Writing off women

“...it’s possible that the viewer might take in the book first and move upward to her décolletage.”

It’s been almost two months since I’ve made a post. My life has taken on a greater degree of chaos while I’ve balanced two overlapping roles: outgoing art librarian at Purchase College north of Manhattan and incoming textiles student at Sheridan College southwest of Toronto. The colleges are eleven hours apart if traffic is good. Apartment hunting, writing an entrance exam, battling mold on items in storage…it has all been a whirlwind. My new commute involves the Go Train instead of the Metro North Train. The main difference is access to stray copies of the free Metro newspaper, which I decided to skim yesterday.

My attention was caught by the headline, “Writing off women?” The brief article is about the relegation of female-authored fiction to chick lit. My intention is not to comment on that issue, but to comment on the presentation of it. Unfortunately, the online version of the article does not include the image I discuss below.

An accompanying photo takes up more room than the text of the article. It shows a young, blond, Caucasian woman lying stomach down on the grass while reading a book. It made me yearn for summer, which—at least in Canada—seems to have disappeared amazingly fast. Then I looked closer. The caption mentions Pulitzer Prize winning author, Elizabeth Strout, but does not clarify if the woman is her. The real Elizabeth Strout is about 30 years older, though similarly blond and Caucasian. This image, presumably a stock photo, is a curious choice.

Our fresh-faced reader could do wonders for libraries as a poster child for literacy. Clad in all white (tank top, pants/shorts, and even her bra, whose strap is visible), she exudes innocence. Her mascara-laden lids and lips saturated with colour guide the viewer’s eye towards her ample cleavage and finally, to the book. That, after all, is the real object in the image, right? Or, because she consumes only the top right corner of the image and the rest is grass, it’s possible that the viewer might take in the book first and move upward to her décolletage. Either way, she rivals the book as the focus.

Interestingly, the book’s pages appear virtually empty. One page is entirely white while its opposing page has a blur of text. I am reminded of Reese Witherspoon’s vapid character in Pleasantville discovering words in the previously blank classics that filled her high school library. I’m also reminded of Medieval Books of Hours, those ornate volumes that women—often illiterate women—toted as accessories of sorts. If I think that far back into art history, I may as well reflect on her demure expression, a commonplace strategy to make female subjects seem capable of being overcome. Her gaze is fixated on the book, and not on the onlooker. She is up for grabs.

As a librarian and as a feminist, I am perplexed by the sexualization of reading in visual culture. I don’t mean to imply that beautiful and sexy women don’t read. However, if the editors are attempting to empathize with, or at least, represent the viewpoints of female authors bothered by male dominance in the industry, they would do well to use an image that doesn’t fall into gender traps, or perhaps they could feature one of the three women mentioned in the article/caption.

Source: ----, “Writing women off?”, Metro News, September 8, 2010, p. 31. Print.

Reading art

“...excerpts from novels like Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness set the tone at the gallery’s entrance.”

“I’m totally having a Hiroshi Sugimoto moment,” I mumbled in awe, standing in front of Dominique Gonzales-Foerster’s dioramas yesterday at Dia at the Hispanic Society in Washington Heights, Manhattan. My mind immediately went to the Japanese photographer’s luscious black and white photographs of museum displays that meld two-dimensionality and three-dimensionality, replacing artifice with realism. Sugimoto might lean towards realism and Gonzales-Foerster surrealism, but there is a magical quality that links them.

After culling her personal library collection and that of the Hispanic Society, Gonzales-Foerster has inserted weathered paperbacks into naturalistic settings that range from desert to rainforest. Intended to be imaginary landscapes, they are the outgrowth of listening to the music of the Buena Vista Social Club, a personal favourite of mine. It’s simulacra punctuated by realia in the form of books. Are the books discarded arbitrarily or placed deliberately? My guess is the latter, since their selection was carefully curated: each was chosen for its geographical setting or the locale in which the author wrote the book. Frank Herbert’s Dune, for example, appears in the desert diorama. Either way, they feel like relics of civilization, like the Statue of Liberty in Planet of the Apes. The books are the only inhabitants of these scenes; there is no evidence of animal life. Single pages, curled up at the edges, evoke skin that has been shed or bones that have disintegrated into near-dust. Others appear more animated, such as an open book that is spot lit and suspended, like a bird in flight.

As a librarian, I was drawn in by the collecting impulse. Ultimately, I read the dioramas as a cautionary tale. Being immersed in a college setting where research generally begins online instead of with books, I saw these castoffs as symbols of the decline of knowledge, the side-effect of not evaluating information effectively. These are the survivors, but so what? That’s melodramatic, sure, but excerpts from novels like Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness set the tone at the gallery’s entrance.

As an artist, I was affected by the implication that creative output can be a person’s legacy. Artworks—traces of who an artist is—persevere for the next generation to ponder, dismiss, react against, build on, or appropriate. The obsession with lineage in art history has fallen out of favour, but it’s still a reality, and very much a seduction. Gonzales-Foerster is quoted in the New York Times* as saying “With a library,” she said, “you slowly build a biography for yourself” and I think the same is true of art making (or blogging, or any creative endeavour, for that matter). Biography becomes legacy somehow, whether intentionally or not.

Upon leaving, I had a strong urge to reread Anna Banti’s fictional biography of Artemesia Gentileschi. In the heartbreaking introduction, the author mourns the loss of her initial transcript, a casualty of WWII bombings. I imagine that Gonzales-Foerster would be pleased that her installation made me want to crack open a book.

For more information: click here.

*Kennedy, Randy. “It’s only natural, this thing for books.” The New York Times. Sept. 18, 2009.

The librarian will see you now

"One of them pointed to my white coat and asked, 'Are you a doctor?' 'No,' I laughed. 'I'm a librarian'."

Yesterday, my sister and I had plans to go to the MoMA after her flight arrived from Canada. We agreed to meet by the information stand in Grand Central Terminal. During the hour that I waited, I overheard the staff person skillfully handle the flurry of questions from tourists. He never wavered for a second, making me more than a little envious of his reference skills. The questions were all directional except for one: “Can you make an announcement over the loudspeaker to help this young girl who has been separated from her mother?” About a minute after the mother was paged, she rushed over. I realized that she couldn’t see her daughter because of the curved shape of the information stand, so I shouted, “She’s over there” and pointed. If she registered what I said, it was unconscious: the biological imperative had taken hold and it was as if nothing existed but parent and child.

Here’s a more lighthearted story about trying to be helpful. Last week on the bus, two students from Boston and Philadelphia asked me how they could get from the bus station to the train station in White Plains. Having just left the library, I was still in reference mode so I escorted them there, showed them where to board their train, and advised them to purchase tickets from the machine to save money. One of them pointed to my white coat and asked, “Are you a doctor?” “No,” I laughed. “I’m a librarian.”

The question made me wonder, are there any commonalities between medical professionals and information professionals aside from coincidental wardrobe choices? My answer is based on fantasy and reality, as I’ve watched quite a bit of Grey’s Anatomy. (Seriously? Yes. The television show went a long way towards helping me process a rare medical emergency experienced by a loved one, whose real-life doctors have inspired me with their brilliance, patience and support).

Much like librarians, medical professionals conduct public service and want to educate and empower the people with whom they interact. The stakes are high for them: they do everything in their power to improve the health of their patients, knowing that not all of them will survive or improve, which in the grand scheme of things is more important than feeling comfortable with federated searching of databases.

I used to see reference instruction as an all-or-nothing scenario, in which I felt defeated if I didn't help the student depart with the optimal skill set. Lately, however, I’ve been thinking that I should approach reference service more like a doctor—I should strive for the best but take satisfaction in progress of any sort. Trying this on for size would entail taking the oath,‘first, do no harm.’ That seems like a sound strategy. When users enter the library, it is very important for them to feel welcome and to know that they can ask for help. In our library, help comes in many forms: in-person reference at a desk or by appointment with a subject specialist, chat reference, email reference, and my favourite—roving reference.

As I arrived on campus this morning, I was thinking that maybe it’s less important that the user remember the details of a reference encounter than it is for them to leave feeling supported (much like the woman in the train station who likely absorbed my efforts to help but couldn’t identify me in a lineup if she tried). I stopped into Starbucks on my way to the library and was greeted by a summer student. “You helped me on my first day,” he said. I remembered, but I hadn’t expected him to remember. I could barely contain my smile. What a great way to start a Friday…

MFA vs. studio PhD

"Soutter points out that there is already an increased emphasis being placed on research in MFA programs, as a way of preparing students in case they proceed to PhD studies."

Will the studio-based PhD replace the MFA as the terminal degree in the visual arts? That is the question addressed in the article, "The Currency of Practice: Reclaiming Autonomy for the MFA" by Susette S. Min, Senam Okudzeto, Martin Beck, Gareth James, Odili Donald Odita, and Lucy Soutter, with responses by Jon Rubin and Andrew E. Hershberger (Art Journal, Spring 2009).

The other important purpose the article serves is to describe the current state of MFA programs, both in the US and Europe. Even with alternatives to the MFA cropping up (ranging from post-bachelor’s programs to non-credited residencies and lecture series organized by artist collectives), the authors note that in the US, the amount of applications to MFA programs at present is unprecedented.

With studio PhD programs on the horizon, the authors consider the changing role of the academic institution. Because the library is a critical part of any academic institution, I reread the article to contemplate how libraries (and art librarians in particular) should brace themselves for this change. I was reading on the Go Train, just after having lunch at the Grange, which acts as a hub of sorts for students at the Ontario College of Art and Design; the setting made me think about this article because they just introduced an MFA program last year.

Even if I might never be directly charged with supporting a studio PhD program as an art librarian, the mere prospect is reason enough to take note. Soutter points out that there is already an increased emphasis being placed on research in MFA programs, as a way of preparing students in case they proceed to PhD studies. She talks about PhD studio programs feeding "into a contemporary interest in research as art and the artist as researcher" (as an aside, this was a concept discussed at the ARLIS NY event the other night at the MoMA called The Art Behind the Book).

How can art librarians support the emerging hybrid of the artist-scholar? Although I feel I have a decent sense of what the MFA experience entails (having sat in on the defense of an MFA thesis years ago and having had the great pleasure of taking a course with Masters of Visual Studies students with Andy Patton when I was in graduate school) I relied on the article to outline the needs of today’s MFA student. According to the authors, an MFA student generally wants or unknowingly needs: opportunities to exhibit and network; a challenging environment in which to develop their work; support for academic studies, especially interdisciplinary research; adequate face time with instructors; skills; agency; and ultimately, good job prospects. Some of these needs are better served by studio faculty than art librarians, but forming this list made me resolve to increase outreach to studio faculty to promote research sessions and to be in touch with my fellow selectors to ensure that we have a strong interdisciplinary collection of interest to MFA students.

Looking back in time

"If a book of hours survived rigorous daily use and got passed down through generations of women...all of its users would essentially contribute to the 'use-value' of the object."

This morning, I took the Metro North train into Manhattan, which is the opposite direction of what I usually travel. As I navigated my way through the swarm of commuters in Grand Central Terminal at 8:30 am, I felt very thankful to avoid such chaos on a regular basis.

The occasion for traveling south was to attend a retreat for tenure-track librarians at Stony Brook University. I presented a paper that I delivered two weeks ago at the International Congress of Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo, Michigan. The initial presentation was given to a mix of scholars from art history, literature, history, and theology, so it was a treat to present the same paper today to a group of librarians, especially because my approach to the topic was inspired by librarianship.

Here's a summary of my presentation: Traditionally, patronage in the arts has been associated with men, but I believe that we can look beyond economics to see the impact of women in shaping art history. My focus was on medieval books of hours, which were very small prayer books that emerged as early as the 11th Century and became immensely popular in the mid-14th Century, remaining the darling of bibliophiles for an incredible 300 years. They are primarily associated with women, which is how my presentation, 'Redefining Medieval Patronage: Female Circulation of Books of Hours', came to be included on a panel entitled 'Gendering the Book' in Kalamazoo. Although their primary function was devotional, they doubled as art objects, which is where my interest was piqued as an art librarian.

Essentially, my intention was to introduce a librarian's perspective to the domain of medievalists. Based on the tendency of libraries to assess the value of a book based on the degree of its use rather than on the circumstances surrounding its creation, and to avoid making distinctions between the various kinds of use (recreational, academic, etc.), I proposed that we consider all users of books of hours to effectively be patrons. If a book of hours survived rigorous daily use and got passed down through generations of women through bequests, loans, purchases or even if it were won in political conquests, all of its users would essentially contribute to the 'use-value' of the object.

My assertion was that peripheral and subsequent users of books of hours valued them for reasons beyond their primary purpose (that of assisting devotion by guiding prayers throughout the day); specifically, women valued ornate versions of books of hours as virtual accessories; they used them as tools for literacy, both for themselves and for their daughters; and they used them to negotiate personal salvation in the afterlife by making inscriptions and alterations to the text that called on subsequent readers to effectively pray for them posthumously. Basically, I believe the investment of time (i.e., in using books of hours) should be equated with the investment of money (i.e., in commissioning books of hours). Through this shift in perspective, we can recognize the power of female medieval readers.