Wednesday 8 April 2015

The object's immanence: Been a female been feminist ??


What would the pedagogic or hermeneutic gaze rest upon when, “as women, we are inevitably the subject and object of our study …both the result and the occasion of struggles inside and outside the [academic] context”? 

Looking at the work of all artist archived and cataloged so far as some kind feminist, or for belonging to a variety of feminisms, I always see my self reflected, and my work and my biography too.

It seems that we can’t avoid the Been Women / Becoming Female issues and if there is a kind of very specific issues (that the lesbian feminist have appropriated for themselves an their “war” on patriarchy) there is also a strong immanent theme going throughout the discourses of female artist that are not clearly lesbians or not interested on this specificity.

It is obvious that the hetero-feminist seem to wander all disperse in micro geographies and micro politics of the self, as if she is not a feminist whatsoever. So that she is alone for not belonging to the greater queer/lesbian hard core matrix.
The hostility between women is well known, and the demise of the queer/lesbian intellectual towards a possible emancipated hetero female is continually exercised with its damning consequences of fragmentation and alienation.

Never the less and if looking at the big picture or with an structuralist view on the contents and discourses of all this quoted and listed female artist, the common thematic immanence that I encounter is: Self Portrait, Self Fantasising as many roles, Essays in various Identities, silhouettes, biography tales, diaristic, critic of her role throughout irony or self defeating risking poses……

Once a young women curator told me about some other young women curator she knew, about what she thought about my work: it is too much about you.
This sentence has haunted me, because I always believe that a critic holds some true hints, even if coming from an hostile party.
Later, I found out that this women, was studying and making her line of research and expertise an artist like Ana Mendieta, and I was even more puzzled.

Well, I can make a whole string of works or a list if you like where you can see so many women doing all that. Talking about themselves, self portraying, transforming their id in front of cameras, dressing up and cross dressing, playing the slut, getting naked, referring to blood, violence, crime or their periods, getting “operated” “mutated”. 
There is of course a matter of aesthetics that seem to separe some territoires and practices, we can this style families or aesthetic affiliations. And those can be traced and mapped as well.
In my case I am definitely oscillating between the 70's and early 80's (as far as when Francesca Goodman and Ana Mendieta died) and some kind of 90's re-take on it and Pop/Porn considered more from a kind of cultural studies approach. 
This aesthetics, are ethics and are politics and of course there is a massive separation between those and the so many other options that female feminist have taken for them selves.

My last discovery is Maria Lassnig and Mierle Laderman Ukeles and I am amazed at how many things are again in common and the female immanence, the questioning, the doubts or the affirmations are so close to the other sisters and my self.


This is really making me want to do a list and a series of archives by themes a bit like Abby Warburg.  

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