When Women Were Birds

“…perhaps my mother is a conceptual artist…”—Terry Tempest Williams

The night I planned to attend a fundraiser for feminist bookstores in Canada and the US at the now defunct Toronto Women’s Bookstore, I gave up, which is a shame because I wanted to blog about the event. Once I heard the performer—already half an hour late—would be at least another half hour late, I walked to a different independent bookstore in frustration. Cheekily, I found myself drawn to a book there whose theme is the absence of content.

Terry Tempest Williams’ memoir, When Women Were Birds: Fifty-Four Variations on Voice (Sarah Crichton Books, 2012) is the author’s heartfelt attempt to extract meaning from three shelves’ worth of empty journals bequeathed to her by her mother. Even more curious is the fact that on her deathbed, Diane Dixon Tempest made her daughter promise not to read them while Diane was alive.

At first, I wondered if the empty journals were too simple a metaphor for the female experience. The day I started reading When Women Were Birds, I caught the holiday classic, The Sound of Music, on television. My ears perked up when Rolf—the dashing but dastardly suitor of 16-year-old Liesl—sang, “Your life, little girl, is an empty page that men will want to write on.” I stand corrected: the metaphor is indeed apropos.

The premise is introduced immediately, with Diane dying right away, so the reader doesn’t get a chance to become attached to Diane or to feel Terry’s loss. It works because on the surface, the book is a tribute to her mother, but ultimately it is an autobiography, not a biography. Williams portrays her mother not as a solitary character but as a partner. Their bond is touching but arguably idealized with memories like her mother drawing a rose petal bath for Terry at the onset of menstruation.

A feminist memoir, When Women Were Birds is about finding a voice—as a Morman woman, as a near victim of a male strangler, and as a former teacher who was almost fired for being an environmentalist.

Art provides a backdrop for her musings, from having a meaningful conversation while walking along Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty to contemplating the act of confession in an Italian church with Domenico Ghirlandaio paintings. Works like Robert Rauschenberg’s White Paintings and Kazimir Malevich’s White on White function as a more direct vehicle for interpretation too. She concludes, “…perhaps my mother is a conceptual artist…” (p. 60).

The central motif is not art, but birds. As much as the book is a tribute to Terry’s mother, it is a tribute to ornithology. The characters in ancient Nushu (translated from Chinese as ‘women’s writing’) she describes, in which a bird’s head and a woman’s head share the same symbol, make Terry’s contemporary symbolism seem somehow predestined. In the book, birds take on a mystical role: Terry meets her husband at a bookstore because of their shared love of field guides, and she sees a hummingbird—her African friend’s favourite bird—when she learns of her death. When she quotes Jenny Holzer’s truism, “Myths make reality more intelligible,” it’s fitting.

It is beautifully written: the prose morphs into poetry and stream of consciousness with confidence. Its design is also noteworthy. The front and back inside cover feature an image of overlaid feathers in greyscale, with a mock label at the front that beckons the reader with, “THIS JOURNAL BELONGS TO ____________________.” Additionally, 12 empty pages follow the author’s discovery of the enigmatic journals totaling 54, the age at which her mother died.

With the New Year upon us, I’d like to close by quoting a friend of the author. Stephen Trimble co-published Testimony: Writers of the West Speak on Behalf of Utah Wilderness, a chapbook designed for Congress, with Terry. Not knowing Bill Clinton would single it out for its significance, a member of the press told Trimble that the book was a waste of time. He responded, “Writing is always an act of faith” (p. 143).

Image: reproduced in 2019 via fair use/dealing. Source: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250024114

Office Girl

“…two hipster wannabe artists in pre-millennial Chicago falling in like/love…”

On Monday, I chickened out. For the first time this winter, I left my car downtown and took the bus to campus up the big, imposing (at least to those of us driving standard) hill because I was shaking after driving 20 kilometres below the speed limit on packed snow. When I got home, I made a cup of tea and told my husband, “I just want to read my book and forget about winter.” But what was the first sentence in Joe Meno’s Office Girl (2012, Akashic Books), which I got through interlibrary loan that morning? “Anyway it’s snowing.” Sigh.

‘Sigh’ sums up my reaction to Office Girl. This is not to say the tale about two hipster wannabe artists in pre-millennial Chicago falling in like/love (depending on each character’s perspective) is not enjoyable, but it is a downer. Their lives are unenviable (they live in crummy apartments and meet in a small Muzak call centre) and their emotional states are unstable, so you just know there is not going to be a happy ending.

The first chapter follows Odile’s life and the second chapter follows Jack’s life. The urge for them to meet demonstrates how wired we are to want romance in books, films and real life, even when it is a bad idea. These two should not get together. Odile, who has been spurned by a married man, desperately avoids love because she’s a pessimist. Jack, meanwhile, should be a pessimist because he’s getting divorced at the young age of 25, but he’s desperately seeking love. Time could be on their side if they had a chance to heal and mature, but Odile is hell-bent on moving to New York.

If I weren’t an artist, this book would make me feel seriously irritated about art, because I would probably confuse art with self-involved artists. Reading sentences like “Odile announces that what they’re really missing is a manifesto” (p. 193) make me clench my teeth. The brazen Odile invites Jack to be part of a two-person art movement that does outrageous things in public like wearing ghost costumes. They are intoxicated by their nonsensical collaborations, probably because on their own, they were blocked. Jack, an art school graduate, has done nothing with a stack of tapes made over four years with a handheld recorder of everything from the sound of a tiger roaring at the zoo to the silence of a glove lying in the snow. Odile admits that in art school, when she made things like a penis-shaped lamp, her work felt useless. After dropping out, she graduates to defacing posters with x-rated graffiti. 

Although clearly interested in sex, Odile resists intimacy with Jack. The majority of their relationship is spent skirting romance, which makes for a rather charming friendship where creativity attempts to mask sexual tension. When they consummate their relationship, it’s the best four days of Jack’s life, but it’s the beginning of the end for Odile. Once Odile packs her bags, all Jack is left with is a sketchbook he bought at her garage sale and a dirty magazine they made with self-portraits. Its title, scrawled by Odile, is ALPHONSE F. IS IN LOVE. Alphonse F. is their shared alter ego (like the non-sound of a glove in the snow, it is a source of potential irritation to the reader), but it’s hard not to feel touched by her admission of love, however quirky and fleeting.

Image: reproduced in 2019 via fair use/dealing. Source: http://www.akashicbooks.com/catalog/office-girl/

From Conceptualism to Feminism

 

“When Lippard returned to America, she had a sense of how art and politics could dovetail.”

Lucy R. Lippard may claim that being a library page at the MoMA is the only real job she’s ever had, but as a freelance writer, art critic, and curator, she has worked undeniably hard. It’s evident from her list of accomplishments, and in her comment that editing other people’s texts resembles being on vacation compared to writing herself. For anyone who thinks curators sit back and let other people do the heavy lifting, get this: for her so-called Numbers exhibitions—the subject of a new book—she did favours like source out and shoot 400 photographs of purposefully mundane Seattle horizons for artist Robert Smithson who couldn’t be there to do it himself. Curiously, each Numbers show was named for the host city’s population and Canada was lucky to have one. First came 557,087 (Seattle), then 955,000 (Vancouver), then an overlooked 2,972,453 (Buenos Aires), followed by a touring c. 7,500 (Valencia, California). The fact that the third show was so overlooked (Pip Day highlights the absence of press coverage and the shortage of archival material) demonstrates the importance of publishing books on the history of exhibitions.

From Conceptualism to Feminism: Lucy Lippard’s Numbers Shows 1969-74 (Afterall Books, 2012) is the third title in the Exhibition Histories series published in association with the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna; the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College; and Van Abbemuseum. It looks not so much at her shift in focus from conceptualism to feminism as the blending of the two: her final Numbers show was still heavy on idea-based art but it included only women artists, some of whom made work with a feminist bent and others who didn’t.

Lippard’s activist impulse was rooted in time she spent in Argentina in 1968 before the Buenos Aires show to jury an art award. It’s hard to imagine being exposed to the type of art being produced there without being affected. For example, Tito Fernández confiscated gallery visitors’ belongings and banned conversation inside the venue to comment on the police state. Characterizing the ‘dematerialization’ of art was Graciela Carnevale’s Acción del encierro (Confinement Action), for which she invited people to a gallery and without forewarning them, locked them inside until someone on the street broke a window an hour later and they escaped. The artists worked in solidarity, at one point burning their works collectively to protest police censorship of a single artist’s (Roberto Plate’s) work and reading a manifesto-like statement at a conference after cutting the electricity. When Lippard returned to America, she had a sense of how art and politics could dovetail.

I almost didn’t review this book because Conceptual Art really isn’t my bag (so many ropes, so many mirrors!). Much of Conceptual Art is text-based (Nancy Wilson Kitchel said it best: “My work would be different if you couldn’t read”) and I find myself agreeing to a point with Peter Plagens’ scathing Artforum review of Conceptual Art’s writing quality. Ultimately, though, I was won over by coverage of the many thought-provoking pieces, like John Latham’s Still and Chew (1966/67). A part-time art instructor at St. Martin’s School of Art in London, Latham was frustrated by the scholarly high-fiving of critic Clement Greenberg, so he checked out the school library copy of Greenberg’s Art and Culture and proceeded to make a unique protest. He invited students, critics, and artists to chew a page from the book and spit it out in a flask. It was chemically treated, and when Latham received an urgent overdue book notice, he had the audacity to present the then liquid solution to the librarian, poker-faced. The next day he was fired.

From Conceptualism to Feminism: Lucy Lippard’s Numbers Shows 1969-74 includes a main essay by Cornelia Butler, interviews with Lippard and several exhibiting artists, and reproductions of selected index cards that were used in place of traditional catalogues for the exhibitions.

Taking AIM! The Business of Being an Artist Today

“This social cherry-picking is a valid strategy…”

Two years after I moved, people still ask whether I miss New York. I always respond by contrasting life in the Bronx with tourism in Manhattan and the hipster art scene in Brooklyn. My sole regret about moving out of my apartment in the Bronx is that I never had a chance to participate in the Artists in the Marketplace program run by the Bronx Museum of the Arts. I was delighted, then, to discover Taking AIM! The Business of Being an Artist Today (Fordham University Press, 2011, Ed. Marysol Nieves), a book marking its 30-year history of promoting professional development through guest speakers, peer-to-peer studio visits, etc. As I started reading, I wondered if I made a mistake by leaving (prompted by the realization that I shared a glass of wine with one of the two artists interviewed in the introduction after blogging about a book she wrote, and also for my blog, I interviewed one of the three artists from the first chapter). As I settle into my new life in a city with an approximate population of 53,000, it was good to read artist Whitfield Lovell say, “The most significant moments in my career happened when I left New York” (p. 28) and to read Steven Rand from apexart express the need to send New York-centric individuals to remote regions of the world for a broader perspective.

Though partly celebratory, Taking AIM! should in no way be perceived as navel-gazing. Its advice to artists has universal application. Like other professional development books for artists, it emphasizes (repeatedly) that being an artist is hard work. As is typical of these guides, it deconstructs the art world—which collector Dennis Scholl rightly calls a subculture—through multiple perspectives. The content is organized by roles, such as art critic, which is useful if an artist wishes to bolster one section within a CV or foster a particular relationship. This social cherry-picking is a valid strategy, as seen in the advice of, for example, collector Ella Fontana Cisneros to develop a relationship with curators before gallerists, or in the chapter on art fairs, which stresses that gallery representation precedes art fair participation.

As a librarian who conducts collection development in the arts, I always ask whether there is a need for the latest artist guide. The answer is in gallery director Paula Ha’s comment: “Much has changed in the art world, but in some ways, much has not changed at all” (p. 60). In other words, advice on, say, applying for grants and residencies already exists in written form, but there’s always something new to add. At this moment in time, newness is summed up by a cartoon in the introduction of a present day Leonardo da Vinci looking at his laptop and being perplexed that Michelangelo wants to be his friend. The final chapter of the book is entirely devoted to social media, something that was only mentioned in passing in artist guides a few years ago. Curiously, in this chapter, professionals’ comments from separate interviews are cobbled together in the imagined transcript of a single discussion, but it works well, as does the book overall.

Another fantastic resource, also at the end of the book, is the timeline of art events and global news (with bold and regular type differentiating the two). Interdisciplinary educators will appreciate that it highlights art’s role as a social barometer. It reveals, for example, that Keith Haring’s Crack is Wack mural in New York coincided with the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, and that Nelson Mandela was freed from jail the same year that African artists began exhibiting at the Venice Biennale. It would be nice to see more coverage of Canadian content besides the development of NAFTA* and CAFKA**, especially since content relevant to Canada is included (for example, the first state to legalize same-sex marriage is included, but the surge of weddings of gay American couples in Canada is not). This presumably unintentional editing out of Canadian content is the very reason I submitted work to two exhibitions about reproductive rights this year in the US: to emphasize parallel politics. In the same way that I don’t think Canadians as a whole imagine life in the different boroughs of NYC to differ substantially, I don’t think Americans as a whole realize how deeply connected Canadians feel to their politics. Let me assure you, though, the meme ‘binders full of women’ was discussed all the way up in North Bay at the reference desk this week.

*Not that I don't appreciate the North American Free Trade Agreement. It is, after all, the mechanism through which I was employed in the US.
**Contemporary Art Forum, Kitchener + Area

Image: reproduced in 2019 via fair use/dealing. Source: https://www.fordhampress.com/9780823234141/taking-aim/

Féminismes Électriques

“Sometimes a rose is a rose is a Rrose.”

Although I recently bought my first car, I wasn’t about to drive seven hours by myself from North Bay to Montreal. To get to a book launch and panel discussion at La Centrale Galerie Powerhouse last Friday night, I had to choose between taking a bus at 2 am or taking two six-hour train rides that connected at Toronto’s Union station. That’s when it hit me that I had really moved to northern Ontario. I opted for the train since it meant breaking up the trip with a night of sleep. It also meant that I got to bid farewell to the Northlander in its penultimate week of operation.

I’ve been spoiled traveling with my husband, not just because he loves driving, but because he is bilingual. As I looked unsuccessfully for a map in a Gare Centrale store, I fretted about what I would say if the clerk didn’t speak English. Simple answer: improvise. (“Je desire de chercher pour les directions dans la grande papier [I want to look for directions on large paper]”). The French translation for ‘map’ came to mind an inconvenient five hours later, which was doubly frustrating since I’d had a teleconference with map librarians earlier in the week in which French terminology was discussed.

I didn’t fare much better at La Centrale, where I could only catch a string of four French words at a time, and only two of the six panelists spoke in English. So much for having called ahead to ask if all presentations would be in English. Here’s the punchline of my visit: the following evening, I was having dinner at the home of a former La Centrale board member when she pointed out that the book is being launched at Art Metropole. In, ahem, Toronto. Alas, I’m glad I attended the standing-room-only event to show my support. And perhaps this post will bring people to the Art Metropole launch, which happens tonight. Therein lies the power of self-publishing in the Internet age. As Chris Kraus argues in said book, Féminismes Électriques (2012), blogs are the new zines.

At the launch, editor Leila Pourtavaf spoke about the desire to give feminism “renewed life” through the book’s essays, interviews, and artist project (the latter by G. B. Jones). In short, this means enhanced inclusivity, encompassing trans and queer artists as well as artists with diverse ethnic backgrounds. Trish Salah provides a compelling account of the risks inherent in pluralistic feminism, such as treating male artists as special or as non-men of sorts. Interestingly, La Centrale, Canada’s first gallery for women, recently programmed its first show for a man, the late Will Munro. This shift is the outcome of the gallery spending six years reworking its mandate through consultation with members and colleagues. The publication is equally thoughtful.

Why would six years of contemplation be necessary? Consider that, according to Bernadette Houde, ‘lesbian’ remains a radical term. Helena Reckitt suggests that gender is equally (and relatedly) radical, provoking genderqueer art that experiments with gender rather than accepting existing anatomically-derived definitions. If feminism in its initial iteration focused on the needs of traditional women, how can its contemporary counterpart advocate for those labeled as Other?  

Féminismes Électriques is a fitting title, because its content reminds us how electrifying feminism is: it is feisty, inspiring, sometimes serious and other times fun. Often, feminist art evokes the familiar, such as Women with Kitchen Appliances, a collective that blends images with audio work created using kitchen appliances. ‘Familiar’ doesn’t mean banal, though, as proven by a video by Palestinian artist Jumana Manna featuring her adult self breastfeeding from her mother. Sometimes feminist art takes the familiar and reworks it to emphasize clichés, like Lesbians on Ecstasy, which does ‘performative sampling’ of lesbian folk music from the Second Wave, to resist the association between women and nature and the disregard for female musicians’ technical skill. Arguably opposite to playing with the familiar is indulging the imagination as Stéphanie Chabot and Dominique Pétrin do, with role-playing involving vampires and cannibals. In an interview with Manon Tounigny, Pétrin emphasized how universal art is but also how open to interpretation it is: in performances involving monsters, she found that children have a literal interpretation, teens are impressed, intellectuals interpret it as subversive, gays think it’s queer, and older people find it exciting. Sometimes a rose is a rose is a Rrose.*

The book concludes with a chapter by Aneessa Hashmi, who writes, “The circulation of knowledge cancels out hierarchy” (p. 191): a fantastic mantra for feminists and librarians alike.  

On the occasion of my 100th post, I would like to thank everyone who has read, commented on, or encouraged my writing.

*Apologies for the inside art joke, but I couldn’t resist.

Image: reproduced in 2019 via fair use/dealing. Source: http://www.editions-rm.ca/livres/feminismes-electriques/

Rethinking Professionalism

“Charlotte Schreiber…couldn’t attend [Royal Canadian Academy of Arts] meetings because it would have meant being alone with 39 men.”

Women. Art. Professionalism. Isolated concepts or a natural combination? I’ve been pondering this question for the past three weeks, ever since I started embroidering in the campus parking lot half an hour before starting work to take advantage of the natural light that has waned by the time I extract myself at the end of the day.

The convergence of women, art, and professionalism is also the subject of the book, Rethinking Professionalism: Women and Art in Canada, 1850-1970 (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2012). Full disclosure: I am a former Queen’s employee and my former place of work, the Agnes Etherington Art Centre, is mentioned on the opening page of the preface for its contribution to feminist art history.

An outgrowth of the inaugural Canadian Women Artists History Initiative conference, this multi-authored, hefty tome is a very useful addition to academic library collections supporting gender studies or Canadian art history.

While reading Kristina Huneault’s introductory chapter about the ill-fitting concept of professionalism for women artists, my mind kept flitting back to Eunice Lipton’s Alias Olympia: A Woman’s Search for Manet’s Notorious Model and Her Own Desire (1992, Charles Scribner’s Sons). Spurred on by Linda Nochlin, who famously asked why there have been no great women artists, Lipton traveled to Paris to restore dignity to Victorine Meurent, Edouard Manet’s model. Although Meurent was an exhibiting artist and a member of an esteemed professional art society who declared herself an artist twice in the French equivalent of the census, her contemporaries and later art historians dismissed her as an amateur and a prostitute. Huneault’s parallel examples from Canada are lower profile but no less gripping. She identifies discrepancies between a census count of female artists compared to the membership in the Ontario Society of artists. And then there’s the case of Charlotte Schreiber, the only female artist accepted into the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts in its first 50 years, who couldn’t attend meetings because it would have meant being alone with 39 men.

If you read this book, the historical references may make you angry, whether it’s the virile description of the Group of Seven or the flipside, emphasis on the feminine stature and fashion of Canada’s first female architect. (Curiously, the impulse to emphasize the gender of artists continues today, as one of the female artists’ techniques in the book is described as loving). At the very least, you’ll probably find yourself annoyed by comments like Group of Seven member A.Y. Jackson calling the arts appreciation show hosted by his former lover Anne Savage “quite a little job” (p. 121).Yet, there’s inspiration to be found in women’s comments; consider Margaret Watkins’ retort about a critic who passionately disliked her photo of dirty dishes: “Evidently the poor duffer knows nothing of Modern art” (p. 170).

Lest you get the impression that art is unique in its gender bias, Jennifer Salahub reminds us that it affects other disciplines too. As a librarian, I found her comment disheartening: “…when I first began to research Canadian needlework in the 1980s, the Library of Congress Catalogue directed me not to needlework, sewing, or even embroidery but to the letter ‘w’—women’s work.” (p. 138). I tend to be angry rather than annoyed when I read such things, but this book helped me slow down and resist a knee-jerk response. Reading the rest of Salahub’s chapter about intriguing artist, Hannah Maynard, I learned that the Victorian artist included textiles in her photos to maintain a lady-like image while pursuing an unconventional career. From a contemporary perspective (read: privileged life—the kind where I am allowed to drive and work and vote), it’s so easy to overlook awesomely experimental work and harp on what’s traditional, like the artist marketing herself as Mrs. Richard Maynard.

The most poignant content for me was Sherry Farrell Racette’s roll call of names of Akwesane artists who practiced basketweaving. Seeing a photo by Mary Kawennatakie Adams, the first artist on the list—of a basket adorned with teeny decorative baskets the size of a thumbnail—had a tip-of-the iceberg effect and served as a strong argument that female Aboriginal artists have been grossly overlooked by the existing model of art history. Add to that other groups like nuns that have historically been heavily engaged in craft and the entire concept of professionalism starts to fall apart.

Image: reproduced in 2019 via fair use/dealing. Source: https://www.mqup.ca/rethinking-professionalism-products-9780773539662.php?page_id=73&#!prettyPhoto/1/

Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry

“...Ai is so shocking because he ‘points out society’s dark side’. He does this pointing, very often, with his middle finger.”

Last night at Doc North in North Bay, I watched Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry (2012), a documentary about the provocateur. Since the Chinese artist was detained last spring and interrogated daily with no communication about his well-being made to his family or the international community for 81 days—presumably for his activism but officially for tax fraud—screening the film had a pronounced resonance with this week’s jailing of three women in Russia. Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Yekaterina Samutsevich, and Maria Alyokhina, who are suspected members of the anonymous feminist punk band, Pussy Riot, which addresses issues ranging from the environment to politics, were charged with hooliganism. To quote Ai(who is described even by one of his friends as a hooligan) commenting on his own struggle: “If there is no free speech every single life has been in vain.” 
 

The film directed by American Alison Klayman opens with shots of the cats milling about Ai’s Beijing studio. Taking matters into its own paws, one of those cats figured out how to leap into the air and press on the door handle to exit. Ai is like this exceptional cat. That he regards himself as more of a chess player than an artist reveals his exceptionalism.

Ai’s mother says she wishes her son were purely an artist, but notes that if no one speaks out, what will happen? Her comment is undoubtedly informed by memories of her family’s exile to a remote region of China because of her late husband’s modernist poetry. Growing up in the family he did, Ai knew exactly what he was getting into by taking on the mantra, “Art is about sharing information.” One of his most engrossing projects has been the compilation of the names of 5,212 child victims in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, attributed in part to poorly constructed schools. This endeavour later took visual form in a installation of backpacks that spelled out “She lived happily for seven years” (trans.) and audio form in a recording of individual voices reading one name. As one of his volunteers says, his work “…doesn’t just have to do with art. It has to do with life.” 
 
Blogger and media figure Hung Huang says Ai is so shocking because he “points out society’s dark side.” He does this pointing, very often, with his middle finger (see movie poster). The night that police broke down his door at 3 am and punched him in the head, causing a brain injury that required surgery, Ai shot back with a photo on Twitter, which has become his international mouthpiece after authorities shut down his blog. The price he has paid has been high (he was fined the equivalent of $2.4 million US for tax evasion), but the reward is also high: he was named the most powerful artist by Art Review Magazine last year. Watching him walk through his installation at the Tate Modern with his young son on 100 million ceramic seeds hand-painted by assistants who revere him, one senses his vision and his resolve. “Everybody just live your life,” he told reporters upon his release from those mysterious 81 days. And this is his.