(My Working Will Be the Work) Maintenance Art and the Messianic (Mierle Laderman Ukeles)

(My Working Will Be the Work) Maintenance Art and the Messianic (Mierle Laderman Ukeles)

Posted on January 19, 2017 by zjb

 

As it turns out, Jewish ritual, the idea of the holy, informs much of this artist’s work and her thought. They cut against the grain of “messianism” in ways that are at once profound and ordinary. My introduction to her work as somewhat happenstance. Vetting a manuscript on contemporary Jewish art and conceptualism, I stumbled upon a reference to Mierle Laderman Ukeles and her “Maintenance Art Manifesto.” I found it immediately useful as a model for work in Jewish aesthetic thought and philosophical Talmud. Some months later, the Queens Museum put on a retrospective of her work. Ukeles was a pioneer in 1970s feminist art. Her particular hiddush (innovation) was to turn the drudgery of a married women’s domestic work into the labor of art. As conceptualist art, the work cannot be understood apart from the concept that builds it. You can read the full version of her Maintenance Art Manfesto here. It turns out too that her father was a rabbi.

About the tension between art, labor, gender, and the particularities of motherhood, she wrote in the Manifesto,

I am an artist. I am a woman. I am a wife. I am a mother. (Random order). I do a hell of a lot of washing, cleaning, cooking, renewing, supporting, preserving, etc. Also, (up to now separately I “do” Art. Now, I will simply do these maintenance everyday things, and flush them up to consciousness, exhibit them, as Art. I will live in the museum and I customarily do at home with my husband and my baby, for the duration of the exhibition. (Right? or if you don’t want me around at night I would come in every day) and do all these things as public Art activities: I will sweep and wax the floors, dust everything, wash the walls (i.e. “floor paintings, dust works, soap- sculpture, wall-paintings”) cook, invite people to eat, make agglomerations and dispositions of all functional refuse. The exhibition area might look “empty” of art, but it will be maintained in full public view.

Translating this idea into art, she contracted with museums and galleries to clean its exhibition spaces, photographing and documenting the entire process as a “happening.” Defined it in the Manifesto, “My working will be the work,” meaning, her (domestic) working will the work (of art). The photographs documenting this happening were shot at various angles meant to present the work itself and the space of its performance. At some point, an art critic suggested caustically that perhaps, inspired by Ukeles, the then financially strapped Sanitation Department could call its work art and apply for a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Responding to this barb, Ukeles reached out to the New York City Department of Sanitation, offering to become its artist in residence. The result were full blown documentations of the department and especially its workers. Most famously, the Touch Sanitation Performance project was meant to give voice to working people; Ukeles set out in this performance to shake the hand of every single worker for the department, to thank them for the work they do for the city. Again the entire process was documented. About the work of sanitation, predicated on large scale systems and the transformation of materials, she insisted that there was nothing more essential to life and to the life of the city.

From the Manifesto, the ideational contrast between the art of the Avant-Garde versus Maintenance Art reiterates Freud’s famous distinction between “the death instinct” and “the life instinct.” The avant-garde and the death instinct inspire separation, individuality, “[following] one’s own path to death—do your own thing; dynamic change,” “[d]evelopment: pure individual creation; the new; change; progress; advance; excitement; flight or fleeing.” In contrast, Maintenance together with the life instinct exhibit “unification; the eternal return; the perpetuation and MAINTENANCE of the species; survival systems and operations; equilibrium.” The idea behind Maintenance Art is to “keep the dust off the pure individual creation; preserve the new; sustain the change; protect progress; defend and prolong the advance; renew the excitement; repeat the flight; show your work—show it again keep the contemporary art museum groovy; keep the home fires burning.”

The Jewish angle for this work starts with biography, Ukeles being the daughter of a rabbi, and her own interest in Jewish ritual. From Judaism, the key concept brought into Maintenance Art is holiness (kedusha). On view at the exhibit is a long quotation from Abraham Isaac Kook and also a lengthy citation from Rachel Adler’s early work on the mikvah. The passage from Kook was included for one of the earlier projects, conveying the idea that the work of art and art performance is like a ritual. Both art and ritual [1] set apart the space of their appearance, [2] resist what is perceived to be the false and subjective binary between the holy and the profane, and [3] activate the essential transformation of the latter into the former. The citation from Adler informs Ukeles’ Mivkah Dreams from the larger Immerse Again Immerse Again project (1986). This piece gets a brief mention here in Four Centuries of Jewish Women’s Spirituality: A Sourcebook edited by Ellen M. Umansky, Dianne Ashton, p.191). It’s fundamental visual is the repetition of the words, “immerse again.”

In working through the retrospective at Queens Museum of Art, I took for the slideshow below what for me is an unusually large number of digital photos. Usually at a museum or gallery show I take up to 20 images. Here I took nearly one hundred. This fits the work. I would like to think that my own documentation here represents a third reiteration adding on to the performance itself and the artist’s own photographic and textual documentation. The slideshow includes photographs of the photographs and a lot of the written documents, much of it original from the 1970s and 1980s. What I hope gets underscored is the intimate relation between physical bodies, written texts, ideas, performance, and photography. Tracking back and forth between ideas, texts, and visual images lends itself to a multi-layered form of deep immersion. That was my “experience” at the show, and this would be as true of religion as it is for art.

As for my own immediate purpose with this body of art is to work Maintenance Art Working as a simple form of quotidian life against false masculine bravado of “the messianic.” Against the avant-garde, Maintenance Art is “the sourball of every revolution.” None of the theorists opining about the messianic ever think to ask, “after the revolution, who’s going to pick up the garbage on Monday morning?”

Por un feminismo no sólo hegemónico

Por un feminismo no sólo hegemónico
Por Vidas precarias


El deseo que se esfuma por el camino

Cuando los feminismos se piensan exclusivamente en términos de hegemonía[1], se pierde algo importante que las luchas feministas desde los 60 pusieron sobre la mesa: el deseo como fuerza colectiva, el cuerpo como campo de batalla y la creatividad como posibilidad de inventar mundos. Necesitamos una política de mayorías, pero también una política del deseo que permita desplazar los presupuestos racionalistas-discursivos que prevalecen en la apuesta populista. ¿Cuáles son estos presupuestos? Tienen que ver con tres cuestiones: otorgar prioridad al discurso como campo en el que se disputa lo político; señalar la importancia de las emociones como instrumentos para la movilización social –en lugar de comprenderlos como afectos incalculables e impersonales–; y tomar la demanda –las reivindicaciones de los diferentes actores sociales– como lógica que rige el espacio político.

Chantal Mouffe y Ernesto Laclau publicaron en 1985 un libro clave, Hegemonía y estrategia socialista, en el que elaboraron una contundente crítica al marxismo ortodoxo. En el centro de sus preocupaciones, estaban dos: pensar las luchas sin presuponer una identidad a priori que portaría en sí misma el cambio; y dar cuenta de una multiplicidad de sujetos surgidos al calor de las transformaciones socioeconómicas de un capitalismo que se recomponía velozmente: feminismos, luchas étnicas, nacionales, sexuales y ecológicas. En relación al primer punto, pensaron que el cambio no podía derivarse automáticamente de una determinada posición de clase. Debían contemplarse los complejos procesos en los que se forman las identidades políticas. Esta atención implicó romper con algunas de las certidumbres que ofrecía el relato marxista: la clase obrera, entendida como una esencia con inclinaciones propias, se desvanecía. En relación al segundo, en contra de los pensadores que en el término del siglo XX profetizaban el final de la política, señalaron que la proliferación de nuevos protagonismos no debía conducir al relativismo. Al contrario, constituían la riqueza necesaria para repensar la democracia, siempre que se buscasen formas de articular las diferencias que evitasen la dispersión de las luchas. Como Laclau desarrollará posteriormente, para ello se volvían imprescindibles significantes vacíos como «pueblo» con capacidad para nombrar diversas demandas sin condicionarlas en su contenido ( no tanto por su vaguedad, sino por tratarse de significantes al mismo tiempo necesarios e imposibles –nunca pueden representarlo todo–), y que permitía aglutinarlas a partir de sus equivalencias.

Teniendo en cuenta estas importantes aportaciones, ¿puede afirmarse que una teoría que se reconoce parte de la crítica al esencialismo filosófico y político contenga algo del racionalismo que pretende cuestionar? Para intentar responder a esta pregunta –sacudida por la preocupación de un deseo que se esfuma de la acción política– debemos acercarnos a tres problemas que transitan entre la propuesta teórica de Mouffe y Laclau, y la experimentación real de Podemos en España.

¿Qué política, qué sentido común, qué articulación?

El primer problema surge cuando reducimos lo político a una serie de demandas. La demanda presupone un sujeto que realiza determinadas reivindicaciones, como si el proceso por el que dicho sujeto se forma no fuese político en sí. Pese a que estilos, modos de hacer y construir relaciones son determinantes, pasan a un segundo plano. Si tenemos en cuenta que estos aspectos están implicados en producir subjetividades diferentes, este desplazamiento supone una pérdida fundamental. Gilles Deleuze y Félix Guattari señalaron que lo que sucede en el plano molecular –que tiene que ver con lo que ocurre en el nivel del deseo, no con lo pequeño o individual– es clave para el tipo de procesos revolucionarios que ponemos en marcha. Desde los 60, las revueltas feministas afirmaron que el cambio debe tocar los cuerpos, transformar la vida. Con ello, anticipaban la respuesta a un capitalismo que además de producir desigualdades económicas insiste en lo simbólico, codifica el deseo social. El poder produce formas de vida, se encarna en la sexualidad, el racismo o el consumo, modula individuos. Si consideramos esto, el desafío que se presenta es revalorizar el proceso de experimentación que permite construir otras culturas políticas, otros modos de habitar el mundo. Los afectos no son emociones individuales que puedan ser conducidas por la razón, sino la materialidad en la que nos constituimos. Dicho de otra forma: el desafío se juega también en una micropolítica de los cuerpos.

Con aquel desplazamiento, también se olvida la existencia de algo más esencial que la demanda: el acto por el que acontece la reapropiación de la potencia colectiva. Antes que la demanda, lo político reclama espacios donde vivenciar la capacidad que tenemos de cambiar las cosas junto a otros, de hacer lo imposible. Espacios donde lo que se pone en juego no es algo calculable, sino la misma intensificación de esa potencia. Precisamente, se trata de una potencia que no siempre puede –ni debe– traducirse en demanda; ésta es en todo caso un efecto de un proceso mucho más amplio. La tensión producida en los últimos meses, al calor de las pasadas elecciones municipales, entre desborde y control, exceso y captura o sociedad en movimiento y movimiento social puede entenderse como una disputa positiva contra el olvido de esta noción amplificada de lo político. Si echamos la vista atrás en busca de referentes que ayuden a orientarnos, encontramos la singular experiencia de institucionalización que vivió el movimiento feminista en los años 80 y 90; experiencia que nos enseñó que la posibilidad de crear nuevos imaginarios está ligada a espacios de autonomía social: en ellos, se inventan mundos diferentes. Y que sin procesos de autonomía que sean capaces de salir más allá de sí mismos lo que se genera es meramente autorreferencial. En el contexto que nos toca, cabe decir que sin experimentación social no podrán crearse instituciones realmente otras. No debe olvidarse que el triunfo en las urnas no fue producto de un movimiento prefigurado, sino de la sociedad en movimiento que de maneras a veces insospechada, desde múltiples focos, ha alimentado una atmósfera de cambio sin precedentes. El 15M sigue siendo la imagen que nos inspira: un movimiento de cuerpos que auto-organiza progresivamente un nuevo sentido de la realidad. Esta imagen la tenemos grabada a fuego lento en la memoria colectiva reciente. Debemos seguir preguntando: ¿Cuánto del 15M es parte del famoso asalto institucional? ¿Cómo mantener viva una política deseante? ¿Puede ser ésta también una política de mayorías?

El segundo problema tiene que ver con la batalla por la hegemonía. Si miramos desde los feminismos, vemos que tenemos una oportunidad ¿histórica? para hacer de nuestras propuestas lugares comunes en los que la sociedad pueda sentirse reconocida. Para ello, se necesitan marcos de sentido compartidos, lenguajes menos codificados que promuevan una participación amplia e ir más allá de posiciones ideológicas, interpelando desde la experiencia llana, cotidiana, en primera persona. En esta tarea, enfrentamos dos peligros: que se confunda este trabajo de conexión de lo particular a lo general con asumir un determinado sentido común presente en la sociedad –presuponiendo su necesidad, olvidando su contingencia–. Y, por otro lado, interpretar la articulación entre diferentes luchas como algo que tiene lugar desde arriba, como un paraguas que nos protege, pero que nos queda grande y no acabamos de sentir propio.

¿Cómo evitar esto? Primero: no puede darse por hecho qué sea el sentido común, pues éste siempre está sujeto a la historia y al lugar en el que se delimita. No está de más señalar que lo que para unos resulta «de sentido común» no lo es para otros. Esto tiene que ver con el hecho fundamental de que el sentido permanece siempre abierto: no puede ser clausurado de manera definitiva. Por ejemplo, pensemos cómo ha cambiado lo que entendemos por «crisis»: de un destino inesquivable a una situación con responsables directos. Si bien, por una parte, el sentido es objeto de disputa, por otra, el sentido también implica un proceso creativo. Y si el sentido se crea es debido a que las palabras no pueden decirlo todo por sí mismas: están inacabadas, y este inacabamiento permite que pueda producirse una novedad; y que protestar, tomar las plazas o parar un desahucio adquieran un significado diferente. Pero, ¿qué es lo que hace entonces que tal sentido y no otro se torne común? Una respuesta tentativa: tiene que ver con la presencia de diversas fuerzas que constituyen lo social (por ejemplo: sin la Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca posiblemente los desahucios no serían considerados como ocurre hoy un problema de todos), así como con la capacidad de nombrar una experiencia compartida –vivida y sentida por muchos– y con no decirlo todo: con expresar algo de su esencia inacabada; con la posibilidad de dibujar una línea de fuga, de crear un significado distinto. El desafío en este caso: no plegarse a un sentido predeterminado, sino insistir en que podemos crear otros compartidos por muchos (¿quién diría hace solo unos pocos años que los mercados –representantes por antonomasia de la lógica capitalista de acumulación– iban a ser reprobados por tantos?).

Por último, debemos preguntarnos: ¿Existe un único modo de construir articulación política o hay diversos? Son fundamentales demandas generales que provean de un marco común a las diferentes luchas, del modo en el que permite hacerlo, por ejemplo, «democracia real». Pero también es importante observar cómo se conforma dicho marco. Existe el peligro de que la articulación se realice desde cierto idealismo del lenguaje: entre diferencias que no tocan, modifican o afectan al conjunto que las reúne y que intenta significarlas desde arriba. Aquí podemos creer estar ante una articulación, pero asistir en realidad a una operación en la que se neutraliza lo diferente. Evitar esto exige girar la mirada hacia las prácticas políticas que encarnan de modos diversos problemas generales (sanidad, vivienda, migración, cuidados). Y que al encarnarse los resignifican. De modo que asistimos a un movimiento en una doble dirección. Por ejemplo: ¿cómo practican los feminismos la democracia? Y, al mismo tiempo, ¿cómo se reinventa la misma idea de democracia a través de dichas prácticas: una democracia no solo de las instituciones, sino también de los hogares y de las relaciones sexuales? Cuando partimos de las vivencias, de las luchas, de las realidades cotidianas, la articulación se produce al nivel de la experiencia, de la composición de los cuerpos, y no solo desde cierta sobredeterminación del discurso. Dicho de otra manera: el desafío en este caso es tejer una política de lo común.

¿Qué supone esto para los feminismos?

Digámoslo de este modo.
Necesitamos algo de la política deseante.
Necesitamos también algo de poesía.
Necesitamos no renunciar a inventar nuevos sentidos sobre el mundo que queremos desde miradas feministas.
No solo demandar. No solo conectar con lo que hay. También atrevernos a imaginar otra cosa diferente. Hacerlo desde la realidad en la que se ensayan transformaciones a escala de las estrategias cotidianas que sostienen un sistema insostenible.
No solo conquista del sentido común: también creación de nuevos mundos. Nadie esperaba el 15M.
Ni que aquello de poner el cuidado en el centro fuese debatido ampliamente.
No hay democracia sin feminismos, pero tampoco hay democracia sin experimentar otras culturas políticas.
Culturas políticas capaces de revolver los cuerpos, que produzcan cercanías e intensidades nuevas.
Culturas del cuidado que no son femeninas, sino feministas.
Que hacen que circulen otras prioridades y otros modos de estar en el espacio político.
No solo articulación discursiva-racional de las demandas feministas, sino también expresión de otras formas de vida que se contagian y expanden sin saber apenas cómo.
No solo tener razones que nos unen, sino componernos y afectarnos.
No solo articular mayorías sociales, sino producir desviaciones, desbordes.
No solo bloques antagónicos, sino diferencias irreductibles, singularidades.
No solo demandas, sino también el gesto artístico. El que trasporta en su esencia apenas sin hablar a lo imposible.
Y es que el sentido se disputa, pero también se crea.

silvia l. gil







[1] Este texto parte del reconocimiento explícito a todas las feministas que desde Podemos u otros espacios están dando la enorme batalla por hacer que las ideas feministas estén en el centro de la discusión política actual.

Clarice .......

PAGE-TURNERJULY 10, 2015
The True Glamour of Clarice Lispector
BY BENJAMIN MOSER





The connection between literature and witchcraft has long been an important part of the Clarice mythology, which endures even now, nearly forty years after her death.


CREDITPHOTOGRAPH COURTESY PAULO GURGEL VALENTE

Catholic communicants are asked at Easter, “Do you renounce the glamour of evil, and refuse to be mastered by sin?” The question preserves a conflation, now rare, of glamour and sorcery: glamour was a quality that confounds, shifts shapes, invests a thing with a mysterious aura; it was, as Sir Walter Scott wrote, “the magic power of imposing on the eyesight of spectators, so that the appearance of an object shall be totally different from the reality.”

The legendarily beautiful Clarice Lispector, tall and blonde, clad in the outspoken sunglasses and chunky jewelry of a grande dame of midcentury Rio de Janeiro, met our current definition of glamour. She spent years as a fashion journalist and knew how to look the part. But it is as much in the older sense of the word that Clarice Lispector is glamorous: as a caster of spells, literally enchanting, her nervous ghost haunting every branch of the Brazilian arts.

Her spell has grown unceasingly since her death. Then, in 1977, it would have seemed exaggerated to say she was her country’s preëminent modern writer. Today, when it no longer does, questions of artistic importance are, to a certain extent, irrelevant. What matters is the magnetic love she inspires in those susceptible to her. For them, reading Clarice Lispector is one of the great emotional experiences of their lives. But her glamour is dangerous. “Be careful with Clarice,” a friend told a reader decades ago, using the single name by which she is universally known. “It’s not literature. It’s witchcraft.”

The connection between literature and witchcraft has long been an important part of the Clarice mythology. That mythology, with a powerful boost from the Internet, which magically transforms rumors into facts, has developed ramifications so baroque that it might today be called a minor branch of Brazilian literature. Circulating unstoppably online is an entire shadow oeuvre, generally trying, and failing, to sound profound, and breathing of passion. Online, too, Clarice has acquired a posthumous shadow body, as pictures of actresses portraying her are constantly reproduced in lieu of the original.

If the technology has changed its forms, the mythologizing itself is nothing new. Clarice Lispector became famous when, at the end of 1943, she published “Near to the Wild Heart.” She was a student, barely twenty-three, from a poor immigrant background. Her first novel had such a tremendous impact that, one journalist wrote, “we have no memory of a more sensational debut, which lifted to such prominence a name that, until shortly before, had been completely unknown.” But only a few weeks after that name was becoming known she left Rio with her husband, a diplomat. They would live abroad for almost two decades.

Though she made regular visits home, she would not return definitively until 1959. In that interval, legends flourished. Her odd foreign name became a subject of speculation—one critic suggested it might be a pseudonym—and others wondered whether she was, in fact, a man. Taken together, the legends reflect an uneasiness, a feeling that she was something other than she seemed.

In the eighty-five stories that she wrote, Clarice Lispector conjures, first of all, the writer herself. From her earliest story, published when she was nineteen, to the last, found in scratchy fragments after her death, we follow a lifetime of artistic experimentation through a vast range of styles and experiences. This literature is not for everyone: even certain highly literate Brazilians have been baffled by the cult-like fervor she inspires. But for those who instinctively understand her, the love for the person of Clarice Lispector is immediate and inexplicable. Hers is an art that makes us want to know the woman; she is a woman who makes us want to know her art. Through her stories we can trace her artistic life, from adolescent promise through assured maturity to the implosion as she nears—and summons—death.

But something more surprising appears when these stories are at last seen in their entirety, an accomplishment whose significance the author herself cannot have been aware of, for it could only appear retrospectively. This accomplishment lies in the second woman she conjures. Clarice Lispector was a great artist; she was also a middle-class wife and mother. If the portrait of the extraordinary artist is fascinating, so is the portrait of the ordinary housewife, whose life is the subject of her stories. As the artist matures, the housewife, too, grows older. When Lispector is a defiant adolescent filled with a sense of her own potential—artistic, intellectual, sexual—so are the girls in her stories. When, in her own life, marriage and motherhood take the place of precocious childhood, her characters grow up, too. When her marriage fails, when her children leave, these departures appear in her stories. When the author, once so gloriously beautiful, sees her body blemished by wrinkles and fat, her characters see the same decline in theirs; and when she confronts the final unravelling of age and sickness and death, they appear in her fiction as well.


This is a record of woman’s entire life, written over the course of a woman’s entire life. As such, it seems to be the first such total record written in fiction, in any language. This sweeping claim requires qualifications. A wife and a mother; a bourgeois, Western, heterosexual woman’s life. A woman who was not interrupted: a woman who did not start writing late, or stop for marriage or children, or succumb to drugs or suicide. A woman who, like so many male writers, began in her teens and carried on to the end. A woman who, in demographic respects, was exactly like most of her readers.

Their story had only been written in part. Before Clarice, a woman who wrote throughout her life about that life was so rare as to be previously unheard of. The claim seems extravagant, but I have not identified any predecessors.

The qualifications are important, but even when they are dropped it is astonishing to realize how few women were able to create such full bodies of work. And the women who did were precisely those exempted from the obstacles that kept most women from writing. These are the barriers Tillie Olsen adumbrated in her famous 1962 essay, “Silences in Literature,” the barriers that led to women constituting, in Olsen’s calculation, “one out of twelve” writers in the twentieth century. “In our century as in the last,” Olsen wrote, “almost all distinguished achievement has come from childless women.” Edith Wharton was far from middle-class; Colette hardly lived, or wrote about, a conventional bourgeois life. Others—Gabriela Mistral, Gertrude Stein—had, like many male writers, wives of their own.

Clarice Lispector, as her stories make clear, was intimately acquainted with these barriers. Her characters struggle against ideological notions about a woman’s proper role; face practical entanglements with husbands and children; worry about money; confront the private despair that leads to drinking, madness, or suicide. Like so many women writers everywhere, she was ignored by publishers, agonizingly, for years; she was consistently placed in a separate (lower) category by reviewers and scholars. (She persisted anyway, once remarking that she did not enjoy being compared to Virginia Woolf because Woolf had given up: “The terrible duty is to go to the end.”)

But her sympathy for silent and silenced women haunts these stories. The earliest ones, written when Clarice was in her teens and early twenties, often feature a restless girl in conflict with a man, as in “Jimmy and I”:


Mama, before she got married, according to Aunt Emília, was a firecracker, a tempestuous redhead, with thoughts of her own about liberty and equality for women. But then along came Papa, very serious and tall, with thoughts of his own too, about … liberty and equality for women. The trouble was in the coinciding subject matter.

If these women are sometimes crushed by imposing, fascinating men, they become more assertive as the author grows older. But it is a different kind of assertion. The strident feminism of Clarice’s student years gives way to something less explicit, the characters stop flaunting thoughts about “liberty and equality for women.” They simply live their lives with as much dignity as they can muster. In art as in life, that is not always very much.

Many are silent. The grandmother in “Happy Birthday” surveys the petty mediocrities she has spawned with wordless revulsion. The Congolese pygmy in “The Smallest Woman in the World” has no words to express her love. The hen in “A Chicken” has no words to say that she is about to give birth—and thus cannot be killed. In “The Burned Sinner and the Harmonious Angels,” an adulteress utters not a single word, and in the end she is burned as a witch. At the execution, her husband admonishes the crowd, “Beware a woman who dreams.”

Clarice was nine when Virginia Woolf asked a question she later quoted: “Who shall measure the heat and violence of the poet’s heart when caught and tangled in a woman’s body?” The question, Woolf believed, applied as much to women of her own day as it did to women of Shakespeare’s. How did Clarice Lispector—of all people—succeed at a time when so many other women were silenced?

She was born on December 10, 1920, to a Jewish family in western Ukraine. It was a time of chaos, famine, and racial war. Her grandfather was murdered; her mother was raped; her father was exiled, penniless, to the other side of the world. The family’s tattered remnants washed up in northeastern Brazil, in 1922. There, her brilliant father, reduced to peddling rags, barely managed to keep his family fed; there, when Clarice was not quite nine, her mother died of her wartime injuries.

Her sister Elisa wrote that their liberal father, whose own desire to study had been thwarted by anti-Semitism, “was determined for the world to see what kind of daughters he had.” With his encouragement, Clarice pursued her education far beyond the level allowed even girls far more economically advantaged. Only a couple of years after reaching the capital, Clarice entered one of the redoubts of the élite, the National Law Faculty of the University of Brazil. At the law school, Jews (zero) were even more rare than women (three).

Her law studies left little mark. She was already pursuing her vocation into the newsrooms of the capital, where her beauty and brilliance made a dazzling impression. She was, her boss wrote, “a smart girl, an excellent reporter, and, in contrast to almost all women, actually knows how to write.” On May 25, 1940, she published her earliest known story, “The Triumph.” Three months later, at age fifty-five, her father died. Before her twentieth birthday, Clarice was an orphan. In 1943, she married a Catholic man—unheard of at the time for a Jewish girl in Brazil. At the end of that year, shortly after she published her first novel, the couple left Rio. In short order, she had left not only her family, her ethnic community, and her country, but also her profession, journalism, in which she had a burgeoning reputation.

She found exile intolerable, and during her fifteen years abroad her tendency toward depression grew sharper. But, despite its disadvantages, perhaps exile—this series of exiles—explains how she managed to write. Her immigrant background left her less susceptible to the received ideas of Brazilian society. And in purely financial terms her marriage was a step up. She was never rich, but as long as she was married she did not have to work on anything but writing. She had two children, but she also had full-time help. This meant free hours every day: a room of her own.

Traditionally “female” subjects—marriage and motherhood, kids and clothes—had, of course, been written about before. But had any writer ever described a seventy-seven-year-old lady dreaming of coitus with a pop star, or an eighty-one-year-old woman masturbating? Half a century or more after they were written, many of Clarice’s stories, read in an entirely different age, have lost none of their novelty.

New subjects require new language. Part of Clarice’s odd grammar can be traced to the powerful influence of the Jewish mysticism that her father introduced her to. But another part of its strangeness can be attributed to her need to invent a tradition. As anyone who reads her stories from beginning to end will see, they are shot through by a ceaseless linguistic searching, a grammatical instability, that prevents them from being read too quickly.

The reader—not to mention the translator—is often tripped up by their nearly Cubist patterns. In certain late stories, the difficulties are obvious. But many of Clarice’s reorderings are subtle, easy to miss. In “Love,” for example, we read: “They were growing up, taking their baths, demanding for themselves, misbehaved, ever more complete moments.” The sentence, like so many of Clarice’s, makes sense if read in a quick glance—and then, examined again, slowly, begins to dissolve. In “Happy Birthday,” amidst an awkward celebration, a child verbalizes an awkward pause: “Their mother, comma!”

In “Why This World,” my biography of Clarice, I examined her roots in Jewish mysticism and the essentially spiritual impulse that animated her work. As the Kabbalists found divinity by rearranging letters, repeating nonsensical words, parsing verses, and seeking a logic other than the rational, so did she. With some exceptions, this mystic quality, which can make her prose nearly abstract, is less visible in her stories than in novels such as “The Passion According to G.H.” or “The Apple in the Dark.” But to see Clarice’s writing as a whole is to understand the close connection between her interest in language and her interest in what—for lack of a better word—she called God.

In her stories, the divine erupts beneath carefully tended everyday lives. “She had pacified life so well,” she writes in one story, “taken such care for it not to explode.” When the inevitable explosions come, shifts in grammar announce them long before they appear in the plot. Laura, the bored, childless housewife in “The Imitation of the Rose,” has a “painstaking taste for method”—until, as she is thinking about how to explain herself to her friend Carlota, her grammar starts to slide.


Carlota would be stunned to learn that they too had a private life and things they never told, but she wouldn’t tell, what a shame not to be able to tell, Carlota definitely thought she was just tidy and mundane and a little annoying, and if she had to be careful not to burden other people with details, with Armando she’d sometimes relax and get pretty annoying, which didn’t matter because he’d pretend to be listening without really listening to everything she was telling him, which didn’t ever bother her, she understood perfectly well that her chattering tired people out a bit, but it was nice to be able to explain how she hadn’t found any meat even if Armando shook his head and wasn’t listening, she and the maid chatted a lot, actually she talked more than the maid, and she was also careful not to pester the maid who sometimes held back her impatience and could get a little rude, it was her own fault because she didn’t always command respect.

These signals can be much more concise, as in “The Passion According to G.H.,” when another housewife recounts the mystical shock she underwent the day before. Remembering herself as she then was, G.H. says, “I finally got up from the breakfast table, that woman.” The transformation described in the novel—then to now, yesterday to today, her to me, first person to third—is resumed in a breezy anacoluthon, the break in grammar perfectly symbolizing the break in this woman’s life. Like so many of Clarice’s best phrases, it is elegant precisely because it disregards the mannered conventions that are the elegance of belles lettres.

“In painting as in music and literature,” she wrote, “what is called abstract so often seems to me the figurative of a more delicate and difficult reality, less visible to the naked eye.” As abstract painters sought to portray mental and emotional states without direct representation, and modern composers expanded traditional laws of harmony, Clarice undid reflexive patterns in grammar. She often had to remind readers that her “foreign” speech was not the result of her European birth or an ignorance of Portuguese.

Nor, needless to say, of the proper ways women presented themselves. As a professional fashion writer, she reveled in her characters’ appearances. And then she dishevelled their dresses, smudged their mascara, deranged their hair, enchanting well-composed faces with the creepier glamour Sir Walter Scott described. With overturned words, she conjured an entire unknown world—conjuring, too, the unforgettable Clarice Lispector: a female Chekhov on the beaches of Guanabara.

This essay is adapted from the introduction to “The Complete Stories,” by Clarice Lispector, out in August from New Directions. Benjamin Moser is the series editor of New Directions’ Lispector translations.

been there ..... becoming cactus ....

parallel situations of self -Exile and Exile......... why so similar ???

a time of broken skyes

Since I had arrived,
Lots of photos where rescued from a dark drawer, and are now at my small room (where I stay) when I am in Barcelona.
This room that means nothing special, the last room of the so many that due to my father unstable behaviour, I would have to inhabit.

The photos are at the table where the laptop is, and at other places, like an old trunk that serves as bed table. Kept in small groups of periods and themes, one is of my parents weeding, other, of my baptism or of my very young parents with a baby who is me. Other groups are of a few holiday pictures, including my parents photographed by me at 12 years old or so, when my dad has just arrived to this old sixties Barcelona airport.

I also have a few of my mother, been photographed by my father as to re-explore how he was looking at her.

Can we see in this photos any sign, any clue of what is about to happen in our lives?
The first clue, is the face expression of my grand mother María, the mother of my father.
She is holding a big candle, next to the baptismal pile at Barcelona cathedral wile I am about to be christened. Her face looks abstracted in a sadness and coldness that is quite impressive.
She is supposed to be happy, but she is not.
Another people who are not so happy or smily are, her daughter, my aunt and other aunts from my mother's side.

Looking at my parents weeding pictures is really nice, one looks at happiness and love. Genuine and truly, simple and honest.
But again, one is stricken by the serious and sad faces in contrast, bared by my dad's mother and sister.

Fifty and four years later all the unfolded events and retrospective analysis uses the pictured seconds to grasp any hidden sign or premonition....
As today my dad is with a very developed cancer started from his prostate and spread to his bones, and my sister has put her self on observation inside the mental health dept in hospital wile I am tacking my medication and struggling with depression.

Narcissist disorder, inherited disturbance?

Just one day in spring of 1975 things shifted and started.

But not really, as we know that all starts always way before.

She was a Lost Girl

After few months away, I am back at home where my dad had been at hospital back and forward since Xmas.
Fainting or getting his urine conduct infected twice already.
Now he is back at home and very frail, but his strength is helping him and yesterday he asked for a cigar so he could smoke like he used to do.

Me and my mother help him to walk out to the sunshine for few minutes, and then slowly we get back.

Just before coming back, one night in London I dreamt I was going to marry my dad. Freud will have loved this dream!
I was looking at his best, and clearly on the dream it was apparent how narcissistic we all where.
In any case, I was immediately thinking that it was not right I was the one who was marrying  him, and started to ask about my mother and trying to find her, so that I was making sure she would marry the guy instead of me. Later on my Analysis, I realised how much about me restoring the primal couple this dream had been.

The Primal Couple, yes ! this archetype that our parents are or should be if things are right and positive.
The couple is not about heterosexual values, is about the idea of loyalty and love all based in the respect for our own compromise around a shared life project.

It may sound conservative, but should not be, because does not appeal any conservative value once one is a couple, one could have an open couple as well.
I think the worst kind of couple is the one I had to witness and endure as an accomplice daughter of my father about my mother.

And I guess this is why I was feeling guilty inside me and also why now I enjoy seeing them together.

As my dad developed a toxic relation with me, I became first an enemy of my own mother and later, a protector of a secret that would shatter her life if she would ever knew.

I have then, no father no mother, in Jungian terms and even in Freudian terms.
The Tabu, had been broken and I shared with my father a kind of a phallus equality, we both talking freely about sex, specially his sex with other women.

He never suggest anything to me, but when my sister told me about her relation, it was mind blowing literally as she really represented all this wrong, obscure, sinister thing.
She had incest with my brother as well, later, she dated one ex-boyfriend of mine too and in the end and in particular this days, I even dare to believe that she was dealing with her competing feelings about me, her elder sister with her sexiness as many women do when they actually use their sex as tool to get power, attention or else.

Of course this take me to the idea of feminist issues about dynamic between women inside a family, be the family hetero or gay.

But for more that I try to put now the blame on her too, I can't avoid what is known and what anyone can find on researching on text about sexual abuse etc etc. Is the father, the adult, that fails to resist the provocations of the child ( is a 18 year old a child??) it stills so hurting to think all that but is part of every day now that my dad is ill with Cancer and his passing is approaching.

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.  

The Problem of the Overlooked Female Artist:

The Problem of the Overlooked Female Artist: An Argument for Enlivening a Stale Model of Discussion

by Ashton Cooper on January 10, 2015 34


Maria Lassnig, “Du oder Ich” (2005), oil on canvas, 203,5 x 155,5 cm (photo courtesy Maria Lassnig Foundation)

Editor’s note: This essay first appeared in the catalogue for Lucid Gestures, an exhibition of Barnard College alumnae artists last fall.

Very recently I was told that a certain art magazine editor, who had deleted the feminist critique from a review I had written, “can only take so much feminism.” At the time, I was infuriated that someone who is hypothetically tasked with shaping the way art is discussed, would take such an explicit and condescending stance against gender equality. With art world professionals like him hoping that feminism would just go away, it feels necessary to be supportive of any museum exhibitions, gallery shows, market successes, or media attention given to women artists. However, even when it seems as if we might be getting it right (the Museum of Modern Art will feature women in five shows opening this spring! four out of seven Tate solo exhibitions will go to women in 2015! the Hole devotes a show to “Future Feminism”! Georgia O’Keeffe’s “Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1” sells for $44 million!), something is still amiss.

As a onetime writer and editor for a company that owns two art magazines and an art-centric website, I can attest that art journalism is in no way immune from conventions that ostensibly champion women artists, but in fact perpetuate problematic narratives about them — tropes so prevalent, even I have operated within them. In particular, I’m thinking of the widespread myth of the “overlooked,” “forgotten,” and/or “rediscovered” female artist.

Two experiences I had at Barnard irrevocably shaped the way I understand the art history’s inherent power structures, especially regarding the role of female artists. First, serving as the Columbia Daily Spectator’s art editor, I interviewed the Guerrilla Girls. My conversation with founding member Frida Kahlo (the Girls take pseudonymous names for anonymity) taught me that the art world is not, nor has it ever been, a meritocracy. It seems rudimentary now, but realizing that the best artists do not simply rise to the top based on the high quality of their work — without any consideration, say, of their genitalia — was crucial to developing my critical stance toward art.

Next, Rosalyn Deutsche’s class “Feminism and Postmodernism” showed me the connection between images and the maintenance of sexual difference: how masculinism suppresses otherness and elevates the concept of the heroic, alienated (or, “Genius Male”) artist, and how feminist artists have tried to produce different kinds of images as a challenge to phallocentrism. I haven’t used the word “seminal” since.

Yet, the myth of meritocracy is still widely perpetuated in writing and discussions about art. When it comes to the everyday written materials we consume about artists (here I am thinking about the daily glut of press releases, artist profiles, articles, and promotional materials), again and again the social and political forces that marginalize women artists are ignored.

To illustrate the fable of the Overlooked Female Artist, here is a small sampling of headlines from the past year:

From the Guardian: “Marlow Moss: forgotten art maverick;”

From the Independent: “The woman in black: Mira Schendel is finally bursting on to the British art scene;”

From the Huffington Post: “10 Drawings By Female Artists Whom History Has Underestimated;”

From the Wall Street Journal, on Maria Lassnig: “Retrospective Is Part of Late-Career Resurgence for 94-Year-Old;”

From W: “Ahead of her Time: Artist Sarah Charlesworth is experiencing something of a revival;”

And the trend isn’t exclusive to artists. From the Daily Beast, on a writer: “The Rediscovered Genius of Muriel Spark.”

Be it a late career exhibition or a bump in sales, again and again I have seen an eerily similar story structure parroted:

At long last, a senior (or deceased) female artist gets the recognition she has deserved all along. Overlooked by the establishment for her entire life, she never stopped prodigiously toiling in obscurity and is finally being given her due.

At first these recognitions might seem laudable, even a continuation of the efforts of the Women’s Movement to dig into history and pull out disregarded women who have achieved remarkable things. But after reading several of these stories, a troubling pattern starts to emerge: this type of article does not truly advocate for women artists, but rather belatedly elevates women or minorities to the canon, instead of questioning canonicity itself.

Similar to Hollywood’s Strong Female Character (who, for all her kickass prowess, is not actually all that empowering — see: The Matrix’s Trinity), these at-long-last-glorified women artists are being vaunted as emblems of inclusion and steps toward gender equality, when, in fact, the stories that are being told about them are keeping our understanding of women artists firmly grounded in a safe and schematic narrative. Removing all blame from the (white, male) writers of history, these articles justify the delay of recognition as a matter of taste: their work just didn’t “catch on.”

Louise Bourgeois, “Cinq” (2007), currently on view as part of ‘Louise Bourgeois: Suspension’, Cheim & Read, New York (photo by Benjamin Sutton)

Take these excerpts from a Wall Street Journal profile of Louise Bourgeois from May of this year:

She met American art critic Robert Goldwater in 1938. They married and moved to New York and had three sons. She continued her art studies and befriended Abstract Expressionists like Willem de Kooning and Barnett Newman. Like them, she was interested in making psychically charged art, but her sculptures didn’t catch on as quickly.

After her husband died in 1973, […] she coped, as ever, by making art into the night.

In 1980, Mr. Gorovoy said he was working in a gallery when he convinced her to let him exhibit some of her drawings. The show proved a hit and he became her assistant. Two years later, the Museum of Modern Art gave her a retrospective that amounted to her debut on the international art scene. She was 71.

The rhetoric surrounding these “rediscovered” artists excludes too much about the specifics of their lives and the sociopolitical contexts that have perpetuated their exclusion — not simply from notoriety, but also from market success and a place in art education. Instead of acknowledging these forces, we often say women artists were too unorthodox for their times. “She refused to court trends in the art world, and weathered decades of rejection from the Establishment,” reads an August 2014 Telegraph obituary of Maria Lassnig. “Ultimately, she would be rewarded for sticking to her guns.”

Moreover, all too often the stories of women’s lives are forced into the age-old paradigm of the Genius Male Artist. When the mainstream art industry (here I am thinking of the MoMAs, Gagosians, and Tates of the world) finally does bestow its interest upon the Overlooked Female Artist, it forces her to fit into a tired story. The “genius” artist has toiled away for years until she is finally found or discovered by the boys’ club. Unsurprisingly, there is often no discussion of the forces of exclusion faced by the female artist.

Here’s another familiar story from a March 2014 Guardian article on Phyllida Barlow:

She’s taught everyone from Martin Creed to Rachel Whiteread, but it’s only now, at 70, that Barlow is getting her dues as an artist.

Barlow, who turns 70 this week, has spent her adult life making sculpture, enjoying her greatest success by far over the last 10 years.

She went on to the Slade until 1966, and then began teaching, and having children; she and Peake have five in all. […] In those days, she was working in total isolation.

Since she started being represented by the gallery Hauser & Wirth a few years ago, her work has been sold […]

Barlow has weathered the fallow times, to be celebrated as one of the country’s greatest sculptors, her career built on resilience, curiosity and commitment.

Not only does this narrative ignore that women were frequently raising children during their professional prime (hence a reason for “working in total isolation”), but it also fails to take into account that an artist must have some level of economic security in order to work in obscurity for years. Even an exclusionary narrative manages to only admit mostly white, upper- and middle-class women.

When it comes to perpetuating these stories, the official line put out by institutions and the articles written by the media go hand in hand. In just one example of a great many, here’s the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) on its current Sturtevant retrospective:

As a woman making versions of the work of better-known male artists, she has passed almost unnoticed through the hierarchies of mid-century modernism and postmodernism, at once absent from these histories while nevertheless articulating their structures.

This exhibition is the first comprehensive survey in America of Sturtevant’s 50-year career, and the only institutional presentation of her work organized in the United States since her solo show at the Everson Museum of Art in 1973.

What infuriates me most about this press release is that MoMA at once shirks any culpability for allowing such an artist to pass “almost unnoticed” at the same time that the museum pats itself on the back for having the insight to give her a long overdue exhibition. Nor does MoMA address how an avant-garde-hungry market has seeped into museum programming and forced institutions to go back and find some women to glorify.

A quick perusal of the materials for the Tate’s 2015 programming, which was praised byThe Art Newspaper for putting “women artists first and foremost,” shows the same pitfalls. According to museum materials, Barbara Hepworth’s retrospective will emphasize her “overlooked prominence in the international art world” and an Agnes Martin exhibition will “cover the full breadth of Martin’s practice, reasserting her position as a key figure in the traditionally male-dominated fields of 1950s and 1960s abstraction.”

My intention here is not to call out museums or simplistic writing, but to point out the ways in which institutions and publications — both major and minor — are guilty of perpetuating a schematic and damaging narrative about the lives of women artists. These paradigms of understanding are stale caricatures of these artists’ lives.

Part of the issue is the way that art journalism works. A hook must quickly be established to make a story seem timely, and often with women artists, the supposed “breakthrough” moment is the easiest one to reach for. One of the major consequences of this discovery narrative, however, is that it essentializes an artist’s practice and oversimplifies her achievements. We don’t look at the ways that an artist’s work changed over time or the ways in which she influenced her better-known peers. Major early milestones like exhibitions or acquisitions are left out of the story in order to foreground the triumphal moment of recognition, which leads to a monolithic understanding of what women’s art making looks like.


Sarah Charlesworth, “Work” (1988) (courtesy of the Estate of Sarah Charlesworth and Maccarone Gallery)

Did you know that Judy Chicago was part of the landmark minimalism show Primary Structures before she made “The Dinner Party”? That, before her MoMA retrospective, Isa Genzken was in the 1982 Venice Biennale? That Sarah Charlesworth was in the 1985 Whitney Biennial before she was included in the 2014 edition? It takes decades to become an overnight success.

It is essential that we complicate these stories. Writers, along with collectors, dealers, and curators, are all part of an ecosystem that is constantly forming and unforming art history. So instead of focusing on the moment when these women were finally “found” — and by extension, on the institution that was gracious enough to do so — I propose we talk more about that period where she was toiling away in obscurity. What was she doing then? Where was she showing? Who was she in community with? How did her practice change? What forces of exclusion did she face?

Instead of the tired story where a masculinist force deigns to discover, find, or recognise female artists, what if we tried to also understand the material realities of these women’s lives? Ultimately, we would not be so dependent on the recognition of the art world’s skewed mainstream if we used these histories as case studies to define different kinds of success.