Hello Katy and Faces,
thank you, Katy, for your cogent, illuminating and somewhat encouraging summary of the current situation for women artists in the contemporary European art world - and your call for concerted political actions to redress the imbalances in museum and gallery representation. I was recently in London where the three big museum exhibitions were solo surveys of work by Francis Bacon, Mark Rothko, and Gerhard Richter.
I'm copying your email to the CRUMB: NEW MEDIA CURATING list as their October discussion theme was ostensibly about women artists and new media. Because that thread was interrupted and largely overwhelmed by another related conversation, I'm hoping the original theme can be explored for a few more days.
In any case I think your voice[s] should be heard in that arena!
Thanks again,
Marcia
In any case I think
On Nov 2, 2008, at 1:14:41 AM, "Katy Deepwell" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
From: "Katy Deepwell" <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: [faces] Are there any women artists in France? At all?
Date: November 2, 2008 1:14:41 AM PST
To: [log in to unmask]
Dear Faces,
Have been reading these postings with some incredulity and amusement.
First, the Guerrilla Girls' assumption - it's worse in Europe - seems
pervasive but it is not justifiable.
Second, culturally there has been a tremendous shift in the representation
of women artists internationally over the last 30 years - which means that
feminism did not fail - regardless of backlashes, temporary setbacks and
ongoing sexism in the art world. Attention to the number of retrospectives
by women, representation in biennales etc all show significant change for
women artists in the last 40-50 years.
n.paradoxa has published plenty of information online and in its print forms
to demonstrate this - as have other women's groups and organisations in
Europe.
The art world continues to promote sexist male "wunderkind" curators who
disregard women but let's be clear: doing this is business as normal and re:
cyberfeminism, women and computers/programming, the reason why FACES was set
up and remains much needed.
Third, I have noticed that statistics about discrimination produce some
strange and interesting responses from some, not necessarily younger, women.
Many do not see these statistics as a "call to action", as an evaluation of
the situation in order to persuade people that collective political action
is necessary (as I do). They are a limited snapshot of reality and they have
shifted - effectively doubling in size in the last 50 years.
However, for many, any recounting of these figures produces denial: this
situation is not what I personally experience, therefore it is not a reality
that hindered me.
It also produces fear and another form of negation of this reality: is this
all women can achieve? therefore I am not a woman as I, personally, will
exceed this.
The statistics about discrimination are therefore experienced as a kind of
oppression - something which any modern liberated economically independent
woman will want to deny exists (without acknowledging that her position is
the result of freedoms fought for by feminists in the last 150 years).
There is also the response: I can see the artworld does this but I'm not
interested in making it there, I have my own network or connections and
interests (again ignoring how these alternatives have been formed in
relation to the dominant norms).
I want to point out that even when you know these figures, have a view of
how contemporary reality discriminates against women and how our cultural
industries work, it is never a block to one's own creative work. For other
women, it is the spur which makes them continue to fight and be productive.
I have come to the conclusion we need to reverse their presentation: why
should we put up with such excessive privileging of men over women: men
receive 85% of all retrospectives in major museums; 75% or more of all
professorships; 60% of all representation at Documenta, 80% in other
international biennales?
There are so many talented strong productive and highly creative women
around. Curators should be spoiled for choice. It is not a "poverty" they
have to choose from, but a "wealth" they continue to ignore or disregard.
We do still need to lobby our public funded galleries and museums (areas
which carry significantly more weight in Europe than US) for equal
representation for equal taxation: ARCO for example published a manifesto
written by Xavier Arakistain (a man!) to protest this in 2005. This action
was signed by a wide range of major curators and museum directors in Europe,
many of whom are women.
Our ability to lobby private galleries and the art market is considerably
more limited - but given the symbiotic relationship they have with
publically funded museums and government funded institutions, lobbying the
former will have an effect. And this leads us back to the question of 1970s
actions to picket museums and the question of imaginative ways/strategies to
pursue this kind of activism.
Ps. re: French situation, I hope people have seen Elizabeth Lebovici and
Catherine Gonnard's 'Femmes Artistes, Artistes Femme' which is the first
major publication on women artists working in Paris in the 20th C.and came
out last year.
Katy Deepwell
Editor of n.paradoxa
KT press
38 Bellot St
London
SE10 0AQ
UK
Tel/Fax: +44 (0) 208 858 3331
Order n.paradoxa at www.ktpress.co.uk
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----- Original Message -----
From: <[log in to unmask]>
To: <>
Sent: Sunday, November 02, 2008 4:55 AM
Subject: Re: [faces] Are there any women artists in France? At all?
dear helen,
Taking nothing for granted, I would cautiously agree that many on
this list have read or participated in those discussions, but there
are no doubt quite a few who have not or who are too young to even
know about them.
I wholeheartedly agree that some of what has been gained has again
been lost, but it is probably not quite true that very little has
changed. I think a lot has changed, most particularly in people's
expectations of diverse participation in art and public life. Still,
your statistical evidence is very disheartening.
I hope you are not thinking that the bullet points I listed were my
own points of view? I was simply offering a reading of liz's post,
with which I did not agree, although I can see that what I presented
as her unstated argument constitutes a way of keeping on keeping on.
Problem is, that was the precise argument before the women's movement
of the mid-60s and onward. The idea that what has gone before us is
past history, your mother's tampax, boring, or nostalgia-land is the
field of opposition that we ourselves had to get beyond in order to
change things back then, wouldn't you say?
We had to OWN the history of political struggles, especially of women
but also of other Others, to energize ourselves to change things, and
get beyond the resentment of feeling as though we were engaging in a
previous generation's battle. It is just this resentment that
pervades the market-centric generation of younger artists in the
States—that we who went before failed to "win" & they are now left to
fight "our" battles.
martha
On Nov 1, 2008, at 6:44 PM, helen varley jamieson wrote:
> hi martha,
> i am sure that many or most of us on the list have read those discussions
> from the early 1970s; in fact probably a few of the women on this list
> participated in those discussions themselves.
>
> the real sadness is that, despite all those discussions, despite all the
> struggles and hard work that have gone into trying to redress gender
> imbalances and inequalities over the last 30 or more years, in reality
> very little has changed, & some of what was gained has been lost again.
>
> i live in new zealand & work in the theatre industry, where our national
> playwrights' agency is currently urging women playwrights to enter its
> best play competition because only a third of its client writers are
> women - despite women making up something like 80% of audiences; the
> percentage of women writers having their plays produced is even less than
> a third (& in off-broadway new york theatres, the percentage of women
> writers being produced is less than 25%). i don't know about statistics
> of women in gallery exhibitions here, but i do know that women artists
> (across all disciplines) in new zealand earn on average half of what
> their male counterparts earn.
>
> i also work in the IT industry & i know that women teaching computer
> programming at universities are lamenting that, these days, they have
> about 1-2% of female students (& sometimes not even that) whereas in the
> 1908s the numbers were getting closer to (but not reaching!) 50%.
>
> i don't want to be ghettoised either, i also want to be accepted for who
> i am. but i'm deeply concerned by the attitude that we should just get
> over it and accept the injustices, inequities & hypocracies of life in a
> patriarchal world. happily there are quite a lot of people (both men and
> women) who also refuse to accept this.
>
> h : )
>
> [log in to unmask] wrote:
>> Dear Liz et al,
>> At the risk of sounding like an utter jerk, I would like to comment
>> that your remarks reiterate with uncanny fidelity the discussions of the
>> early 1970s or so (except for the part about the market which is either
>> a provocation or a subject for another discussion):
>>
>> 1: I like being a woman and don't want to disclaim it but don't want to
>> be in the women's ghetto but rather accepted for who I am.
>> But I am a woman, so please don't ignore that in recognizing me; i just
>> want my art work to be seen as a full player just like men's.
>>
>> 2 Intellectual discourse is male. Therefore it bores me.
>>
>> 3. Men are competitive & self-aggrandizing.
>> I don't need to take part in that, so I leave it to the men to exercise
>> the voice of public enunciation.
>>
>> 4. Women don't need protecting, so women's groups that actually give
>> awards to women shouldn't reserve them for women who are not working
>> with men. (Just give me the money!) After all, there are not not very
>> many of those groups or awards...
>>
>> 5. Don't bother me with discussions of male power structures; it's too
>> male, and analysis is male and therefore boring. i just want to get on
>> with my work and let the system do its thing.
>>
>>
>> There are some important assumptions underlying your remarks, which I
>> take to be a way of keeping from being sunk by considerations that seem
>> extraneous to getting one's work done and shown (and sold?). No one
>> wants to be drawn into fields o' crap.
>>
>> So, is there a chance you would be interested in reading some
>> discussions from that era? Not that i can think of any at the moment,
>> but i bet plenty of people on the list would be happy to point you to
>> some, and probably this is a generational thing, that should be passed
>> on since it is clearly not passé.
>>
>> in solidarity
>> martha r
>>
>
>
> --
> ____________________________________________________________
>
> helen varley jamieson: creative catalyst helen@creative-
> catalyst.com http://www.creative-catalyst.com
> http://www.avatarbodycollision.org
> http://www.upstage.org.nz
> http://www.writerfind.com/hjamieson.htm
> ____________________________________________________________
>
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