Hi everyone. I am very happy to be part of the list-serv. Just a few
words about my work: After participating in the Whitney Museum’s
Independent Study Program, my research interests turned increasingly
to contemporary art. I have written art criticism for The Brooklyn
Rail, composed catalog essays for artists Matthew Buckingham and
Sharon Hayes, and curated an exhibition entitled “Imaginary Arsenals”
for the ten-year anniversary of the LMCC’s artist residency program.
Right now I am investigating the work of feminist artists from the
1970s to the present who have created what Mary Kelly describes as
“scriptovisual” scenarios in which the immaterial and affective labor
assigned to and thereby associated with women can come into view. (The
artists I am interested in include: Mary Kelly, Laura Mulvey, Carrie
Mae Weems, Lorna Simpson, Mona Hatoum, Therea Hak Kyung Cha, Silvia
Kolbowski, Patty Chang). My interest in feminist art as a practice and
a category, as well as its relationship to what is known as feminism’s
second wave, was bolstered by the numerous exhibitions that appeared
in 2007 that were devoted to displaying feminist art, narrating
stories of its emergence, and speculating about its futures. Wack! Art
and the Feminist Revolution and Global Feminisms: New Directions in
Contemporary Art were two of the most prominent exhibitions of 2007,
and to some degree qualify as “mega-exhibitions”: they were curated to
fill large museum spaces, received mainstream press coverage, and
traveled to multiple North American cities. In different ways and to
different degrees, both exhibitions reflected the impact of
antiracist, postcolonial, and transnational feminism and feminist
theory, and therefore, with debatable success, sought to unsettle the
assumption that feminist art belongs to the Euro-American 1970s. Much
of the artwork included in these exhibitions called attention to the
immaterial and affective work associated with women and how women’s
production of themselves as images, in the words of Kathi Weeks, is an
“activity that produces society itself, including the networks of
sociality and the subjects they sustain” (Constituting Feminist
Subjects, 1998, 6).
Though it may seem quaint to narrow in on artwork that defamiliarizes
the relationship between language and image, I see it in relation
to—but certainly not subsumed by—the legacies of conceptual art.
Furthermore, feminist artists’ work de-suturing language and images is
pertinent to our present digital moment in which, according to
Friedrich Kittler, “sound and image, voice and text have become mere
effects on the surface, or to put it better, the interface for the
consumer” (Kittler, 1987). What Kittler is describing here is the
spectacle’s ability to flatten and erase worlds of work into images to
be consumed. Building upon Guy Debord’s still productive notion of
spectacle, Peter Wollen offered useful insights about spectacle in
Visual Display: Culture Beyond Appearances (1995). He writes that the
excess of display has “the effect of concealing the truth of the
society that produces it, providing the viewer with an unending stream
of images that might best be understood, not simply detached from a
real world of things, as Debord implied, but as effacing any trace of
the symbolic, condemning the viewer to a world in which we can see
everything but understand nothing—allowing us viewer-victims, in
Debord’s phrase, only ‘a random choice of ephemera’”(1995). Whether
contemporary art contributes to, is complicit with, or undermines the
spectacle of consumption is a nagging but necessary question.
Following Okwui Enwezor’s emphasis on the possibility of the
“counter-hegemonic” within the global spectacle in his 2010 essay
“Mega-Exhibitions and the Antinomies,” I am interested in the ways in
which contemporary feminist artists use language to re-trace the
symbolic within spectacle (444).
Thinking about contemporary art in relation to feminism requires
discussing affective and immaterial labor and their relationship to
the production of images. I have recently been reading Enzo di
Martino’s History of the Venice Biennale, 1895-2005. Di Martino makes
it clear that the Biennale was conceived to recuperate the economy and
myth of Venice: “On its last legs both socially and economically,
Venice needed to be set on its feet again…Thus in 1887, as other
Italian cities had already done, Venice too organized a great
exhibition but whereas the other cities focused on their regional
craftsmanship, Venice instead decided on a national exhibition of
painting and sculpture that numbered over a thousand works” (8-9). Can
we think about this strategic turn to art for economic and cultural
viability and its continuance into twentieth- and twenty-first century
“mega-exhibitions” as a reflection of the increased emphasis on
affective and immaterial labor in the global marketplace? In Multitude
(2004), Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri make the necessity to produce
