, lips the mere continuation of a cheek bone — and their surfaces were left rough and discolored. Recalling Mycenean funeral masks or impaled war trophies, the chins of these portrait heads are poised precariously on bronze uprights. The small scale of Incarnations (pi. I, no. 3a-c) gives no hint of the authority and monumental- ity of Heads, Seated Figures, Backs, Embryology (fig- l)- Katarsis (fig. 2), Crowds and War Games that preoc- cupied Abakanowicz in the ’70s and into the late ’80s. The Heads, made of sewn burlap stuffed with rope, stand roughly three feet tall; the Seated Figures and the simian, headless Backs are slightly larger. Embryology (fig. l) — stuffed, stitched ovoid forms in burlap and ranging in size from egg to boulder — evokes wide associations to organic forms like potatoes, stones and feces. Katarsis (fig. 2) is comprised of 33 tall, androgenous bronze figures ranged in lateral regiments at the edge of a private sculpture park near Florence. They are sexless and headless; their backs protrude while their hollow fronts expose the striations of the mold and projecting rods that are normally cut off after the casting process. Abakanowicz describes this group as "figures of man-trees, man-coffins, revealing her surrealist predilection for merging morphologies. War Games refers to huge timbers stripped of bark and bound by metal at their stumped ends. Supported horizontally by iron-frame tables, they suggest mutilated Titans, medieval projectiles, both the sword and the plowshare in giant scale. They condense nature and aggression. Where does this art come from? In theme and expression it can be related to the German artists Joseph Beuys and Anselm Kiefer; all three artists create unique and intense responses to the inarticulate horrors of the Second World War. Yet Abakanowicz’ s series of traumas probably began earlier, when her parents’ indifference drove her to seek solace in the forests surrounding the family’s country estate just outside Warsaw. Her mother preferred her older sister and had counted on Magdalena being a boy. Endowed with a hypersensitivity to nature, curious about its inner workings, privy to the folklore of servants and the romantic tales of her father, a descendant of Ghenghis Khan, Abakanowicz was acutely vulnerable when, in 1939, German tanks churned into the family estate. In 1943* drunk German soldiers shot off her mother’s right arm and mutilated her left hand as she moved to open the door to them. "The body was like a piece of fabric... it could be torn apart with ease,” Abakanowicz realized. "The capable wise hand suddenly became a piece of meat, separate...! had seen dead bodies, but they somehow had always pre- served their completeness in front of others. We had to wait until the morning to go by carriage to the small town where there was a doctor. She survived in spite of a terrible loss of blood and excruciating pain. When she returned from the hospital, maimed, 1 attempted to replace for her the hand she had lost...l only wanted to make up to her for the great disappointment of my gender. 1 wanted to be both needed and loved, if only now, to attract her attention and perhaps even praise.”^ fig. 1 Magdalena Abakanowicz Embryology 1978-81 burlap, cotton gauze, hemp, rope, nylon and sisal approx. 680 pieces Collection of the Artist, Marlborough Gallery, New York no. 1 Magdalena Abakanowicz Les Desert Rouge 1984 sisal, wall hanging 53 in. X 40 in. Anne &. Jacques Baruch Collection, Ltd., Chicago photo: jerry Kobylecky no. 2 (p. 19) Magdalena Abakanowicz Self-Portrait 1976 fiber & glue 108 3/4 in. X 84 3/4 in. X 60 3/4 in. Anne &, Jacques Baruch Collection, Ltd., Chicago photo: Jerry Kobylecky 21 Abakanowicz and her family fled their home in advance of the Soviet army and went to Warsaw, where the artist worked in a hospital caring for the wounded. She completed her high school education there, and, between 1950 and I 954 > attended the repressive Academy of Fine Arts, where adherence to Social Realism was required. After graduation, and in secret, she returned to the Academy at night to execute her own abstract "rain forest” paintings on bed sheets that she had sewn together. Their formats were huge, as large as the subsequent three-dimensional weavings that attracted critical acclaim. fig. 2 Magdalena Abakanowicz Katarsis 1985 bronze 33 figures Collection of Ciuliano Cori photo: Arthur Starewicz Abakanowicz’s art has been concerned with surviving war and the Communist regime in Poland; it is not ostensibly concerned with feminist issues, although vulnerability, fertility, gender ambiguity, the textures and interior spaces of the body and an identifica- tion with nature are implicit. Primarily, the art of Magdalena Abakanowicz ties aggressor to victim by building military regiments of decapitated androgyns, and it finds sympa- thies between seemingly distinct genera, like human tissue and fabric, felled trees and war amputees. Up until now, it has not expressed even a "skeptical, wounded, vigilant” utopia- nism;® but since the demise of the Soviet Union, it may be moving optimistically in that direction. In the current exhibition. Six Small Figures on a 5/11(1992) (no. 4) seems lighter in mood. The burlap, resin and wood sculpture is part of Abakanowicz’s series called iJcg'os?;/ and Sages. There adults or children sit or stand poised on wood beams that suggest that the ground might shift. Today in Warsaw it has. Notes 1. Barbara Rose, Magdalena Abakanowicz. New York: Marlborough Gallery and Harry N. Abrams, 1994, p. 41. 2. Ibid. 3. Quoted in Michael Brenson, Magdalena Abakanowicz's Sculpture of Enchantment, Exhibition Catalogue, Marlborough Gallery, 1993, p. 5-6. 4. Todd Brewster, “Art of Anguish," Life, May 1984, p. 120. 5. Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Magdalena Abakanowicz, New York: Abbeville Press, 1982, p. 27. 6. Michael Brenson Lecture at the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture, April 22, 1992, p. 4, no. 4 Magdalena Abakanowicz Six Small Figures on a Slit 1992-93 burlap, resin & wood 74 3/4 in. X 104 1/2 in. X i6 1/8 in. Courtesy of Marlborough Gallery, New York 22 AN INTERVIEW WITH MAGDALENA ABAKANOWICZ BY MARIANNE LAFRANCE MLF. As a research psychologist, I have studied how people use their bodies to inten- tionally and unintentionally indicate who a person is, their feelings and modes of relat- ing. From my perspective, people need to use another person’s gestures and expressions as a way to get "inside” a person’s head. Your concave figures, such as Seated Figures and Standing Figures, appear to reflect this concept. Could you describe how you came to produce sculptures of bodies that look like cross- sections of human forms, and effectively impel viewers to look "inside?” MA. We perceive works of art as well as other situations to which we are confronted with our entire bodies. I address myself to people’s intellectual [interests] as well as feelings and emotions, to the unconscious and imagination. .. [For example] the Seated Figures, shell-like negatives of the bulk of the human body... deal with the problem of containing and enclosing. The cycles touch upon the question of empty space which can be filled by means of our imagination and with the sphere of the palpable, the rigid, which is an incomplete trace of our body’s adherence to its material surroundings. MLF. Your Faces Which are Not Portraits capture something universal about human faces. Your fiber self-portraits are, on the other hand, individual and particular. Could you describe what is the essence of the human face, that is, what is it that makes a human face human? MA. The faces have their origin in my own face, in impressions taken in soft material. Warm, liquid wax blurs the actual features and creates new ones, capturing them as it solidifies suddenly. What remains are details of skin, a lip, an eyelash, unexpectedly literal. The wax disfigures, as does the passing of time... [The impression reveals] [m]any existences side by side, together with experiences etched into the skin. 1 look with surprise at what 1 remove from my face, what yields to my fingers. 1 strengthen the film of wax with gauze and canvas to preserve the important details. My face comes between the whirl of my thoughts and emotions, and the people who look at me, to whom 1 speak. The faces of Incarnations [pi. I, no. 3a-c] unveil elements of the inner chaos hidden behind the living face. MLF. All of your figurative sculptures deliberately lack clear gender differentiation, yet, if I had to judge, they appear more male-like than female-like. Do your figures have a gender? MA. Each form is a set of meanings, and as a set of meanings it is true. Nothing should be translated into concrete terms, reduced to a single plane of reference. This would annihilate the form as a tool of cognition My whole work is metaphoric, so are also the figures, which are neither dressed nor undressed, never literal like shadows or bark fallen off a tree, or... fallen off a mummy. 24 MLF. Several series, including Becalmed Beings, Katarsis [fig. 2], all four versions of Crowd, consist of a large number of similar but not identical figures arranged in the same space. Frequently, the arrangements suggest depersonalization and de-individu- alization; sometimes they seem to convey a sense of community or congregation. Could you describe how you use the spaces between the figures as well as their orienta- tion to express how people relate to each other in collectives? MA. It is almost repulsive to feel another human being so close as to be a physical threat. A human being turned into a crowd loses his human qualities. A crowd is only a thousand times duplicated copy, a repetition, a multiplication. Among such a great number, one person is extremely close and at the same time terribly distant. 1 summoned solitude and finally escaped inside myself. I have been born as one of the crowd. TTiis is a situation for life. One cannot revolt against it, as we cannot fight against our own face which is grown into us or against inborn instincts. Being aware of my dissimilarity, 1 wish to escape from the herd. Many would like to do the same. But we immerse in the crowd like a grain of sand in the friable sands. MLF. Are you a feminist? MA. 1 do not feel to be a feminist. Each person is a mixture of genes of both genders. 1 was all my life with my husband and broth- er. 1 worked with various museum directors while exhibiting. 1 never felt that there is a difference between me and men in execution of my art, and its perception by the public. MLF. Your art has included abstract fiber articles, human forms cast in bronze, and stone wheels and wood trunks. Could you describe how your work has evolved through the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s. MA. Whe n 1 look back [over the last three decades] 1 think 1 worked all the time around the same problem[s], 1 only expressed them through different materials, media. It was always metaphoric, concerning human condition in very general terms. At the very beginning of every creative pro- cess, whether it is science or art, is mystery. One of the strongest motives of our time is the search for explanation, the need to explain everything away. Explanation is one of the means to tame the mystery of art. Talking about mystery has become indecent. Many people consider it as pure mystification or lack of intelligence. They want to identify mystery with a problem and a problem is something which can be reduced into details susceptible to explanation. Mystery cannot be reduced to details. It is a whole which embraces us. MLF. What do you want to say about your work that these questions have not addressed? MA. In everything I do... the constant factor and permanent necessity is to search for and reveal secrets inherent in structure, the structure being the phenomenon which all the organic world on our planet has in common, this mystery which can never fully be revealed MARY BETH EDELSON ALSTON CONLEY, BOSTON COLLEGE Throughout her career, Mary Beth Edelson has made her feminist beliefs the subject of her art. In the ’ 70 s, her creative activities were many and diverse, including performances she referred to as "private rituals created alone and usually outdoors,”' and that she documented with time-lapse photography. She also made 'public rituals often performed with others and presented to an audience”^ in a gallery with re- lated drawings, photographs and sculpture. The objects served as both props and environment for the group performance, and later remained as a haunting installation. The ritual perfor- mances centered on creating an archetypal Great Goddess mythology as a way to overcome the then-current cultural stereotypes of women as powerless. Reinventing the rituals of worshipping ancient fertility and earth goddesses allowed Edelson to recast women in politically and spiritually powerful roles. In the private ritual series Woman Rising, J973~74> Edelson uses manipulated photographs of her naked body rising from the earth. By obscuring her face in some images, she presents not a self-portrait, but an archetypal female image, a universal Goddess. Edelson declares the female body "is not a nude tantalizer, but powerful and wild, with self-generating energy.”^ In related works from this series, Edelson directs her con- frontational gaze at the viewer, refusing to avert her eyes. The gesture is "meant to signify the inherent power of women’s naked bodies, and to deny centuries of male manipulation of it;”'*^ she means this work to reclaim the female body from the "male gaze.”® Woman Risinghas been associated with Body Art and her public rituals with Performance Art, both new forms free of histories of male domination, and thus accessible to feminist artists to define as their own. Refuting recent post-feminist criticism, Amelia Jones states that women’s Body Art, "encompass[es] both the sensual and conceptual, ...trouble the exclusionary value systems of art history and criticism by refusing the prohibition of pleasure.”^ Edelson performs shamanistic transformation in Up from the Earth, R^kjavik, Iceland, 1979’ another private ritual in which a draped figure rises from the barren ground to a standing position and claims, "I separate myself from the awesome unyielding landscape of hardened lava without trees to establish my own nature.”® The trans- formation from rock-to-woman, a feminist creation myth, parallels the male-centered creation myth of man-from-clay. The private ritual titled Fire Flights in Deep Space in an Indian Cave, California 1977’ (no. 5 ) is documented by three time-lapsed photographs depicting a figure in motion near an ancient grinding stone; circular shapes of light/fire hover nearby. "During Fire Flights my body became light as I drew on the energy of the Mountains,”® Edelson has said. In these later private rituals the role of the shaman is to "promote healing, spiritual ecstasy and transformation,”'® a political act that invades the previously all-male territory of direct spiritual connection to the sacred. The Storii Cathering Boxes (no. 6), composed of wooden boxes divided into four quadrants and set on tables, reveal another aspect of Edelson’s 27 no. 6 (p. 26) Mary Beth Edelson Story Gathering Boxes 1972-present mixed media: enamel table, painted stool, wooden boxes, paper tablets, pens 38 in. X 40 in. X 25 in. Collection of the Artist, New York 28 work. Each quadrant contains paper tablets with titles denoting different themes, and to which the audience contributes stories, thus participating in the artwork. An on-going project, the Story Gathering Boxes (no. 6) has been installed on numerous occasions since 1972 , once as part of a wall-drawing/painting installation seen in the 1975 A. 1. R. Gallei'y exhibit in New York, and again in the 1988 Dear Correspondent exhibition at the Mendel Art Gallery in Saskatchewan, Ganada. The installations challenge the division between art and audience, object and experience, being "explicitly critical of the art gallery’s perceived role in a process of market valida- tion. It questions the artwork as a discreet containable object while affirming it as a provocative idea and cautionary tale, an affirmation of both marginalized experience and symbolic language.”" These installations function as "storytelling with ritualistic and transformative purpose.”'^ In the ’ 90 s Edelson uses recent cinematic images of women. An image from the movie Gloria, of Gena Rowlands aiming a pistol at the camera-audience, is silk-screened onto double bed sheets and pillow cases (fig- 5)- The multiple images become a sculptural installation. The image of power, aggression and confrontation associated with men and weaponry is transferred to a woman in the no. 5 Mary Beth Edelson Fire Flights in Deep Space 1977 black and white silver print triptych, 21 in. x 21 in. each Collection of the Artist, New York SOME LIVING AMERICAN WOMEN ARTISTS fig- 3 Mary Beth Edelson Some Living American Artists’ Last Supper 1972 offset poster Collection of the Artist, New York photo: Mary Beth Edelson 30 context of the bedroom and sexual politics. In another version, the image is silk- screened onto an apron; a symbol of female domesticity is transformed into one of power. Edelson’s appropriation and recontextualization of media images to give them new meaning may reflect her frustra- tion at the reinterpretation of her own images from the '70s. "Acknowledging from the outset the deficiencies of any single image to encompass the totality of feminine experience, to contrast the shooter of the ’90s with the manifestations of the Goddess of the ’70s is to contrast, metaphorically, two period explorations of female identity and representation.”'^ Notes 1. Quoted in Shape Shifter: Seven Mediums, ed., Mary Beth Edelson. New York: Mary Beth Edelson, 1990, p. 44. 2. Ibid. 3. Quoted in Seven Cycles: Public Rituals, ed., Mary Beth Edelson. New York: Mary Beth Edelson. 1980, p. 17. 4. Mary Beth Edelson, “Objections of a ‘Goddess Artist,’” in The New Art Examiner, April 1989, p. 36. 5. This interpretation has been disputed by post-feminist criticism. For example, please see the 1988 lecture by Thomas McEvilley entitled “Currents and Crosscurrents in Feminist Art” given at the Artemisia Gallery in Chicago. 6. Post-feminist criticism, using a “nature/culture” dichotomy, asserts that the ’70s Goddess and Body Art is complicit with male constructs of women as objects of the male gaze. 7. Amelia Jones, “Postfeminism, Feminist Pleasures, and Embodied Theories of Art,” in New Feminist Criticism: Art, Identity, Action, New York: Icon Editions, Harper Collins, 1994, p. 28. 8. Quoted in Shape Shifter: Seven Mediums, p. 57-58. 9. Ibid. 10. Edelson, “Objections of a ‘Goddess Artist,”’ p. 35. 11. Matthew Teitelbaum, “Ways of Seeing: Dear Correspondent,” in Seven Sites: Paintings on the Wall, ed., Mary Beth Edelson. New York: Mary Beth Edelson, 1988, n.p. 12. Ibid. 13. Quoted by jan Avagikos, “No Reverse Gear” in Firsthand: Photographs by Mary Beth Edelson 1973-1993 and Shooter Series, ed., Mary Beth Edelson. New York: Mary Beth Edelson, 1993, p. 7. fig- 4 Mary Beth Edelson Crapceva Neolithic Cave, See For Yourself 1977 silver print Collection of the Artist, New York 31 AN INTERVIEW WITH MARY BETH EDELSON JENNIFER S. CRINNELL )G. In a 1990 interview with Mel Watkin for your catalogue. Shape Shifter: Seven Mediums, you describe, at length, the variety of issues and ideas that have informed your work for almost three decades.' Although you state that there is no one philosophy that embraces your thinking or art. do you think that there is a common content or theme that has emerged from your work over the past three decades? MBE. I would say that the sound-bite answer to that question is that a common content found in my work is to glorify women. By glorifying women, 1 have placed them in a context, that, at least for the jOs, was denied women. To glorify is to magnify, to make visible — glorification is an in-your- face strategy for presenting women as subject matter. By visualizing women in ways that our culture did not encourage, specifically in positions of power, women become the grand subject. )G. Would you comment on your consistent use of humor to help make accessible your serious goals? MBE. I used humor in my art work even in high school. Later, I realized its political power, and humor became part of my feminist strategy. Unlike language, humor does not, as they say, "belong to the patriar- chy,” and therefore, it has the possibility of breaking that hold and catching people off-guard. After all, humor gives people the pleasure of laughter, as well as feeling part i (' ]' 1 , of an inner circle — of "getting it.” And, also, because this is feminist humor, there is that added pleasure of balancing off all those sexist, dirty jokes about women with your own brand of humor. My best known work, entitled Some Living American Women Artist's Last Supper [fig. 3 ]> L 3 spoof or a joke on the patriarchy. When I first printed the poster in 1972, 1 can’t really say how many people got more than just the delight of seeing women take the place of men in an important historical painting. Today, this poster is more controversial than ever, because they do get the challenge to organized religion to include women on all levels, all the way to the top. )G. At what point in your life did you begin to identify as a feminist? Did the women’s movement in the 197OS radicalize your art, or did you engage the women’s movement because it was sympathetic to the issues and concerns already present in your work and life? MBE. The moment I heard the term femi- nism, I was in heaven! While some feminist concerns were present in my work of the ’60s, those concerns were arrived at through intuition. I could not have then articulated or elaborated on the work’s feminist mean- ing. For example, in my ’6os painting of the Madonna and Child entitled Godhead, the Madonna’s head is substituted in this paint- ing with a series of concentric circles. I also 32 produced other paintings of women together in the ’60s, but they were not communicat- ing. They were isolated, daydreaming — there was an attitude of expectancy. In some of these ’60s paintings, the women looked like they were reaching out to one another, but the gestures were incomplete. These early works anticipated the more head-on, focused works of the 197OS. And with the feminist movement, finally there was a way to explain this huge part of myself. The feminist movement of the ’70s did radicalize my art, fueled by a personal experi- ence that I had. My daughter was legally kidnapped by my ex-lawyer husband, and in spite of being a good mother, the courts took her away from me. It was an awakening that coincided with the awakening of the feminist movement that radicalized me. Not that I was a shrinking violet before that moment, but those two events came together as a wake- up call that radicalized my art. I will forever be in debt to the feminist movement for articulating our issues and doing it with such brilliance, as well as the demonstrations and actions that changed our world. |G. What is your formal relationship to the movement now? MBE. I was very active in the Women’s Active Coalition (WAC), and, when it fizzled out, I wanted to continue with the issues that I was particularly concerned with at WAC, and that’s when I started Combat Zone: Campaign Against Domestic Violence. Combat Zone has taken many forms, includ- ing a store front that provided domestic violence services situated within an art installation. About 30 women have worked with me on the Combat Zone project, most notablyjanet Henry. My current Combat Zone project is a book that I have compiled of domestic violence statistics that will include art work on the subject. It will be published by Bill Bartman of A.R.T. Press. When released, free copies will be sent to domestic violence centers, agencies and the media. )G. The Stoiy Gathering Boxes [no. 6 ] that you have been displaying and creating since 1972 record the present social, political, cultural and personal concerns of your audiences nationwide. You ask the audience to partici- pate in the creation of the boxes through writing their personal stories, producing a cross between "object” and "performance” art. Could you describe how story-gathering boxes bridge the gap or break dovm the boundaries between object and performance? MBE. TTie boxes, in part, were my rebellion against the implied message of galleries that you are to look but not touch. You are welcome to breeze through the exhibition, but not linger. You are to stand but not to sit. And that the exhibiting artist is the know- it-all, and that you are the know-nothing. The other part was to simply collect stories from people that, as you mention in your question, record political, cultural and social concerns worldwide. Participation was a key element of my performances, and the story-gathering boxes, started in 1972. pre- dated my public performances and had already begun to bridge the gap between artist and other, as well as object and the gallery go-er, through the act of participation. JG. A 1993 by essay by Jan Avgikos for your catalogue FirstHand: Photographs J 973 “ ^993 and Shooter Series discusses the visual paradigms embodied by the 197OS Great Goddess and 199OS Shooter Series, [no. 7]^- In this essay, you are quoted as saying "the rituals I performed in the ’70s, while addressing political issues of the day (e.g. women as priests in the Catholic Church, and the treatment of women in organized religion in general), still occupied mythic space in order to pull up their power... but another transformation has taken place, a transformation away from mythic space into real time.”^ My ques- tions are: How would you define "mythic space?” What brought about this transforma- tion? How has this transformation from mythic space to real time effected your use of "primal levels of consciousness” or the shamanic experiences and your art-making? fig- 5 Mary Beth Edeison Untitled: Pillowcases and Bedsheets 1992 silk screened sheets and pillow cases on double bed Collection of the Artist, New York photo; Mary Beth Edeison MBE. I’m going to answer this as succinctly as I can. "Mythic space” is timeless space; the space of profound fairy tales, if you will. The narration of life passages told, in the language of the grand and the layered, and then related to the history of our conscious- ness. "Mythic space” allowed for projecting a history that wasn’t there but could be imag- ined and recalled through creative invention. What was not manifested in mythic space is the present. The transformation of "mythic space” to real time was psychological for me. I came to accept things the way they were, and to find that exhilarating. Primal levels of consciousness and shamanic experiences belong to mythic realms, but they can visit us in real time — usually on weekends JG. Given your earlier concerns with women’s positions in organized religion, what are your thoughts about participating in an exhibition at a Catholic andjesuit university museum? MBE. Well, my first response to that is, "thanks for telling me!” (they both laugh) I once gave a lecture at Notre Dame and, if it had been the middle ages instead of the 1970s, certain members of the audience would have erected a stake, and lit a match to me! (they both laugh) My thoughts about participating in your exhibition are that I welcome the opportunity to get my work out. ) G. Underlying your work is a direct challenge to current historical constructions of gender. Can you give an example in your work where you challenge historical constructions of race, class or ethnicity? MBE. I prefer the term "privileged” over "class” because it’s a more fluid term. "Privileged” is a term which refers to people who have access,” and allows the discussion to include heterosexual privilege, physical privilege, and so forth, as well as economic and social privilege. 34 One example in my work where I challenge historical constructions of race is a series of drawings of women’s heads. The features in these drawings were very consciously Black, Asian and White. 1 then colored the white- featured faces black, the Asian faces white, and, in other words, matched skin color with unexpected features. Uniformly, people couldn’t get beyond skin color, and inter- preted the race of each face based on color rather than dominant racial features. |G. In the 1970*1 were well known for your private ritual performances based on the archetype of the Great Goddess, such as Fire Flights in Deep Space [no. 5] and Grapceva Neolithic Cave, See For Yourself (l 977 )- In the 1980s you worked in several mediums, notably large-scale wall paintings such as Track Fires (1986) and Networking (1989). The 199OS 5 /ioofcr Senes [pi. II, no. 7. fig- 5] plays with a taboo, albeit, prolific cinematic archetype. What new possibilities for female identity do you imagine your work has cre- ated for women over the past three decades? MBE. The ’70s Private Rituals provided me with a creative way to act out my experimentation with constructing spiritual life that included my body. They were an exorcism of the patriarchal hold over my body and spiritual practice. This process also constructed a contemporary female identity — with a history provided by Goddess. The ’80s wall paintings were about a process — although that process is not visible in the end product. I painted the first of the wall paintings by myself. However, this activity soon became a community process, a participatory collaboration which reinforced or built communities around the country. I gained communication skills that a studio artist doesn’t always possess, and then passed those skills onto other women. The practice of these skills encouraged constructing female identity as an authority figure who shaped and staged her own community. It was an activist-constructed identity. The Shooter Series [pi. II, no. y, fig. 5] deals with the treatment of women through the decades in films when they have a gun in their hand. I view the gun as a metaphor for power and not for violence, and the phallus as a signifier of power rather than as a physical penis. That power automatically redefines the status of "victim” with which women are often saddled; a gun in her hand signals that she is protecting herself, that she is not easy prey. Isolating women from the film itself gives me the opportunity to not only highlight their specificity, but also to project another text on them — a text more to my liking. My narrative re-scripts the film’s message and presents my own story board: the shooters are autonomous, freed from the patriarchal story, and, in collaboration with the viewer, make up their own story as they go along. This series also plays with the tension between concealing and revealing because it is on transparent chiffon — a fabric associated with veiling, concealing and masking — stereotypes of feminine duplicity and deception. The viewer, however, can walk around the chiffon installation and view it from the other side. There is nothing to hide. There are no secrets — only the project of re-scripting the story, and representing the subject. ' Mel Watkin, "A Lifelong Process. Interview with Mary Beth Edelson by Mel Watkin," in Shape Shifter Seven Mediums, ed., Mary Beth Edelson. New York: Mary Beth Edelson, 1990, p. 7 - 9. ^Jan Avgikos, “No Reverse Gear,” FirstHand: Photographs 7973-7993 and Shooter Series, ed. Mary Beth Edelson. New York: Mary Beth Edelson, 1993, p. 5 - 15. ’Ibid., quoted by Jan Avgikos, p. 8. 1 JANET FISH KATHERINE NAHUM Janet Fish has not lost her passion for articulate edge from the time she studied sculpture and printmaking with Leonard Baskin at Smith College during the late fifties. Yet Fish went on to become an abstract expressionist painter at Yale University where, by 1963' she had earned both bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Fine Arts. Now both Fish’s drawing and the remnants of her abstraction submit totally to color and light; Fish is a painterly realist who concentrates on the depiction of clustered, reflective and translucent domestic objects that might be considered feminine. These objects, placed in the foreground against figures and sometimes landscape, denote the realm of women while seeming to eschew any ostensible political content. The expression of their meaning for women is both subtle and complex, and under- stood through artistic concerns. The mutative action of light as it moves through space and encounters the surfaces of objects and figures that Fish has selected seems ultimately to embody a woman’s vision. Fish says that her "primary subject is light [and] the manner in which it transforms appearances, altering color and atmosphere, shattering and reordering forms.’’’ Her subject might be explained by her childhood in Bermuda, where life was throvm into high relief by the peculiarly intense light reflected by the sea. Fish became a strong figpire in ’70s realism, a movement that was comprised primarily of male artists including her Yale teacher, Alex Katz. For some artists like Fish, realism was a reaction to the theorizing and personalization of mainstream abstraction of the New York School. Fish’s unique contribution was to achieve a kind of scintillating yet subtle abstraction paradoxi- cally by depicting details of keenly observed objects with a loosened, sensuous brushstroke. Her early paintings of store-bought vegetables and fruits were three to four times life-size, and wrapped in cellophane. The oily shine of the surfaces of red peppers and the reflections in plastic wrap offered opportunities for the exploration of optics and light. Shiny surfaces and reflections were independent and abstractly interesting, so that the viewer’s response to a work such as Three Red Peppers (l 975 ) is to forget the peppers and see ambiguous grey to whites stretching over reds, a rectangle of white and yellow that is finally recognized as a price sticker. Liquor bottles, jelly jars, goblets or any glass container of variously colored liquids then became Fish’s objects of interest, because ambiguity and abstraction could be increased by the action of light against and through glass. In Maud’s Glasses (pi. Ill, no. 8 ), light both penetrates and is refracted from colorless liquids and the translucent green glasses that contain them, as they are set out on a formica surface. The reflections on formica and glass create high-keyed, abstract planes of color and odd scumblings just below the glasses’ rims. Behind, the yellow grid of a building opposite and geometric shadows of a fire escape playing over it are juxtaposed to reflection. There is no indication of a window; Fish brings these monumental glasses right up to the shadowed monument contrasting different effects of light. Definition of form has become obscure; sparkling surfaces have become abstract arrangements as Fish explores her true subject, the complexities of perception. 38 By the 1980s, Fish’s still lifes became impacted with classical fragments, candle- sticks, vases, pitchers, fruits and flowers — the elements of traditional vanitas. TTiese paintings recall 17th century Dutch masters’ obsession with optics and life’s brevity; they recall surrealist juxtaposition as well. The implicit narrative of Fish’s paintings is muted — ^when it is not downright funny. Scat (fig. 6) depicts a cat caught leaping from a dining table laden with food and drink. Candlestick and milk pitcher have been overturned. This must be a joking enactment of Vermeer’s d Girl Asleep (fig- 7), for both involve interruption, fleeing figures and overturned vessels. Thus, it is a reversal of the stasis implied in still life. Scat v/as Fish’s contribution to a collaborative exhibition, an experiment, really, whereby four objects were circulated among four women who each based her own highly individual painting on them. The point was to demonstrate how objects are misperceived as merely literal subjects and how their representation can suggest myriad meanings.* During the ’8os, human figures — adults and children — became important elements to be compared to Fish’s still life in the fore- ground. Still life, figure, and then landscape, were overlaid to correlate them in meaning and in their responsiveness to brilliant light. Fish seems to be questioning traditional visual hierarchies, or at least setting out her own visual order of things. In the fore- ground of Feeding Caitlin (no. 9), a vase of poppies and iris stretches the height of the canvas. A teething ring, watermelon and no. 10 janet Fish Snowstorm 1996 oil on canvas 50 in. X 56 in. Private Collection, New Jersey photo: Beth Phillips, 1996 fig. 6 janet Fish Scat 1986 oil on canvas 58 in. x 85 in. photo by janet Fish, courtesy of DC Moore Gallery, New York no. 9 (p. 36) janet Fish Feeding Caitlin 1988 oil on canvas 54 1/4 in. X 70 1/4 in. Courtesy of DC Moore Gallery, New York photo: Zindman/ Fremont 39 toys surround it on a table. The eye moves to the tanned arms of a young woman who spoon feeds Caitlin in her high chair; behind, a hatted woman stands at the ready with a napkin. The reds and blues of flowers and shiny running shorts, the sensuous fig- 7 Johannes Vermeer (1632-75) A Maid Asleep c. 1657 oil on canvas The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Bequest of Benjamin Altman, 1913 (14.40. 6n) New York. textures of flesh, poppies and straw, the sense of taste that the pursed mouths of both Caitlin and the young woman demonstrate, mirroring each other, are all exposed by the play of light. Behind the figures, light is less reflective at the surface of the pond and is absorbed by the muted, rolling Vermont hills. Fish makes dense and complex her contemporary vanitas that addresses the sense of taste as de Heem might, but Fish articulates a psychological engagement of her figures, as de Fleem would not. The comparison between flowers, feeding, girls and women, and landscape is explicit; Fish seems to run the gamut through depicted space from edgy, precise feminine symbol to one that is generalized. Fish’s paintings in the ’90s present fruit- filled jars, artichokes, glasses and goblets, all enlarged and vitalized objects scrutinized close at hand, while behind them, a deep perspective contains figures and/or land- scape. While Feeding Caitlin (no. 9) depicted these elements in Vermont where Fish spends half the year. Snowstorm (no. lo), in the current exhibition, records her New York life. A snowbound Soho appears ambiguously beyond Fish’s studio window. A few tiny figures can be discerned milling about in the new snow. Brilliant orange cosmos are set in contrast to this distant view, while a strange, translucent pink and yellow shape, entirely abstract, rises up into the background on the right. What is it? Monumental still life objects take up most of the foreground: the cosmos in a vase, lemons, ornate silver dishes and trays, refracting pinks, blues and yellows; and then we realize that the abstract shape is colored cellophane; it is caught under a silver plate and rises up, linking foreground to background, linking representation to abstraction. Fish’s paintings require more than our gaze; they require our scrutiny. Notes 1. Quoted by Judith E. Stein and Ann-Sargent Wooster, “Making Their Mark," in Randy Rosen and Catherine C. Brawer, Making Their Mark: Women Artists Move into the Mainstream, igjo-Ss, New York; Abbeville, 1989 2. See Thomas Bolt, “Four Objects, Four Interpreta- 40 tions,” in American Artist, Vol. 51 (July, 1987), 28-31. fig. 8 Janet Fish Herb Tea 1995 oil on canvas Collection of Smith College, Museum of Art, MA photo by Janet Fish, courtesy of DC Moore Gallery, New York 41 AN INTERVIEW WITH JANET EISH BY MARY A. ARMSTRONG MA. H ow did your experience at Smith, a woman’s college, affect your beginnings as an artist? ) F. You know. I’m not sure that it did, because I came from a family of artists — my mother was a sculptor and my grandfather was a painter. I wanted to go to art school, but I went to Smith instead because it had art. It was one of the few colleges at the time that I applied to that did. MA. Your mother being an artist answers all kinds of questions of your becoming a woman artist, because you had a role model right in your family. ) F. Yeah, then I also worked as an apprentice to a sculptrice in Bermuda, Billie Lang, when I was in my teens. I worked in her studio in return for lessons. MA. Was it a natural evolution into painting from sculpture? J F. No, I was going to be a sculptor, but when I went to Yale, I took one look at the sculpture department and decided to go into painting. It was kind of Bauhaus, run by Bob Ingman; it was very formal and structured, using modules, so I went to the other department, which was more free form. MA. When you switched to the painting department at Yale, who were your teachers? ) F. Well, we had a lot of teachers who came and went, because Yale was in a state of tran- sition at the time. Though I didn’t have him as a teacher for very long, I liked Alex Katz. MA. What influenced you to make that transition from abstract painting to representational still lifes? ) F. Well we were studying De Kooning a lot, he was a hot artist. I felt like Yale and Smith were both really intellectual environments. I felt I knew a lot of theory. So I was up at the Skowhegan School in Maine and I was trying to do these paintings, and I just felt like I was pushing paint around, they didn’t mean anything. So Alex Katz came through for the weekend, and he said, "Oh, why don’t you just relax for the summer and paint some landscapes?” Those moving words made all the difference. So anyway, I tried that and began working very much out of people like David Park and Deibenkorn. M A. You had seen them in books? J F. Yeah, Elmer Bishoff was teaching there that summer, and though I didn’t really have a lot to do with him, it fit in with that whole interest in the California artists. 42 M A. Were there women teaching that summer? I F. Not really, 1 mean there weren’t a lot of women teaching when 1 was in school. MA. That’s a pretty clear statement. Your still lifes seem to celebrate a sensuously tangible world, drawing attention to the complex beauty of albeit quite exotic domes- tic objects, spaces and situations. How were these dominantly feminine worlds in your paintings connected to the growing consciousness of women artists, particularly in the ’ 70 s as it involved a resurgence of gender- related image making? ) F. 1 actually don’t think that the choice of subject matter had anything to do with the women’s movement, because 1 really started doing that as a way of getting away from the theory at school. When 1 was in New York on my own, 1 didn’t really know too many people the first year so 1 was pretty isolated. 1 was simply trying to work in a reductive way, in order to establish what 1 was interested in. And I think 1 had more internal reasons for picking these things than theoretical. MA. Were the first things bottles? )F. Well, 1 started off with just large vegetables, then 1 moved on to packages with ■wrapped plastic. From that 1 got interested in reflections and light. Thus 1 defined my in- terest to be movement and energy. I haven’t really used as much glass through the years. M A. It sounds like you really were good at optical painting at that point, putting the theories aside and really using your eyes in a very intense way. ) F. Well it was that, also just feeling out what my own personal attitudes were to painting, and what were my interests. So it wasn’t just analyzing what 1 saw, [it] was also how 1 would interpret it. 1 really just wanted to forget the theories. 1 had a lot of it at two good col- leges, but I felt that there was still something very false in all of that. So 1 wanted to go more on my gut feelings, on each individual issue. MA. 1 hesitate to relate that to gender although it is a temptation. ) F. Yes, it’s hard to know, because when 1 started there wasn’t the women’s movement. We really weren’t too encouraged, nor were there job opportunities for us. It wasn’t like you were being encouraged to go in any particular direction. MA. Do you consider yourself a feminist, and how has being a woman affected your career? J F. Well 1 am a feminist, but not in thinking that 1 have to adhere to a particular kind of subject matter. I’m a feminist, I mean naturally, because I think women are just as smart. I think that as far as it affected my career, it made it harder for me to get a job. You didn’t automatically get respect the way the guys did in school. And then getting out, there were not teaching jobs at that time. So I was forced to get any old kind of part-time job, which a lot of people have to do now, just because there aren’t jobs. But it probably made me more independent because when people were condescending to me, I thought they were jerks. MA. When you were in New York in the early ’ 70 s did you participate with conscious- ness-raising groups, when women were getting together, pushing the boundaries...? )F. Ith ink the women’s movement was very important, for all of us. I didn’t really go to a lot of meetings because to me, it was pretty easy to get it. But, other than that, it was basically a personal battle, it was really just a matter of survival. MA. Could you describe for the benefit of our students some of your working methodology? For example, when setting up your still lifes, what themes dominate — formal concerns, color issues, metaphorical relationships? 43 J F. I never think that any one theme is the thing. I think there are formal concerns in all of those issues, it’s not metaphorical, but there are associational relationships. The formal issues are a part of it. 1 consider it more of a playing with a lot of different elements, and manipulating them, or work- ing them around for the painting. 1 don’t do sketches, and 1 don’t work from photos. 1 consider the still life the drawing. MA. 1 assume some take more time to set up than others? ) F. Yes, because sometimes I’ll spend a few days moving things around and come up with nothing in the end. M A. What’s interesting to me, is the differ- ence between a still life painting like Herb Tea [fig. 8] and one like Snowstorm [no. lo] with the snow scene in the background. Herb Tea looks like it was set up really with a different thought process than some of the other ones. I’m wondering if there are some still lifes that set themselves up? ) F. Maybe, 1 don’t know, 1 haven’t really thought about that. For instance when 1 set up Snowstorm, 1 think 1 was going to do a night scene out the window, but it snowed, so... M A. Could you describe the stages of your paint technique? How do you start? Where do you start? J F. I start, as I’ve told you, with the still life, with the things I’m going to work with. Then I roughly draw them in with a water-soluble pencil on the canvas. If there are any man-made objects in the still-life set ups, I want them to stand straight, so I use a pro- portional scale and a ruler, and anything else I need. If there was a particular movement that went with the painting, I might do a rough line to indicate it, to remind myself, but after that the painting’s pretty open, and I start somewhere in between everything to work out the color of the painting. MA. O n the actual painting, on the surface? ) F. Yeah, I just start painting. Then as I paint, the color changes the drawing, so that’s why I never make a really tight drawing. Because the color changes the size, the apparent size of the object. MA. Yes, it does. In a way, that answers one of my questions which is, what are the biggest surprises in your working methods? )F. Well, I do n’t know, I set something up, that will give me a situation, that I feel will carry me through the amount of time it will take me to make the painting, which could be a month. It’s not like taking a photograph; I don’t know what the painting’s gonna look like in the end, a lot of changes happen. I might take something out, or just ignore it. I just keep going with the movement or sensa- tions, of whatever the mass of the painting is. MA. It’s fascinating, because when you finish them they really seem so complete "all of a piece,” you don’t really leave your tracks there. How would you characterize the biggest change in your work over the last three decades? ) F. I probably have been slowly changing my attitude, so 1 suppose the biggest change you’d say is that I’ve let all this other kind of subject matter in. First, I used the subject matter to find my interest, which was really light and energy. Once that was established, I started moving through different kinds of subject matter. M A. Could you break that subject matter down a bit for me? ) F. Generally still lifes, because I do relate to things outside of my head, but I put in things that are happening around me. Now I sometimes do figures in landscape, or other things. I mean going from painting just a package of vegetables to painting rows of glasses, I didn’t want to keep doing that. MA. Which brings us to the ’8os, when you introduced the figure into your work. How did they come about? I F. Once I started putting in flowers and fruit, there was no reason not to put in a person. So I did. I just wanted to see if I had anything to say about a figure, and if it was interesting. It’s not always. I really only use figures, if I know the person, and have some kind of idea about them. M A. Do you believe that there is any validity in the hierarchy of figure painting over still life? ) F. Well no, I really can’t, (laughter) The hierarchy goes abstract then it goes figure... (laughter). No, I think that’s all boy talk. Boys like to rank. MA. Is psychological content more important in the figure paintings or the still lifes? J F. Not really, though it might be for the viewer, I don’t know. The figure tends to organize the space very aggressively, so that in some ways, organizing the painting is easier with a figure. But then the figure does have that content baggage, everybody is interpret- ing it, so you have to be careful, with a twist of an eye, the mouth, the gesture, every- thing, because people are so used to reading the figure. MA. We are looking at Feeding Caiflin [no. 9], and I think it’s a wonderful painting. I’m curious about the fact that almost half the painting is this huge bouquet of flowers. The table with the flowers on it, takes up about as much space as the figures. There seems to be anxiety between those flowers, those wildly energetic flowers, and the figures. ) F. Well everybody was always fussing around that baby, there was an enormous amount of tension around her and this affected the painting. That painting changed a lot, during the time I was painting, the table that was square, became round, the woman in the red hat, the mother, her pose changed several times. The landscape behind it changed, everything about it changed. MA. When you make those changes in a painting, do you wipe? Do you try, like Matisse, to get rid of what you are going to change? Like the corners of the table, did you wipe it out or sand it down? J F. I think I probably scraped at it. It’s hard for me to remember, that painting. I do whatever I have to do. So if it’s dark colors or heavy paint, I use a razor blade on it, and scrape it down and use turpentine. And if the colors are more delicate, and not so aggres- sive, sometimes I can get away with just wiping it down. MA. The work from the ’70s seems more formally restrained: the color, minimal; the mark, less aggressive. What caused you to shift from this to the more colorful and gesturally active works of the ’8os and ’90s? I F. I think it wasn’t [any] one thing that caused me [to change], it was just a develop- ment because I’ve always felt that this whole thing is more like a journey. Some people make real decisions as they go from one concept to another, but I’ve always gone from one work to another, and just felt that I was always following a train of thought. i AGNES MARTIN Agnes Martin makes restrained, nearly colorless grids that are subtly expressive, communicating exquisite emotional and meditative states. She has been identified as a Minimalist because her work is reductive, and occasionally serial, but she considers herself an Abstract Expressionist. "Art is the concrete representation of our most subtle feelings,”' she has claimed. Martin disavows any interest in gender and art,'' and she has not embraced the women’s move- ment, perhaps because she was absent from New York when feminism developed, but more likely because her self-effacing character would preclude any such involvement. Her minimalist vocabulary has occasionally been understood to reflect masculine conventions of modern- ism, but incorrectly and unjustly so, because her style is unique and hard to reconcile with strict minimalist grids ("What you see is what you see”) which dissuade the viewer from a com- plex responsiveness. Martin’s work requires it. Her late success, the result of slowly amassing a body of mature work before exhibiting it, has ensured a positive critical reception for Martin’s art that has been entirely on her own terms. ^ Martin’s work evolved from the ambiance of the New York School in the expressing a sublimity found also in the large-scale works of Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko, both of whom Martin knew. Already a graduate of its Teachers College, Martin received an MFA from Columbia University (l952)> and contin- ued dividing her time, teaching and painting, between New Mexico and New York. Betty Parson’s gallery supported her, and she was affiliated with other Parson protoges such as Jack Youngerman and Ellsworth Kelly. These artists and James Rosenquist, Robert Indiana, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg had KATHCfi/Nf mtIUM studios near her own in Coenties Slip in lower Manhattan. Martin has described ambiguously that Ellsworth Kelly "used to come for break- fast. He came every day for a year and a half to breakfast. Then he stopped all of a sudden. Didn’t come back. She knewjackson Pollock, and Ad Reinhart was a good friend. The NEIA grant that Martin was awarded in 1967 symbolically represented recognition and acceptance of her unusual work. At the same time, she had lost her beloved loft, so she used the $5,000 grant to buy a truck and a camper and left New York for good. Martin spent roughly 1 8 months traveling through the United States and Canada until she had a "vision of an adobe brick. Just the brick. And 1 thought, that means I should go to New Mexico. So I went to New Mexico.”^ Alone, she built her house and studio and other buildings on a mesa and lived in isolation; then changed her mind. "I decided that human beings are herd animals ...to live properly you stay with the herd.”^ Martin stopped making art until late 1971 - During this and later dry periods she wrote. These notes and commentaries that parallel and seem to serve as the key to the mystical character of her work have been published in various recent catalogues and books of essays.^ In 1973, a series of her prints was published® and a retrospective of her work was mounted at the Philadelphia Institute of Contemporary Art; but it was not until 1974 that Martin actually resumed painting. Her work has been formally consistent ever since, making it hard to trace stylistic changes in subsequent decades. She makes horizontal fields of pale color on a format six feet by six feet. Within the last few years, the format has been reduced to five-by- five because the larger canvases "got too heavy for me to carry alone. Martin also makes grids of rectangles that "contradict” the authority of the square canvas. Sometimes these grids traverse quite small formats; they are made with watercol- ors on paper nine or eleven inches square. The watercolor puckers the paper so that accident and contingency form an aspect of the imagery. Martin draws her grids with an eighteen- inch ruler that she moves across the larger canvases. Her line registers her freeing touch because it is not an absolutely straight line created by laying down masking tape, nor by any mechanical device that a Minimalist might use. Martin’s aesthetic is quite differ- ent from the mechanical methods and industrial finishes that characterise Minimal- ism. The recent group of five-by-five paintings contain white lines like horizons that traverse the canvas. On either side are bands or fields of color — only two — and these colors are inflected with a quivering energy and light. They are the result of what Martin terms, "wild brushstroking.” Surprisingly, these horizontal bands, a formal imperative of Martin’s work, are painted on vertically because "you can’t put it on horizontally. It would drip down.”‘° "Vision” is an operant word for Martin, for vision or inspiration generates the formal language of her paintings. Her work evolved from a responsiveness to nature, to biomorphic abstraction, thence, by the early 1960s, to utterly geometric abstraction. The paintings contain no reference to the visible world; they come forth from her mind, and constitute an egoless self expression of the awareness of an elusively sublime reality. Nevertheless, the horizontality of Martin’s work evokes the plains of childhood wheat farms in western Canada. The bare, expan- sive, straight edge of the plains pleased her; it was formally and emotionally consistent with her spare relations with her mother and beloved, attuned grandfather who allowed her freedom, and for whom she came "first.”" The paintings’ evocations of Martin’s past, their slight modulations of linear grid and bounded field create poetic, subtle feeling; they exact an exquisitely attuned response from the viewer. Notes 1. Joan Simon, “ Perfection Is in the Mind: An Interview with Agnes Martin,” Art in America, May, 1996, p. 124. 2. See Mara R. Witzling, “Agnes Martin," in Voicing Today’s Visions, New York; Universe, 1994, p. 47. 3. See Anna Chave, in Barbara Haskell, Agnes Martin, Exhibition Catalogue, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York: Abrams, 1992, for an insightful discussion of Martin's relation to the women’s movement. 4. Simon, "Perfection is in the Mind,” p. 88. 5. Ibid, p. 89 6. Ibid. 7. See especially Witzling, “Agnes Martin," p. 43-63. 8. Ibid., p. 45. 9. Simon, "Perfection is in the Mind,” p. 83. 10. Ibid., p. 84. 11. Witzling, “Agnes Martin,” p. 44. 12. Simon, “Perfection is in the Mind,” p. 124. no. 12 (p. 46) Agnes Martin Untitled #8 1984 acrylic & pencil on canvas 72 in. X 72 in. From the Collection of the late Edna S. Beron photo credit: Dana Salvo BEAUTY IS THE MYSTERY OE LIEE BY ACMES MARTIN When I think of art I think of beauty. Beauty is the mystery of life. It is not in the eye, it is in the mind. In our minds there is awareness of perfection. We respond to beauty with emotion. Beauty speaks a message to us. We are confused about this message because of distractions. Sometimes we even think that it is in the mail. The message is about different kinds of happiness and joy. Joy is most successfully represented in Beethoven’s "Ninth Symphony,” and by the Parthenon. All art work is about beauty; all positive work represents and celebrates it. All negative art protests the lack of beauty in our lives. When a beautiful rose dies beauty does not die because it is not really in the rose. Beauty is an awareness in the mind. It is a mental and emotional response that we make. We re- spond to life as though it were perfect. When we go into a forest we do not see the fallen rotting trees. We are inspired by a multitude of uprising trees. We even hear a silence when it is not really silent. When we see a newborn baby we say it is beautiful — perfect. The goal of life is happiness and to respond to life as though it were perfect is the way to happiness. It is also the way to positive art work. It is not in the role of an artist to worry about life — to feel responsible for creating a better world. This is a very serious distraction. All of your conditioning has been directed toward intellectual living. This is useless in art work. All human knowledge is useless in art work. Concepts, relationships, categories, classifica- tions, deductions are distractions of mind that we wish to hold free for inspiration. There are two parts of the mind. TTie outer mind that records facts and the inner mind that says "yes” and "no.” When you think of something that you should do, the inner mind says "yes” and you feel elated. We call this inspiration. For an artist this is the only way. There is no help anywhere. He must listen to his own mind. The way of an artist is an entirely different way. It is a way of surrender. He must surrender to his own mind. When you look in your mind you find it cov- ered with a lot of rubbishy thoughts. You have to penetrate these and hear what your mind is telling you to do. Such work is original work. All other work made from ideas is not inspired and is not art work. 49 fig- 9 Agnes Martin Untitled c. 1965 watercolor, ink and gouache on paper Photo by Ellen Page Wilson courtesy of PaceWildenstein Gallery Art work is responded to with happy emotions. Work about ideas is responded to with other ideas. There is so much written about art that it is mistaken for an intellec- tual pursuit. It is quite commonly thought that the intellect is responsible for everything that is made and done. It is commonly thought that everything that is can be put into words. But there is a wide range of emotional response that we make that cannot be put into words. We are so used to making these emotional responses that we are not consciously aware of them until they are represented in art work. Our emotional life is really dominant over our intellectual life but we do not realize it. You must discover the art work that you like and realize the response that you make to it. You must especially know the response that you make to your own work. It is in this way that you discover your direction and the truth about yourself. If you do not discover your response to your own work, you miss the reward. You must look at the work and know how it makes you feel. If you are not an artist you can make discov- eries about yourself by knowing your response to work that you like. Ask yourself; "What kind of happiness do 1 feel with this music or this picture?” There is happiness that we feel without any material stimulation. We may wake up in the morning feeling happy for no reason. Abstract or non-objective feelings are a very important part of our lives. Personal emotions and sentimentality are anti-art. We make art work as something that we have to do not knowing how it will work out. When it is finished we have to see if it is effective. Even if we obey inspiration we can- not expect all the work to be successful. An artist is a person who can recognize failure. 50 If you were a composer you would not expect everything you played to be a composition. It is the same in the graphic arts. There are many failures. Art work is the only work in the world that is unmaterialistic. All other work contributes to human welfare and comfort. You can see from this that human welfare and comfort are not the interests of the artist. He is irre- sponsible because his life goes in a different direction. His mind will be involved with beauty and happiness. It is possible to work at something other than art and maintain this state of mind and be moving ahead as an artist. The unmaterial interest in essential. The newest trend and the art scene are unnecessary distractions for a serious artist. He will be much more rewarded responding to art of all times and places. Not as art history but considering each piece and its value to him. You can’t think, "My life is more important than the work” and get the work. You have to think the work is paramount to your life. An artist’s life is adventurous. One new thing after another. I have been talking directly to artists but it applies to all. Take advantage of the awareness of perfection in your mind. See perfection in every thing around you. See if you can discover your true feelings when listening to music. Make happiness your goal. The way to discover the truth about this life is to discover yourself. Say to yourself: "What do 1 like and what do I want.” Find out exactly what you want in life. Ask your mind for inspiration about everything. Beauty illustrates happiness; the wind in the grass, the glistening waves following each other, the flight of birds, all speak of happiness. The clear blue sky illustrates a different kind of happiness and the soft dark night a different kind. There are an infinite number of different kinds of happiness. The response is the same for the observer as it is for the artist. The response to art is the real art field. Composition is an absolute mystery. It is dictated by the mind. The artists searches for certain sounds or lines that are acceptable to mind and finally an arrangement of them that is acceptable. The acceptable composi- tions arouse certain feelings of appreciation in the observer. Some compositions appeal to some and some to others. But if they are not accepted by the artist’s mind they will not appeal to anyone. Composition and acceptance by mind are essential to art work. Commercial art is consciously made to appeal to the senses which is quite different. Art work is very valuable and it is also very scarce. It takes a great deal of application to make a composi- tion that is totally acceptable. Beethoven’s symphonies, with every note composed, represent a titanic human effort. To progress in life you must give up the things that you do not like. Give up doing the things that you do not like to do. You must find the things that you do like. The things that are acceptable to your mind. You can see that you will have time to your- self to find out what appeals to your mind. While you go along with others you are not really living your life. To rebel against others is just as futile. You must find your way. Happiness is being on the beam with life — to feel the pull of life. This text was originally prepared for a lecture at The Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, on January 7, 1989, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Santa Fe, in April 1989. 51 PAT STEIR 1 ALSTON CONLEY Pat Steir studied art at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn (1956-62) with both the Abstract Expressionist Philip Guston and the figurative painter Richard Lindner. Throughout her career, Steir synthesizes contradictions into a new painting conception, as she did the contra- dictory concerns of her two teachers. Her early works, influenced by Carl Jung’s concept of archetypal symbols, were figurative and extremely subjective. As she became familiar with Navajo Sand painting and the New Mexico landscape, her images became iconic, organized in geometric space. John Cage’s randomly structured music suggested to her the possibility of a similarly unstructured space in painting. TTie search for randomness or chaos focused her on the act of painting. "I was suddenly conscious of my medium. It became one of my subjects.”' Minimal Art and Conceptual Art were the dominant schools in New York in the 196OS and early 197OS. Steir began to synthesize these concerns with her earlier interests in imagery. At this point she became "interested only in Abstract painting.”'' The black square at the center of Night Chant Series, No. 2 (no. 14) is a reference to Kazimir Malevich’s early modernist icon Black Square of 1923 - The pencil grids show the influence of Agnes Martin’s minimalist painting of the ’6os. Grids across the black square delineate the space at the top and sides. The language of painting is displayed as a catalogue of basic elements — line, value, color, texture, mark, gesture. Two irises, one painted in black, white and gray tones and another painted in color, are depicted. The iris is both image and, in this early painting, symbolic self portrait (Steir’s given name was Iris); Steir puts herself into the painting as she deconstructs its visual language. The title Night Chant refers to a Navajo ceremony used to cure schizophrenia that Steir heard while in New Mexico. "Naming the ailment, the shaman cures it.”^ For Steir, painting became a naming; a painted flower was a painted flower, a brush stroke was a brush stroke. In these paintings she synthesized con- tradictory interests in abstraction and imagery, investigating the nature of each. After 1975 Steir began to move away from painting as a thought process — an investigation of the self— and towards painting as an object with a history. Painting, its history and its language about seeing became her subject. She made paintings by exploring the mark-making language of Rembrandt, Manet and Courbet, and worked her way to twentieth-century artists. "My art education really only started after I decided to work through the entire history myself,”'*' to use stylistic differences in culture and history as subject matter. With this re-conceptualization of her work, Steir made paintings comprised of multiple panels that juxtapose with different styles. This culminates in The Brueghel Series (A Vanitas S^le) (fig. lo) of 1982-84. in which the post-modern strategy of "quotation” is applied to a grid image of Brueghel’s Flower Piece In a Blue Vase (l 599 )- ^n Steir’s painting, divided into sixty-four rect- angles, each becomes a separate canvas painted in a different artists’ style. Steir’s sixty-four panels quote from, reinvent and lay claim to the exclusive male tradition of making art and being included in its history. Continuing along the art-historical path, Steir serialized the wave, an image having both Eastern and Western traditions, and quoted Katsushika Hokusai, Gustave Courbet and J. M. W. Turner. "Steir’s work on the theme of the wave must also be seen as involving... not so no. i6 Pat Steir Sixteen Waterfalls of Dreams, Memories and Sentiment 1990 oil on canvas 78 1/2 in. X 151 1/8 in. Collection of Joost Elffers, photo courtesy of Robert Miller Gallery, New York no. 14 (p. 52) Pat Steir Night Chant Series #2 1973 oil on canvas 84 in. X 84 in. Collection of Alvin and Barbara Krakow, Boston 54 much Romantic-era urge toward the sublime as an art-historical homage to the tradition of the sublime in Western art.”^ Some of the wave series superimpose two sources, as in The Wave after Courbet as though painted ^ Ensor (fig. Il) or in. . .Courbet as though painted ^ Monet, implying a fictional interpretation, a "historical vision” which reminds us of the precedent of artists painting from earlier pictures. Historically a tradition of styles evolves one from another, including Van Gogh’s Japonaiserie; The Tree and Bridge in the Bain, both from 1887, only 30 years later than the originals by Ando Hiroshige. Steir’s paint- ings of 1982-83 draw from both Van Gogh and the historical example of quotation. In the late ’80s, the waves evolve into water- falls. By using very liquid paint applied on a vertical canvas with a limited single brush stroke, Steir employs gravity and random drips to paint the image as well as mimic the activity of a waterfall. Steir’s waterfall paintings historically refer to both the drip paintings of the Abstract Expressionist Jackson Pollock, and Ghinese brush and ink landscapes. In the Ghinese tradition, "great painters of the past were admired and cop- ied, not to rehearse their skills but to absorb their ideals.”® Through conceptual reinven- tion and post-modern quotation, Steir lays claim to the predominately male gestural painting of the New York School. "I’ve taken the drip and tried to do something with it that the Modernists denied. The image. Notes 1. Pat Steir, in Pat Steir Paintings, Essay /Interview by Carter Ratcliff, New York: Harry Abrams, Inc., 1986, p. 17. 2. Ibid., p. 36. 3. Ibid., p. 32. 4. Ibid., p. 62. 5. Thomas McEvilley, “Pat Steir,” in Pat Steir, New York: Harry Abrams, Inc., 1995, p. 58. 6. Holland Cotter, Pat Steir, New York: Robert Miller Gallery, 1990, n.p. 7. Pat Steir from “A Conversation with Brook Adams,” in Pat Steir: Elective Affinities, New York: Robert Miller Gallery, 1992, n.p. 55 AN INTERVIEW WITH PAT STEIR BY ALSTON CONLEY AC. In your Carter Ratcliff interview, speaking about your twenties, you stated that you "hadn’t resolved your questions about being female and being an artist.” What has been the relationship between those two issues? PS. When I was in my teens and twenties, the question of a career was posed as a choice between having a career versus having a family. My father had gone to art school and had hoped to be an artist, but he was easily discouraged and before long gave up the idea. He told me many times that since he, a man, could not manage a career as an artist, how could I, a woman, ever expect to do so? Also, my parents felt, as many did, that a woman’s place was in the home. They thought that becoming a professional in any field but especially as an artist would rob me of my femininity. When I was in school and long afterward until this day, I have met many people who think the same way as my parents did. I have met time and time again, those who feel that any woman cannot be as bright or good at work as any man can be, and that one who is as good as any man, or is better than any man, or tries hard with all her might, is somehow not a woman at all and should be punished for getting "too big for her boots,” that that woman is a bitch for having big desires, and so on. When women are very hard on each other in this way, it is a form of self hatred. However, I am a woman and 1 am an artist. I’ve gotten older and I see the glass ceiling getting closer and closer. I con- tinue to push against it with all my strength. 1 love making paintings. AC. Do you regard yourself to be a feminist? PS. Yes. AC. Has feminism been important to you or your career? PS. Yes, feminism has been important to me and to my career. In 1969. I nret a group of women who were starting a consciousness- raising group. I joined them, we were all artists or young curators. Soon after I met other young woman artists, we all started to show our work at once in the early ’70s. We were all feminists, it was a happy time for me. We all felt it was at the beginning of a new era. The feminist movement made it possible to begin to show my work when I did. AC. The painting Night Chant Series, No. 2 tno. 14] from 1972 in the exhibit was from a period when you’ve said painting was for you a way of naming, of exploring language, a research. Can you elaborate? PS. My early paintings contain a lot of sign and word comparisons, I felt 1 was exploring language in general, as well as beginning to investigate a pictorial language of my own. ! ■i 56 AC. In the late ’70s while living in Europe your work’s subject became art history, art’s ability to define one’s vision. Can you describe a personal instance of this? PS. Living in Amsterdam, I realized the difference between the old and the new worlds. I began to understand that awareness is the result of a chain of events, a process, and only rarely is insight the result of an isolated explosive moment of thought or action done by a single person. AC. Th is is when your work became interested in quotation? PS. It was in 197^ when I became interested in quotation. There were several reasons. First was that I thought of quotation as conceptual art, I thought of myself as a con- ceptual painter. Secondly, with my growing awareness of history, I began to think that the idea of total originality as progress, was a mistake, the obsessive idea of being the first or only one to do a thing as silly. I also use quotation as a means of self education. AC. Are the gender politics implicit in your quoting historical, predominately male artists central to your work, or is it subtext? PS. When I beg an the Brueghel Series [fig. lo], it was because I was hearing the term "post- modern” used in relation to architecture. I thought that through using an ordinary but iconic painting from the 17th century, I would not stress a special picture, that if I could find all periods of art history in the various spatial relations within the picture, that I could discover if we were in the post- modern period or not. I did not realize that the idea of the project, in itself, was a post-modern idea. I chose to use the most familiar icons of painting history to do the research because I wanted all of the artists quoted to be recognized at a glance. That was my only intention at the beginning. Of course I realized that very few women paint- ers became visible enough to be icons. This is of course a political issue and also a bitter fig. n Pat Steir The Wave Series Spring: The Wave After Coubet as Though Painted by Ensor 1986 oil on linen Collection of Paula and Richard Cohen ! I 57 pill to swallow. As 1 was working 1 realized my attempt to organize history by re-painting it was an ironic thing for a woman artist to be doing, like beating against history with a paint brush, crying "let me in. ..let me in...” And also through painting, the history becoming its owner, but 1 was not trying to re-write history as it was written, only to discover and possess it. Gender politics are a sub-text of the work, but as time passes, the scarcity of women in the actual image make gender politics an implicit, important part of the meaning of the work. AC. The Waterfall Series [no. l6] combines re-conceptualizations of both Chinese Painting and painting of the New York School. Do any of these issues dominate? PS. 1 can’t properly address this question because 1 don’t think of these as issues in competition with each other, so that one would dominate over the other. It is simply the case that there was a school of painting in eighth-century China which was not an illustration of meditation but was the actual meditation. These painters always found images in the flung-ink paintings, as 1 do. Using this technique helps me in my physical and mental state as well as furthering my investigations of painting. There is an over- lap in the way that this style of flung-ink painting looks with the way some of the New York School paintings look. AC. Are the issues of abstraction versus imagery relevant in these works? PS. Abstraction versus imagery was never the question in my work; 1 was trying to inspect the nature of abstraction. 1 was also trying to inspect the nature of imagery. AC. D o you see the artists as a neutral medium through which the conventions of an age express themselves? PS. Mostly it is true that artists are a medium for their time. Every once in a while there is an artist who turns everything upside-down and shows us a new way to see life as it is. AC. Are these paintings more engaged in Modernism than a "quotation” of it? PS. At first I thought they were a quotation and de-construction of modernism. Now, 1 think that they may be a part of a re-construction of some of the aspects of modernism that include post-modernist ideas and of the idea of abstraction. 1 feel that by going back to the roots of Japanese, and subsequently Chinese, landscape painting, that perhaps 1 will reveal to myself some aspects of modernism that have been hidden to me. I love to study and do research in slide libraries and museum basements. 1 love to use my paintings to make connections to historical ways of seeing and thinking about how things are seen. 58 fig. lo Pat Stier The Brueghel Series: a Vanitas of Style 1982-84 polychrome oil on canvas 64 panels Photo by Mary Bachman courtesy of Robert Miller Gallery, New York 59 CARRI E MAE WEEMS KATHERINE NAHUM Carrie Mae Weems, who uses both her own and others’ photographs to confront racial, social, historical, gender and identity issues, was given a camera 21 years ago, in 1976. She read The Black Photographers Annual, and for the first time saw "black people imaged photographically in a way that affirmed what 1 thought was basic about them.”' Soon after (l 977 “ 78 ) she began making documentary images of the incidents of her travels in Oregon, New York, Mexico and Fiji. She was interested in using documentary photography both as a means of conveying the human condition and as a political tool. At the time there were virtually no black women working as art photographers who could serve as models for her. Today, thanks to Feminism and the rewriting of photographic history, there are; but Weems cites only Adrian Piper as a model, because Weems’s work depends on a wide variety of influences. At a talk at the Bunting Institute, where she was a Fellow (1995- 96), Weems cited Roy de Carava, who first ar- ticulated an African-American aesthetic in his images of the black family; Buford Smith, who made innovative use of the grey scale; Cindy Sherman, whose histrionic movie stills helped define Weems’s own theatrical self-examina- tions; Andres Serrano; and finally, the Rothko Chapel, which Weems finds spiritually moving.* In the late ’70s Weems was involved in grass- roots socialist and feminist politics, and began her education in the fine arts. By 1984 she had earned her MFA from the University of California, San Diego; Family Pictures and Stories (1978-84) (no. I 7 a-h) formed part of her thesis. This series of photographs is the first to contain a clear narrative emphasis; Weems adds first - person, 'Black English’ captions and audio tapes to a photo album format in a series of images exploring her own family and its folk- lore. Where earlier series (Environmental Portraits and S.E. San Diego) were marked somewhat by a documentary and an emotional distance from the 'other’, these photographs recorded experi- ences that derived from the lore of Weems’s own extended family. These sharecroppers’ memories of migration to the north, and the imaged dynamics of the family’s strengths and affection that have mediated domestic violence and teenage pregnancies, are presented directly, and from within a woman’s point of view. The group of photographs was a response to "official” views of the black family by the Moynihan Report and by white documentary photographers, Aaron Siskind and Bruce Davidson, views that Weems felt were distorted.^ Weems’s approach to Family Pictures and subse- quent work was informed by African-American folklore, as well as the writing of anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston. Since 1984. Weems had pursued graduate coursework in African- American folklore; Hurston had instilled in Weems the idea of a useful truth that is contained within lies. Ain't Jokin (1987-88), as a result, confronts racist humor, while American Icons (1988-89), a related series, shows small domestic curios, like salt and pepper shakers, as caricatured blacks — sardonically exposing racism in the ordinary details of life. These images are not captioned, while Untitled (Kitchen Table Series) (1990) (no. I9a-c) depends heavily on a narrative of folk sayings and song lyrics that expand the photographs’ meanings. The text accompanying Kitchen Table Series, in fact, might seem primary to the serial imagery, because Weems’s voice dominates the installation. It was inspired by Weems’s discovery of her mother’s voice within, a voice that she recognized as her own as well.'*' The Kitchen Table Series uses Weems’s intimate life as a lens through which the experience of black women and the experience of all men, women and children might be understood. Within a shallow space the camera is fixed on a receding table lit by a lamp above. This is the stage space in which Weems, both as photographer and protagonist, enacts a black woman’s life within a fractured society. The protagonist Weems wishes to locate herself, and other women, in relationships. She finds nuclear families unworkable; she is interested in polygamy.^ In a series of I i 62 tableaux vivants, a doomed love relationship develops between the imaged man and woman; the woman consults with friends, one of whom betrays her confidence; she interacts confrontationally, then lovingly, with her daughter, whose new interest in boys she finds disequilibriating; and finally, the woman is alone and self-sufficient, if not triumphant, as she gazes directly at the camera and, by implication, at herself. With the Kitchen Table Series, and moving away from documentary photography, Weems has fully realized the universals found within a fictive or mythic approach. In Colored People Series (1989-90) (pi. VII, no. l8a-d), inspired by Adrian Piper’s work, Weems continues her theme of racial stereo- typing by manipulating color literally and figuratively. She examines the meanings and the range of colors hidden within the term "Black.” "Colored,” a term of whites, Weems uses to refer to black-and-white, minimalist, full-face portraits of African Americans that she has dyed. This is an even-handed approach, for the portraits are dyed colors that expose the color hierarchies that blacks themselves use. The portraits in the current exhibition are titled, for example. Golden Telia Girl (no. l8c) or Blue Black Boy (no. l8a). In their daily life together trouble lurked. He said she was much too domineering. He didn’t mind a woman speaking her mind, but hey, she was taking it a tad too far. Accused her of talking too loudly, being a little too wild in public places. No matter what the subject, she had to get her two cents in, ruined dinner parties with her insistent demand that everything — the flowers on the table — be viewed politically, He was tired of that base and super-structure white-boy-book-shit! Arguing til blue in the face bout them theories. Couldn’t be cool or back-down just once. Nawl! She had to have the last word, had to be right. Plus she was always in the streets, running. Oh, and the way she was dealing with the kid! He didn’t dig it at all. Something had too give. She insisted that what he called domineering was a jacket being forced on her because he couldn’t stand the thought of the inevitable shift in the balance of power. She assured him that the object of her task was not to control him, but out of necessity — freedom being the appreciation of necessity — to control herself She went on to tell him that in face of the daily force she under- stood his misgivings. But they were in a 50-50 thing. Equals. She wasn’t about to succumb to standards of tradition which denied her a rightful place or voice, period. She was trying to be a good woman, a compadre, a pal, a living-doll and she was working. How could he ask for more!! She was really gettin tired of him talkin out of both sides of his mouth about the kinda woman he wanted. Fish or cut bait. no. 19b Carrie Mae Weems Untitled (Kitchen Table Series): Untitled (Man Reading Newspaper) 1990 silver prints, triptych 27 1 /4 in. X 27 1/4 in. 13 text panels, n in. x n in. each Courtesy ofP.P.O.W. Inc., New York no. 19a (p. 6i) Carrie Mae Weems Untitled (Kitchen Table Series): Untitled (Man Smoking) 1990 silver prints 27 1/4 in. X 27 1/4 in. 13 text panels, n in. x n in. each Courtesy of P.P.O.W. Inc., New York 63 I went back home this summer. Hadn’t seen my folks for awhile, but I’d been thinking about them, felt a need to say something about them, about us, about me and to record something about our family, our history. I was scared. Of What? I don’t know, but on my first night back, I was welcomed with so much love from Van and Vera, that I thought to myself, “Girl, this is your family. Co on and get down.” no. 17a Carrie Mae Weems Family Pictures and Stories: Welcome Home 1978-84 one from a series of photographs silver print 25 in. X 37 in. to i6 in. x 19 1/2 in. Courtesy of P.P.O.W. Inc., New York 64 Like my mother, my sisters and I all had children by the time we were sixteen or so. So momma and daddy have plenty of grandchildren. When they heard I was pregnant, daddy cried and momma seriously blew her top. Smokin’ she stormed into my bedromm one night, and in a voice trembling with rage said: "What’s this mess I hear about ya being pregant, girl!!!?’’ Now ordinarilly, I was humble in the face of momma’s wrath. But being preganant had me completely bent out of shape; evil. And with a coldness that shocked me, I retorted, “It ain’t no mess.” Out done and hurt she said, "You little fast negroes gonna drive me crazy! Get your behind out my face, fore I kill ya!!’’ no. 17b Carrie Mae Weems Family Pictures and Stories: Mom and Dad with Grandkids 1978-84 diptych from a series of photographs silver prints 25 in. X 37 in. to 16 in. x 19 1/2 in. Courtesy of P.P.O.W. Inc., New York 65 Weems’s 1992 installation, Sea Islands (fig. 12), is a series of landscape photographs of an historically and culturally charged site, the remains of the Geechee or Gullah commu- nity off the coast of South Garolina and Georgia where slave traders brought Africans to work rice and cotton plantations, and where they remained culturally intact. Weems has recalled that her father told stories about the Geechees that she thought were imagi- nary; they were not.® Weems’s haunting silver prints suggest, by their empty spaces, the people who strode beneath cabbage palms, who lived and worked in slave quarters and smokehouses. Evidence of the slaves’ means of keeping evil spirits at bay — mattresses left outside to catch them, walls lined with newspapers that would snare the spirits into reading every word — interested Weems intensely." Long after slavery, the Gullah culture remains displaced into architecture and landscape, so that when Weems went there looking for Africa, she found "much of [it] in the culture of African Americans.” ^ Nevertheless, she did later travel to Ghana, Mali and Senegal. From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried (l 995 “ 96) constitutes Weems’s most recent photo- graphic installation and the most resolved of her manipulations of color, a theme that she ties to her enduring interest in narrative. The words issue from an African woman, a pair of whose blue-tinted images frame the installation. Daguerreotypes and archival photographs of enslaved blacks hang between the two images of the African woman. The installation was commissioned by the J. Paul Getty Museum: Weems was invited to respond to their collection of mid-I9th century photographs of African Americans. Weems enlarged the photographs, tinted them red, and framed them within black tondo-shaped mats and black square frames. Gommentary is superimposed on the glass above the images, so that 'Your Resistance was Found in the Food You Placed on the Master’s Table — Ha” appears above a white family formally posed with its black Mammy. The prints are hung in rows above and below eye level. The viewer has to stretch or stoop to see the images. Because the frames and mats are black and the glass reflective, it is difficult to see the images at all; instead, the viewer confronts her own reflection, and her own identity becomes spliced into the identities of slaves. In addition to her recent conflation of themes of the ambiguity of color, the oppres- sion of blacks, and mythic truth, Garrie Mae Weems today claims a widening interest in societal ills, multi-culturalism, and social change. She feels that women and children are not the only victims of domestic violence; we all are. She wonders about women’s complicity in such violence, the extent of the agreement between men and women about patriarchal authority. She wonders about increased diversity and the shift of power from native whites, who are becoming "minorities in major financial centers across the country,” to other groups — French, Japanese, Argentinians, Indians.^ We may see the photographic expression of Weems’s new social concerns soon. i Notes 1. Lois Tarlow, "Interview with Carrie Mae Weems,” Art Neiv England, August/September, 1991, p. 11. 2. Weems’s videotaped talk occurred in early May, 1996. 3. Susan Fisher Sterling, “Photographs and Texts in the Work of Carrie Mae Weems,” in Andrea Kirsh and Susan Fisher Sterling, Carrie Mae Weems. Washington, D.C.: National Museum of Women in the Arts, 1993, p. 12. I I 4. Weems’s talk at the Bunting Institute. 5. Ibid. i 6. Ibid. I 7. Ibid. ; 8. Kirsh and Sterling, Carrie Mae Weems, p. 33. 1 9. Tarlow, "Interview with Carrie Mae Weems,” p. 12. i Weems expresses similar feelings in her interview with j Tarlow and in her talk at the Bunting Institute. , I i i 66 1 ' AN INTERVIEW WITH CARRIE MAE WEEMS BY LISA M. CUKLANZ LC. How has your work evolved over the past three decades? CMW. My work remains the same in theme over the three decades. It has been very consistent for a very long time. My attitude toward working is what has changed over time. I have been dealing with issues surrounding questions of identity, race and gender. This is what I started thinking about at 13 or 14 years old — trying to explore the questions that arise out of these broad categories of race, gender and class. LC. D o you call yourself a feminist? In the ’70s, did you have a relationship to the feminist movement? Did you have a formal relationship with a feminist movement in the ’80s or ’90s? CMW. 1 have a great concern for what happens to women. The word feminism or feminists has been a misnomer, very misun- derstood and very often used to obscure the deeper questions for all kinds of women. So, in a name sense, no, and in the broadest sense, yes. All those questions about class and race and feminism have conflicted with feminism in some important ways. The word was problematic in the ’8os, but only in the ’90s have women become afraid and run scared from the concept of feminism. In a highly charged political context, I would have to say absolutely, to deny that pressure. But in the feminist context, with all its conflicts, no. In the ’70s I worked with social-feminist organizations in San Francisco, and in the ’80s I worked on women issues as well. As a serial activist, my work is related to women’s issues. I do still consider myself an activist, both through my art and other actions. Tomorrow, I’ll be participating in a demon- stration on problems of crime and the black community. You have to work on a number of fronts. But I’m not as ’’activist” as I was in the ’70s and ’80s. LC. Do you address feminist issues in your work? CMW. From my perspective, it’s clearer and more specific not to talk about feminist issues, but to talk about issues of concern to women because the term is often misused and misrepresented. A piece from the Kitchen Table Series tno. I9a-c] addresses issues surrounding the complex nature of relation- ships such as monogamy, child rearing, and so forth, and tries to move toward a new way of understanding. We buy into traditions that deny women and men a fuller and broader sense of self identity — traditions that stifle their humanity. I want to allow them to propel themselves forward in a full and complex way. In their project room, the MOMA installation dealt with conflicting issues between men and women. There’s a screen with a veiled woman in the central panel, and a side wing that says ’’temptation, my ass.” She had always been the apple of Adam’s eye. I resist the idea that women, by biology, are in fact nurturers. 67 fig. 12 Carrie Mae Weems Sea Islands Installation Untitled (Trees with Mattress Springs) 1991-92 20 in. X 20 in. silver gelatin print Photo courtesy of P.P.O.W. Inc., New York Our own constraints are more of a tension than the different zones of struggle. The problem for me is, how do you address each of them without feeling that you are in conflict? How do these things criss-cross and get layered in finding a race voice, class voice, woman’s voice? To me this is what is most interesting about my work; getting at each of these with intensity and equal level of probing. For me it’s a dichotomy. What’s in- teresting is how these things are interrelated. LC. What role does theory play in the development of your work? CMW. 1 suppose I’ve cared about certain aspects of theory for a long time, but it’s not, at this point, the position or opposition that’s foremost in my head. I’m more inter- ested in lived experience and what it means to me. This is one way my work has changed. Earlier on, theory was more central to my work, but now I’m more interested in having theory rest upon the work rather than the other way around. Theory can be a trap that makes us forget about what our lives are. I’m trying to live. I think that theory certainly has a place and can be used in ways that are im- portant or dynamic, but at a certain moment in my life, I felt like a major theory-head. Everything I did was processed through the frame of theory. This can deny one’s essence LC. Many theorists, activists and others have observed and discussed at length the tensions or contradictions between commit- ments to feminist concerns and to the struggle against racial bias and oppression. Do you experience tensions or contradictions here in creating your art? CMW. It’ s an interesting question. When I was working on the Kitchen Table Series [no. iqa-c] , there were all kinds of issues of race, culture and gender, all wrapped up into one. The way 1 process and think about what’s impor- tant to me, I don’t see them as in conflict, although I do feel a pressure to decide what issue I want to work on first. The segregation/ mixes we have placed around them create the tensions more than the actual. and subjectivity, as well as key questions, such as "what is beauty?” Practical things you absorb in the way you deliver what you produce. The voice 1 had did not address the depth of who 1 was. It didn’t nourish me substantially or take care of me. It’s not something to live by. It was like replacing our lives with some sort of abstraction. I was reading something recently, about Pablo Neruda and Jose Luis Borges. Both were very well known throughout the world, but when someone asked Neruda about Borges, he said that Borges "has lost all imagination and kindness in life. Borges lived through broken ways and criticism,” and Neruda thought, "what a bore.” LC. In your work, do you make a conscious attempt to connect theory with lived experience? CMW. When theory is useful. I’m more than willing to pick it up and run with it. I’m working on conscious methods for living that are useful. There was a moment when theory was more important to me, such as with the Kitchen Table Series [no. iqa-c]; objectivity, the gaze, constructing one’s own image. The thing that became very interest- ing was that my students became afraid of representing themselves. It froze them. The theory froze them. Laura Mulberg’s article stymied lots of women who were unsure of how to represent themselves. So for me, one of the things that was key was flipping the theory on its head. Kitchen Table Series has been read as a feminist text, but is really a much more complicated text. She is the me who is pushing polygamy, relatively. He is the good guy. She is completely uninterested in having children and she fucks around. Then the child comes in and says "I don’t want any of this shit. None of it interests me.” My life comes first and the theory comes later. LC. What, in your view, are the advantages and limitations of the photographic medium? CMW. I wish all the time that I did some- thing else. I enjoy photography and it has served me well, but I love painting, film and dance, and have been paying more attention to them lately. I have done some drawing and painting and film, and I used to be a dancer, but I primarily enjoy going to see what people are doing in their areas. In a way it doesn’t really matter what I do anymore. I have my interest and they have to do with what gets seen and under what circumstances of culture or society. The most important thing is that the deeper meaning of culture that you really care about is what gets done. I’m probably more interested in music than anything, and the art and sculpture of Senegal and Zaire. How do you contextualize it and give it back to the world in a way that we can understand? I’m just trying to figxire out how to do that in some exciting ways. This is what makes photography exciting but bothersome at the same time. To the extent that I’m excited about it. I’m still doing it. Having some level of success makes it even more imperative that I keep working. I’m not kicking back, I have a platform to express these ideas that are much more important than 1 will ever be. I have to use this platform that I have. LC. D o you have any particular feelings or thoughts about exhibiting at Boston College, a Catholic, Jesuit institution? CMW. N o, I have no feelings about it at all. I’m glad you are having the show, and I’m glad to be included. I hope that it will be accessible. I’m always humored to think people will be paying attention to what I’m doing. OBJECTS IN THE EXHIBITION no. 1 MAGDALENA ABAKANOWICZ 1984 sisal, wall hanging 53 in. X 40 in. Anne &. Jacques Baruch Collection, Ltd., Chicago no. 2. MAGDALENA ABAKANOWICZ Self-Portrait 1976 fiber and glue io8 3/4 in. X 84 3/4 in. x 60 3/4 in. Anne &. Jacques Baruch Collection, Ltd., Chicago no. sa-c MAGDALENA ABAKANOWICZ Incarnation Series: Magduwa, Magubi, Magdeta 1988 bronze, unique 25 1/2 in., 25 3/4 in. and 25 in. Courtesy of Marlborough Gallery, New York : no. 4 MAGDALENA ABAKANOWICZ Small Figures on a Slit 1992-93 burlap, resin 8 c wood 74 3/8 in. X 103 1/2 in. x i6 i/8 in. Courtesy of Marlborough Gallery, New York no. 5 MARY BETH EDELSON Fire Flights in Deep Space 1977 black and white silver print triptych, 2i in. x 21 in. Collection of the Artist, New York no. 6 _ MARY BETH EDELSON Story Gathering Boxes' 1972-present mixed media: enamel table, painted stool, wooden boxes, paper tablets, pens 38 in. X 40 in. x 25 in. Collection of the Artist, New York no. 7 MARY BETH EDELSON Double Agent 1995 transfer on chiffon 204 in. X 120 in. Collection of Artist, New York no. 8 _ JANET FISH Maud’s Glasses 1976 oil on canvas 56 in. X 44 in. Courtesy of DC Moore Gallery, New York ing Caitlin 1988 oil on canvas 54 1/4 in. X 70 1/4 in. Courtesy of DC Moore Gallery, New York no. to JANET FISH Snowstorm 1996 oil on canvas 50 in. X 56 in. Private Collection, New Jersey Untitled’ 1978 watercolor and ink on rice paper 9 in. X 9 in. Private Collection, Boston no. 12 no. 13 no. 14 no. 75 no. 16 ACNES MARTIN Untitled 1984 acrylic &. pencil on canvas 72 in. X 72 in. From the Collection of the late Edna S. Beron, Boston no. ya-h CARRIE MAE WEEMS Family Pictures and Stories 1978-84 eight from a series of photographs silver prints 25 in. X 37 in. to 16 in. X 19 1/2 in. Courtesy ofP.P.O.W. Inc., New York no. i8a-d CARRIE MAE WEEMS , ACNES MARTIN Untitled # 7" 1995 acrylic and graphite on canvas 60 in. X 60 in. PaceWildenstein, New York PATSTEIR Night Chant Series #2 1973 oil on canvas 84 in. X 84 in. Collection of Alvin and Barbara Krakow, Boston I PATSTEIR ^ark Passion Flower 1989 oil on canvas 48 in. X 144 in. Courtesy of Riverfront Office Park, Cambridge PATSTEIR Sixteen Waterfalls of Dreams, Memories and Sentiment 1990 oil on canvas 78 1/2 in. X 151 1/8 in. Collection of joost Elffers, New York Colored People Series: a. Blue Black Boy b. Chocolate Colored Man c. Golden Yella Girl 1989-1990 three monochrome color print triptychs i6 in. X 48 in. d. Burnt Orange Girl monochrome color print 30 in. X 30 in. Courtesy of P.P.O.W. Inc., New York no. iga-c CARRIE MAE WEEMS Untitled (Kitchen Table Series): a. Untitled (Man Smoking) b. Untitled (Man Reading Newspaper) — triptych c. Untitled (Woman and Daughter with Makeup) 1990 silver prints 27 1/4 in. X 27 1/4 in. thirteen text panels, n in. x 11 in. each Courtesy of P.P.O.W. Inc., New York BIBLIOGRAPHY Arts Council of Great Britain. 1 977 Agnes Martin Paintings and Drawings, '' 957 - ■'975- Great Britain: Arts Council of Great Britain. Avigikos, Jan. 1993 “No Reverse Gear.” First Hand: Photographs by Mary Beth Edelson 1973-1993 and Shooter Series. New York: Mary Beth Edelson, 1993, 5 - 15 - Broud, Norma, and Mary D. Garrard, eds. 1 994 The Power of Feminist Art: The American Movement of the 1970’s, History and Impact. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc. 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New York: New York University Press. 1980 "Fire and Stone: Politics and Ritual.” Seven Cycles: Public Rituals. New York: Mary Beth Edelson. 1980, 6-9. 1995 The Pink Class Swan: Selected Essays on Feminist Art. New York: The New Press. McEvilley, Thomas. 1995 Pat Steir. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc. Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. 1982 Magdalena Abakanowicz. New York: Abbeville Press. New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York. 1 984 Art After Modernism: Rethinking Represen- tation. Boston: David R. Codine, Inc. Nochlin, Linda. 1 988 Women, Art, and Power and Other Essays. New York: Harper & Row Publishers. Robert Miller Gallery. 1990 Pat Steir. New York: Robert Miller Gallery. Rose, Barbara. 1994 Magdalena Abakanowicz. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc. Rosenblum, Naomi. 1994 A History of Women Photographers. New York: Abbeville Press. Ratcliff, Carter. 1986 Interview. Pat Steir Paintings. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc. 1986, 7-93. Watkin, Mel. 1990 “A Lifelong Process.” Shape Shifter: Seven Mediums. New York: Mary Beth Edelson, 1990. 7-12. Witzling, Mara R. ed. 1994 “Introduction,” “Agnes Martin,” “Magdalena Abakanowicz,” Voicing Today's Visions. New York: Universe. 42-63; 88-io8.