hello Irina, fellow crumbs,
Amazing to read diary fragments from 1920 that are so relevant to
what is discussed here. I wonder how many "Kandinskys and
Lunacharskys" one really needs. It would depend on whether one would
simply not want to go hungry or whether the aim is for more impact of
the work in the long run? What is the status of Stepanova's work
today? I also wonder whether your position is, Irina, that we still
need men to come to the rescue. I don't think that is what you mean,
but it might be good to be clear about this.
I ask this because fe-mail networks have been so powerful for at
least a while. Shortly after this month's theme was introduced I
happened to meet up with Kathy Rae Huffman, who initiated the
mailinglist for women in new media art 'Faces' in 1997. I told her I
kind of expected her to write something here, but she is in the
middle of moving from the UK to Germany. So maybe I should write just
a few lines. Actually, I liked Charlie Gere's remark about the
relation between issues of gender and problematic around media art
institutions in this respect. When cyberfeminism was first introduced
in the early nineties, the Internet was a very different place. This
made it possible for cyberfeminism to be highly 'speculative'. There
was a lot of room for play and experimentation, of which my favorite
was that of the Russian cyberfeminists Alla Mitrifanova and Olga
Suslova, of whom you can find an interview here: http://laudanum.net/
cgi-bin/media.cgi?action=display&id=949046137 (This is a pre-Word
text, so please try to ignore the spelling mistakes)
This experimentation and also the power of fe-mail networks seems to
have eroded over the years, and I wonder of this is because Internet
cultures are now so much more dominated and defined by offline, often
traditional institutions than they were in 1997. In that respect
there definitely is a relation with new media art in general. Yet how
deeply are gender and new media art issues truly related? Are there
no specific gender issues in new media cultures anymore? I don't
think so.
It would be very good if there were a good text about Faces
somewhere, or if anybody here could write something about how it
functioned over the years, as it was highly influential. I was only
on the Faces mailinglist for about half a year in 1997, but I still
have good contacts from then even today, ten years later.
with respect,
J
*
>
>
> Opportunities to make and to show, generosity with such opportunities,
> politics of funding, larger politics of art practice in a given
> society, respect and reputation from peers-artists, theorists and
> curators, this is what Stepanova documents as major factors in making
> or breaking an artist, or an art movement. She documents brutality
> with which she was personally attacked both as a woman artist and as a
> "left" artist, long before the so-called Russian constructivism was
> attacked as an art movement. These attacks would not mean as much, if
> they did not lead to people losing their jobs and sometimes their
> lives. It was more difficult for her as she did not make a distinction
> between her art making and what was happening in society (she worked
> in a factory, in a design studio, was also an educator and a
> researcher). Stepanova also had no illusions about difficulties of
> being a 'woman' who is trying to re-think and re-make entire art
> history in the early 1920s, not from the point of view of 'individual
> hero artist' (she documented how her better known male colleagues had
> problems with collective, anonymous and socially-aware art practice,
> as well as with changing position of women in early Soviet life). And
> it was Kandunsky in 1920 who supported her employment and art making,
> together with Lunacharsky and few others. At that time this support
> often meant not to go hungry and continue practicing. May be, in
> today's financial crisis it is not about going hungry, but it still
> seems to be about continuing one's artistic and curatorial practice.
> Do we have enough "Kandinskys and Lunacharskys" today, to support
> something that does not look like their own practice or even values in
> art?
>
> Warm regards,
> Irina
>
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