Category Archives: art

The mice will play

If you are an artist or just about anyone participating in the art world, this is not the week to email anyone, or send announcements about anything, or, indeed write a blog post that focuses on anything but the shiny smooth surfaces presented on art media coverage of the fairs: nothing will be heard except the concentration of commerce in Miami.

The cats are away, so at what will the mice play?

Meanwhile at night the streets and highways of New York resonate with people materializing in one neighborhood and then another, chanting “I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe.” What can the mice who are not gathered in the brightly lit agora, and those who are, do about the present injustices, if anything? What is the worth of a single artist’s voice or even the voice of a people?

This summer I was captivated by an essay by Austrian philosopher Gerald Raunig, “Josephine, Or Streaking The Territory,” in his 2013 book Factories of Knowledge, Industries of Creativity.Through it I learned of a short story by Franz Kafka, his last short story, “Josephine, the Singer, or the Mouse Folk.” The concept of an artist’s work as a “weak event,” barely different from the work of the other mice people yet vital to their sense of community, the image of the artist who is as conceited and contemptuous of her audience as she is justifiably admired and heroic, the artist whose song is at best a “gentle streaking of the territory”–all these weak indicators of the generous egotism and valiant futility of the artist offer a model for artistic engagement with the body politic which, by recognizing futility and significance alike, might give an artist some tiny bit of hope for the meaning of the work.

Here are the pages of the short text interspersed with some quotes from Kafka’s story:

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Is the artist any different than the rest of her people?

Among intimates we admit freely to one another that Josephine’s singing, as singing, is nothing out of the ordinary.

Is it in fact singing at all? Although we are unmusical we have a tradition of singing; in the old days our people did sing; this is mentioned in legends and some songs have actually survived, which, it is true, no one can now sing. Thus we have an inkling of what singing is, and Josephine’s art does not really correspond to it. So is it singing at all? Is it not perhaps just a piping? And piping is something we all know about, it is the real artistic accomplishment of our people, or rather no mere accomplishment but a characteristic expression of our life. We all pipe, but of course no one dreams of making out that our piping is an art, we pipe without thinking of it, indeed without noticing it, and there are even many among us who are quite unaware that piping is one of our characteristics. So if it were true that Josephine does not sing but only pipes and perhaps, as it seems to me at least, hardly rises above the level of our usual piping—yet, perhaps her strength is not even quite equal to our usual piping, whereas an ordinary farmhand can keep it up effortlessly all day long, besides doing his work—if that were all true, then indeed Josephine’s alleged vocal skill might be disproved, but that would merely clear the ground for the real riddle which needs solving, the enormous influence she has….

After all, it is only a kind of piping that she produces. If you post yourself quite far away from her and listen, or, still better, put your judgment to the test, whenever she happens to be singing along with others, by trying to identify her voice, you will undoubtedly distinguish nothing but a quite ordinary piping tone, which at most differs a little from the others through being delicate or weak. Yet if you sit down before her, it is not merely a piping; to comprehend her art it is necessary not only to hear but to see her. Even if hers were only our usual workaday piping, there is first of all this peculiarity to consider, that here is someone making a ceremonial performance out of doing the usual thing.

But we listen to the artist precisely because of her imperfections, which attract more than the artist who is trained and proficient:

She gets effects which a trained singer would try in vain to achieve among us and which are only produced precisely because her means are so inadequate. …This piping, which rises up where everyone else is pledged to silence, comes almost like a message from the whole people to each individual; Josephine’s thin piping amidst grave decisions is almost like our people’s precarious existence amidst the tumult of a hostile world. Josephine exerts herself, a mere nothing in voice, a mere nothing in execution, she asserts herself and gets across to us; it does us good to think of that. A really trained singer, if ever such a one should be found among us, we could certainly not endure at such a time and we should unanimously turn away from the senselessness of any such performance.

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The artist is the individual who steps forward at times of need and gives all her strength to the song:

Our life is very uneasy, every day brings surprises, apprehensions, hopes, and terrors, so that it would be impossible for a single individual to bear it all did he not always have by day and night the support of his fellows; but even so it often becomes very difficult; frequently as many as a thousand shoulders are trembling under a burden that was really meant only for one pair. Then Josephine holds that her time has come. So there she stands, the delicate creature, shaken by vibrations especially below the breastbone, so that one feels anxious for her, it is as if she has concentrated all her strength on her song, as if from everything in her that does not directly subserve her singing all strength has been withdrawn, almost all power of life, as if she were laid bare, abandoned, committed merely to the care of good angels, as if while she is so wholly withdrawn and living only in her song a cold breath blowing upon her might kill her.

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The audience is in part competitive and dismissive, in part enraptured:

But just when she makes such an appearance, we who are supposed to be her opponents are in the habit of saying: “She can’t even pipe; she has to put such a terrible strain on herself to force out not a song—we can’t call it song—but some approximation to our usual customary piping.” So it seems to us, but this impression although, as I said, inevitable is yet fleeting and transient. We too are soon sunk in the feeling of the mass, which, warmly pressed body to body, listens with indrawn breath.

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The artist feels “it is she who protects the people. When we are in a bad way politically or economically, her singing is supposed to save us, nothing less than that, and if it does not drive away the evil, at least gives us the strength to bear it.”

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Those who feel that art must have an objective function based on objective research that is objective, or those who both insist that art fulfill a transformative critical function yet reject fantasies of resistance, might find what Josephine gives the people a bit too idealistic:

Here in the brief intervals between their struggles our people dream, it is as if the limbs of each were loosened, as if the harried individual once in a while could relax and stretch himself at ease in the great, warm bed of the community. And into these dreams Josephine’s piping drops note by note; she calls it pearl-like, we call it staccato; but at any rate here it is in its right place, as nowhere else, finding the moment—wait for it—as music scarcely ever does. Something of our poor brief childhood is in it, something of lost happiness that can never be found again, but also something of active daily life, of its small gaieties, unaccountable and yet springing up and not to be obliterated. And indeed this is all expressed not in full round tones but softly, in whispers, confidentially, sometimes a little hoarsely. Of course it is a kind of piping. Why not? Piping is our people’s daily speech, only many a one pipes his whole life long and does not know it, where here piping is set free from the fetters of daily life and it sets us free too for a little while. We certainly should not want to do without these performances.

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What will the artist have contributed? What will be left of the song?

The time will soon come when her last notes sound and die into silence. She is a small episode in the eternal history of our people, and the people will get over the loss of her. Not that it will be easy for us; how can our gatherings take place in utter silence? Still, were they not silent even when Josephine was present? Was her actual piping notably louder and more alive than the memory of it will be? Was it even in her lifetime more than a simple memory? Was it not rather because Josephine’s singing was already past losing in this way that our people in their wisdom prized it so highly?

Georg Flegel (1561-1638), Still Life with Mouse and Parrot, Coll. Alte Pinakothek, Munich.

Thanks for the Memories: The Whitney and The Breuer Building Years

Today the Whitney Museum is ending its 48 years in its Marcel Breuer building on 75th and Madison with a 36 hours marathon. The building was open through the night last night and will close tonight October 19 at 11PM.

I had thought about going at midnight but decided that I had said my goodbyes earlier in the month when I was one of the last people in the New York art world to see the Jeff Koons show.

Perhaps it is an exaggeration to say that every New York artist has a deep relationship of a kind of ownership of the Whitney in that building, which is the only place where most of us knew the Whitney Museum. Perhaps because it felt like family, we often have been angry at it, the Biennials rather like Thanksgiving dinners, something where you’re disappointed by some of the food, you have a lot of resentment about who was there, you feel it’s gone downhill but you’ve learned a lot from it, and you look forward to the next one. There have been so many exhibitions of note in this building and it has been such a quirky idiosyncratic but intimate place to experience art! I have not yet seen the new building, all the way on the west side, huge, filled, we are told, with the requisite large performance spaces for a more spectacular culture, and not near any public transportation, which marks it as another kind of place entirely than the cosmopolitan urban space and the kind of urban life that marked the New York of the modernist era.

On my last visit, ostensibly to see the Jeff Koons show, I also felt I was saying goodbye to the building, even though that is irrational since the building will remain as a space in which contemporary art will be exhibited. The Metropolitan Museum has deep pockets and takes good care of its properties, and also they have a limited multiyear lease only, until 2023, not ownership, but the Met, as much as I dearly love it, also has a tendency to tart things up with little extra luxuries that might be in the wrong taste in Breuer’s austere though warm building, so a lot depends on how much of the building’s interior is landmarked and how much the Met is interested in respecting the building’s interior as a modernist art work. The size and proportion of the rooms, the elegant brut nature of the stone floors and concrete ceilings, the inset lightbulb fixtures, and the relaxed configuration of the small lobby, the quiet of the stairwell, are as much part of the experience as the art seen, and confer dignity to the visitor to the museum. The art’s adaptation to that space, and the fact that the museum was just not that big also contributed to the possibility of an intimate experience, something that is now considered undesirable by most museums because it relies on art and the individual experience of the viewer with the artwork, rather than on a contemporary social network experience writ large and targeted for iPhone documentation rather than contemplation and private thought.

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Even the Koons exhibition benefited from its interaction with this space. I had seen the blue balls works at Zwirner a couple of years ago and the chill of the white plaster in the large white space, clean bright white on clean bright white–which I somehow imagine will be the temperature of style of the new Whitney’s interior–was synergistically antipathetic to the human whereas at the Breuer Whitney, the concrete ceiling with its service ducts bare, created a useful counterpoint to the chill of these particular works by Koons, just as the sculptural ceiling of the 4th floor provided a counterpoint of some helpful gravitas to Koons’ Play-Doh sculpture.

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I started my last visit at the top on the 5th floor, where some of the museum’s permanent collection was on view arranged along the theme of gifts to the museum. I was particularly struck and moved by the fortuitous juxtaposition of two large square paintings, one by Helen Frankenthaler, the other by Grace Hartigan. Hartigan has never struck me as the strongest of the three major women artists of the Abstract Expressionist New York School era, the third being Joan Mitchell, and Frankenthaler’s mid-late career works could get very rote and boring, but this was a very strong Frankenthaler and a complex Hartigan which seemed to gain strength from its neighbor’s bold clarity.

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Like everyone else I took lots of pictures of Koons’ shiny objects. I happen to like some of Koons work very much, while despising other works and the show was equally distributed among the ghastly vulgar sexist, and the sublimely mirrored iconic. I particularly enjoyed taking a picture of myself in the purple balloon tondo that reflected the entire room it was exhibited in, including the great asymmetrical window.

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I also noted on a trip to the ladies’ room on the second floor that the Whitney was acting like anyone who is moving out of a place: there were empty shelves where exhibition displays normally would be, the utility closet was gaping open in the bathroom, and why repair loose fixtures, let the next tenant take care of it.

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Finally I sat in the lobby. The museum bookstore, in recent days reduced to last bits and pieces, was once one of the really useful art bookstores of New York, it had no special room, just shelving in a smallish area near the coat check–hey guys I know many of your faces and you’ve been nice and I hope you all keep your jobs– and in addition to the requisite museum-branded chatchkes, there was a great selection of art books including art theory and criticism, selected by people who cared about books (I was honored to have my books there, or maybe just Wet, not sure now but anyway, honored because the selection was thoughtful and the space limited). In recent years there were fewer books and a less diverse and critical selection. The Met has a talent for proliferating gift shops, I don’t mind so long as they leave that open casual feeling that made the lobby of the building seem like a living room of a family you knew.

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I thought of all the exhibitions I had seen in this building through the years. I decided to look back through the Museum’s website of past exhibitions to recall some great shows but their current website only goes back to 2006. I won’t go hunting through my notes over the years, but will just select a few from over the years that have stayed in my memory.

Starting from the top of my head, some of the memories have not been substantiated by factual research: I distinctly remember a work by Richard Tuttle that was simply a white wall that one gradually realized had inset into its flat surface a rotating disk, white on white. The wall turned. I think I did see such a piece but I don’t think or haven’t been able to prove that it was a Tuttle, so I did see this but now I’m not sure whose work it was (this goes back to the 1970s I think). An early reader of this post tells me it was most likely Rotating Circle by Charles Ray from 1988, must be, and most likely then in a Biennial from that era, interesting how the memory shifts information from one place to another.

In a Biennial before 1974 or 75, or in a group show at any rate, I noticed little oval steelwool-like pads installed in spaces that normally would not contain art–above a red exit sign, outside the building–but that called attention to themselves with a strange intensity that marked them as art. Some time later later Richard Artschwager gave a lecture at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and I discovered that these mysterious piece were his blps which also appeared in other media in other exhibition/non-exhibition spaces over the years.

In a Marsden Hartley retrospective at the Museum in 1980 curated by Barbara Haskell, an early Hartley painting of Mount Katahdin in Maine, from the early 20th century, its forms abstracted and the surface painted in a late pointillist Signac-inspired manner, was hung at the beginning of the exhibition in a large room to the right side of the elevator, and as you stood in front of it, you could see from across the floor to the last room, to the left of the elevator, one of his last group of paintings of the same subject, from the early 1940s, the forms even more abstracted with a flatter surface, with bolder, less sugary colors, and a more extreme sense of emotional definition. Thus one could see embodied the meaning of a lifetime of work as an artist.

In a Biennial in the early 1980s, from across a very large space, I spot a very small painting, the first time I recall seeing a painting by Bill Jensen, when his surfaces were thick, scraped, much more intense and dense than his most recent work. In that period I was beginning to consider painting with oil and both Jensen’s scraped, palette knifed surfaces and the surfaces of Hartley’s late works, painterly and sculptural also, even when relatively thin, were both helpful mentors in my transition to this difficult rich medium.

An mid-career retrospective of Elizabeth Murray: at the opening I seem to remember that Elizabeth is carrying one of her young daughters in her arms, a powerful image for people to see. A painting I have never been able to see or find an image of since remains in my memory: a large work though made of relatively small shaped fragmented parts arranged in the shape like a giant abstracted question mark. Did I see this? Have I reshaped it in memory the way I did the Tuttle? Possibly.

More recently, at the 2013 exhibition Jay DeFeo: A Retrospective, sitting alone in a room, trying to outwit the guards by just getting my iPhone enough out of my bag to surreptitiously snap a picture of works by DeFeo from the early eighties which I had never seen and whose greatness left me feeling crushed because I had never seen them before, because they needed to be in the history of American painting from their period, not an addition after the fact.

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Some more personal memories: of the night my mother dressed up to go to the opening public reception for the 1966 inauguration of the new Breuer building as the guest of a friend who taught architecture at Harvard and I think was friends with Breuer. She fussed over the right dress and to find the best dress she could afford, and then I remember hearing about the crush of people. The last art exhibition I took her to see was Picasso and American Art, in the fall of 2006, forty years later. The rooms were very crowded, she felt unwell and had to sit down while I looked at the second half of the show. In a further concession to the frailty of her great age, we took a cab home across the park instead of the bus as we once would have done. Nevertheless, sitting in the cab, she said firmly, “it’s the kind of exhibition that makes you want to go home and work.” I should add that my mother Resia Schor was an artist. She was 94 and died a few weeks later, just before her 95th birthday.

Another memory: someone gave me an invitation they couldn’t use, to the opening of Jasper Johns’ retrospective at the Whitney in October 1977. I floated around, young and solitary. At that point in my life, at 27, despite personal ambition, I could look at art world events and careers with a sense of impersonal distance, or rather, I had ambitions certainly but no expectations in that moment, I could watch the scene with interest but not personal jealousy. At one point I found myself in a small room off the main hall, from which I could see Jasper Johns, surrounded by admirers, magnetically elegant in an impeccable tuxedo. I happened to be alone in the room with Richard Serra, who, surly and probably sweltering in the heavy wool brown tweed jacket he was wearing, seemed like a working class character at an upper-class gathering in a 1920s British novel. I didn’t know him of course, but I did know it was him. I was struck by the discomfort of his jacket, and I sensed his fury at being at an event glorifying another artist–Why not him? When him?–and why was that artist such a James Bond like character, damn him, so handsome and so beautifully dressed!

The 2005 exhibition of Edward Ruscha’s series of paintings, Course of Empire, his contribution to the 51st Venice Bienale, was one of the most unusual exhibitions at the museum in recent years and the most strikingly effective uses of the space. This exhibition as I recall was an opportunistic event, arranged in a relatively short time frame, and taking advantage of all the walls from a recent Biennial (or perhaps some other major exhibition) having just been taken down to create an unusually broad open space for a very interesting installation of the paintings in a kind of foreshortened vista, an avenue bordered by paintings with a small room to the side a few versions or the complete cycle of The Course of Empire by the nineteenth century American artist Thomas Cole. The contrast between Ruscha’s flat portrayals of American commercial architecture and Cole’s bizarre imaginings of the rise and fall of ancient Rome was very curious and thought provoking. When I saw this show I was practically alone with the work and the space, one of my favorite experiences.

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Many many more memories of so much art, thanks for the memories, and goodbye Whitney Museum of American Art at the Marcel Breuer Building, it’s been swell, and I hope the Whitney comes to regret its decision to leave it, and returns when the Met’s lease is up, to have a second, more intimate and experimental space for its collection and special exhibitions.

Letter from a schoolgirl c.1960

In a documentary about 2014 Nobel Prize for literature author Patrick Modiano, historian Henry Rousso says, “Il a..interiorisé quelque chose qu’il na pas vécu”–“he interiorized something he did not live through.” This is the story of the way in which trauma, here the historical trauma of the German Occupation of France during the Second World War, filters through generations and shapes creativity and thought.

The texture of the world at every given moment is riven with traumas, personal, political, historical and at times they compete in ways that compound the psychic damage.

For my sister Naomi and me, my father’s Hasidic background, our parents’ experience of the Second World War, their massive personal losses in the Shoah and their miraculous survival were the past we had not lived but that we lived with, that we interiorized.

Today October 10, 2014 would have been my sister’s seventy-first birthday. She died in 2001 at the age of 58, which seems very young, particularly since I was the younger sister but am now older than that age, so I like to mark her birthday each year in some way.

Ilya Schor, The Tzadik, 1950s, wood engraving

A few weeks ago I found a torn scrap of paper among a box of her things: it is the draft of a letter she wrote to André Schwartz-Bart, the author of the 1959 novel Le Dernier des Justes (The Last of the Just). I have not read the novel but perhaps because of Schwartz-Bart’s book and the discussions that took place around it in my childhood, and in particular because the theme of the novel and its title was the theme of a major work from 1956 by my father Ilya Schor, I am haunted by the Talmudic notion of the Lamed Vav Tzadikim, the thirty-six “”hidden righteous ones,” whose existence redeems and preserves the world, their identities hidden to others and even, perhaps most especially, to themselves.

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My sister’s handwriting was distinctive and sometimes hard to decipher, this letter for some reason more so than usual: here it is in French and then in English, with cross outs left intact to show the process of writing and certain passages marked […] as undecipherable by me.

Cher Mr. Schwartz-Bart,

Je voudrais, tout simplement, vous remercier d’avoir écrit “Le Dernier des Justes,” Je voudrais vous remercier d’avoir raconté avec tant de poésie et de simplicité cette triste histoire de la famille Lévy, et par extension de tout notre peuple. Je voudrais vous remercie d’avoir exprimé ce que nous sentons tous.

Je me demande […] si d’autres que nous peuvent sentir ce que nous sentons. Le succès de votre livre en France et ici en Amérique semble indiquer que oui. J’espère que grace à vous et d’autres comme vous qui auront pu lutter contre notre sort – non les […], les cris, la résignation, mais l’art des moyens artistiques, les générations futures de notre peuples pourront vivre, inutile de le dire, en paix.

Je suis une jeune étudiante (17 ans) au Lycée Français de New York. Mes parents, des artistes d’origine Polonaise, ont fui Paris la veille de l’arrivée de Hitler, ont traversé la France, passe deux ans à Marseille et sont enfin venu en Amérique. Eux, ils ont échappé mais toute leur famille, leur amis ont péri. Mon père peint son petit village polonaise avec sa synagogue, ses hommes, ses femmes: je connais bien le visage de mes ancêtres et confrères disparus et je ne peus dire le vide que je ressens à ne pouvoir jamais jamais connaitre les modèles dont s’inspire mon père.

Mon père travaille aussi fait aussi des objets religieux et décoratifs en argent, parmi eux il a fait une porte pour une synagogue dont le thème était les Lahmed Vov, les 36…

J’essaye seulement de vous dire que je suis sure que partout où un cœur juif bat votre livre sera chéri et pleure là-dessus.

Respectueusement

Naomi Schor

Ilya Schor, 1950s, Steps to Women’s Gallery of Synagogue at Zloczow. Gouache.

Catalogue for Ilya Schor, 1956, The Doors of the 36, Temple Beth-El of Great Neck, NY

Dear Mr. Schwartz-Bart,

I would very simply like to thank you for having written “The Last of the Just”, I would like to thank you for having told with so much poetry and simplicity this sad story of the family Levy and, by extension, that of our whole people. I would like to thank you for expressing what we all feel.

I wonder if others can feel what we feel. The success of your book in France and in America seems to indicate yes. I hope that thanks to you and others like you who have been able to fight against our fate, not the …, not the cries, the resignation, but [through] artistic means future generations of our people will be able to live, needless to say, in peace.

I am a young schoolgirl (17 years old) at the Lycée Français de New York. My parents, artists of Polish origin, fled Paris just before the arrival of Hitler, they crossed France, spent two years in Marseille and finally arrived in America. They survived but their whole families, their friends perished. My father paints his small Polish village with its synagogue, its men, its women: I know well the face of my lost ancestors and brethren and I cannot express the emptiness I feel to never never be able to know the models that inspire my father.

My father also makes religious and decorative objects out of silver, among these he made a door for a synagogue, whose theme was the Lahmed Vov, the 36…

I just want to tell you that I am sure that everywhere a Jewish heart beats your book will be cherished and wept over.

Respectfully

Naomi Schor

I don’t know if my sister sent the letter. Based on its contents it was written between her seventeenth birthday October 10, 1960 and my father’s death in June 1961, because in the letter she refers to my father as living.

Ilya Schor and Naomi Schor, Provincetown, Summer 1960, Photo: Ryszard Horowitz

The Feminist Wheel

1. One certainty is that when you put together a panel or lecture series with the word feminist in it, a lot of people will show up because people, mostly women, are always hungry to have someone tell them something about feminism. It is a word that appears like a chimera and a promise. Maybe they will finally learn the answer to the puzzle of the unequal status of women in most societies.

2. Feminism is always in a state of revival, because any culture whose actual practices subjugate and devalue women one way or another cannot incorporate it into collective memory, even that of women.

3. The task of the political activist is to keep saying the same thing over and over again, repeating the same history, over and over again for decades, and greeting new arrivals to the cause with enthusiasm rather than despair. I am not always so cheerful about it.

Tweet around 9:05PM Thursday September 18 from the all too appropriately titled The Hole: @miraschor: Future feminism. Preview: is there something more basic than feminism 101? So naive & essentialist it’s all I can do not to walk out.

Earlier this month, promotional material began to circulate about an exhibition and series of events at the downtown New York exhibition space, The Hole, titled Future Feminism. The events seemed diverse and also suspect. When you see Marina Abramovic listed as a guest speaker at yet another “feminist” event, warning alerts sound for anyone who has attended any number of major feminist symposia, such as at “The Feminist Future: Theory and Practice in the Visual Arts” a two-day symposium that was held at MoMA in January 2007 and heard her inevitably begin her talk with the words, “I am not feminist artist.” It’s not that I don’t believe her, in fact I do believe her. If she says she isn’t, she isn’t. Unfortunately the complex story of her personal and artistic biography in relation to a feminist narrative and how she has learned to play the dynamics of the art world’s intersection with fame and fashion is lost on young women artists around the world who emulate her because her fame is less and less problematized the farther away it expands globally, becoming a brand rather than an artist. She’s a woman, she uses her body (now she uses other people’s bodies), she’s famous, this must be a feminist model. But if she is asked yet again to speak at a “feminist” event, then you know some star fucking is going on rather than some serious thinking about feminism…. OK never mind. Point two: what were these “13 tenets of Future Feminism” they were proclaiming? I only saw the full list last night at the panel. I’ll get to that presently.

Oh don’t let me forget the T-shirts: adjacent to the main door of the gallery is a separate storefront which was festooned with T-shirts with the slogan “The future is Female.” In the window were two blackboards, one advertised the price for the T-shirts at $20 and the other for $25. I was trying to figure out whether there were two different designs when, as the line waiting outside filled out, the young woman in the store came over, tipped the signs back so she could see them, and removed the one with the $20 price.

The women of my generation, what I’ve called “Generation 2.5”, show up for these things. We have a lot of history in feminism but we want to know what’s going on too, in a different way than the people who show without any previous background in feminism and who have that inchoate longing for an answer. So a friend suggested we go hear feminist Ann Snitow interview the “Future Feminists,” and we ran into a group of women artists friends who were there for the same reason: let’s see what this is.

And that is the basic thing: we had come to hear what these people had to say.

Eventually the speakers filed in and took their place. And then it took about a half hour until we actually heard them say anything because Ann Snitow made the peculiar choice of asking a man to talk to us about listening.

That is, Snitow had waxed enthusiastic about the FFs, how this group of friends had taken a vacation and they had talked to each other, about feminism, and this was what Consciousness Raising was, they had reinvented CR, they were interested in circles, circular forms of governance, they wanted nothing less than everything; that is to say that after Snitow had failed in introducing this group we had come to learn about, by failing to fully introduce each person, and by failing to give them any kind of historical context–as it turns out, they don’t seem to have any, but it was her responsibility as a long time feminist educator to situate these people in relation to some kind of history–after this very enthusiastic and very uninformative introduction, just as we thought we would hear from members of the group, she asked Robert Sember of Ultra-red to talk to us about listening.

And so he did, for at least 15 or maybe 20 minutes. As he went on my mind was increasingly torn between thinking, on the one hand, well this is kind of interesting–he spoke about the practice of intentional listening, space made for listening in non-hierarchical ordering of processes of change, he said that Ultra-red had been engaged in a deep investigation of the intentional practice of listening in social movements. He mentioned that women in the civil rights movement had created listening circles, building literacy out of experience, conversation into action–as he said this, having spoken by now for several minutes, and he was not the speaker we had come to hear, I thought about how the treatment of women in the civil rights and anti-war movements led directly to the women’s liberation movement, I remembered that when asked what the position of women was in SNCC (Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee) Stokely Carmichael said, “the only position for women in the movement is prone,” and how my anger at the casual sexist injustice of that statement was certainly part of my own early attraction to the feminist movement–by the way this well known snarky quip is not included in online collections of significant statements by Carmichael but of course he was a brilliant and dynamic figure and had a lot to say.

Sember continued, emphasizing that the commitment to actually really listen is a profound act of solidarity and care, of love in the name of the future, of transformation, of the reordering of power. He then noted that the Future Feminists were indeed a collective–later Antony said they were not really a collective, they were just a bunch of friends who hung out together. Sember made an interesting distinction between activism, where there are ones in the know, experts, where it is strategic to speak with one voice, and organizing, which is a long term process of working together, woven together by process, learning and developing. So the FFs had engaged in CR, how is feminism practiced and lived, the building of the “we,” CR had held generalizations about women up to their own experience.

At this point, I interrupted my long time practice of verbatim note taking to insert a personal comment in my notebook: It is weird to have this lectured to us–at us– with the confident voice of a white man.

He continued: The question for us tonight, what do we know? What brought you here? What did you come here to hear? He then asked for a moment of silence.

During which I continued my commentary in my notes, the other side of my brain spoke, the side that drew me to feminism: I kind of resent this quasi religious confident male voice lecturing to me about listening and Consciousness Raising and feminism even if what he is saying is of some interest. Rebecca Solnit has wonderfully named this phenomenon as “mansplaining.” It’s important to distinguish between that which patriarchy offers of history, literature, and art, which is valuable, and that I insist on assuming as my own heritage, and the mechanism of power always devolving to the male voice, so confident, so privileged, even when it is taking the side of the underprivileged. The rebellion is not so much in my anger at being talked at but in assuming a voice of my own and giving others a voice too if possible.

Now, a half hour into this event, held in a hot airless room which had been recently painted white so that it reeked of new paint fumes, would we begin the actual Q & A with the Future Feminists?

Future-Feminists-IMG_9075

No.

We were now asked to turn to the person in back of us, in alternating rows, and talk. The very nice young man in front of me asked me what I thought about the 13 tenets, copies of which were on each seat. I said I couldn’t believe how essentialist it all was and how out of keeping with the time it was to use words like feminine and female without problematizing them and to unquestioningly link women with nature, and he totally agreed. We had a nice chat. He had no idea of my history and I have no idea if he was familiar with the debate within feminism during the 1980s over essentialism and how corrosive it could be, which means that he had no idea that if the lady he was talking to said that something was essentialist, then the amnesiac wheel has definitely turned. Young man, you are blonde and were wearing a dark cap which I was going to ask you to take off before I spoke to you, because it was blocking my view, but after I talked to you I didn’t mind anymore; if you are out there and see this blog post, I was the lady with short white hair and multicolored reading glasses. Just want to say hello.

When the conversation finally turned to the panelists, their vagueness was such that the discussion somehow immediately reverted back to the audience. Someone asked about the gendering of language. The toxic paint fumes or the perilous effects of déja vu on the brain made me freeze. Someone suggested the word God. Only two days later did I remember that old chestnut of an example, history.

Tweet around 9:09PM: @miraschor: Language defaults to “he.” Yes, anyone here heard of Mary Daly? These people seem sweet but apparently just landed on Earth & they aren’t that young. But at last someone in the audience asks why the ” tenets” of this group are so binarist and points out there are a lot of people in the room who have been working on this — feminism– for a long time.

The audience member challenged the group: Where is the transgender in these tenets? What are your racial politics?

At this point Antony said that they were not really a collective, but an affinity group, of friends, who “took time out of capitalism to talk.” Well that is interesting. I’ve been part of groups of women who have taken time out of capitalism for all of our lives to talk. It is indeed a wellstone of strength but if you get up in front of people you have to have a bit more to say. These are performance artists, they should at least know that. At $10 admission fee. Give the audience something. But, Antony continued, “the crowd in the room is the dream we all envisioned.” If you reverse engineer that, you may end up somewhere else: we wanted an audience and we thought, hey feminism seems like something, it’s been somnolent for years, until three years ago when Pussy Riot…OMG, that is a very limited way of looking at the history of feminism and by the way, as I said, Antony said this, because,

Tweet around 9:16PM: @miraschor: By the way men are doing most of the articulate speaking. White men telling us how important it is to listen.

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Snitow asked them how they came to choose the word feminist. They said they had looked it up in the dictionary and it seemed perfect. …… They talked about how dangerous it was to use the term.–FYI, cf. my essay “The ism that dare not speak its name.” They asked, why does misogyny exist? A good question. But no one on the panel seemed to speak from experience of misogyny or a personal history with feminism, feminism was something they might have picked up in the Future Feminism gift shop adjoining the gallery. Not one of the women in the group seemed to speak from a lived existence of experiencing discrimination or misogyny.

Future-Feminism-13-tenets

I had wanted to leave the event early on, mansplaining does that to me, but my natural drive to see things through because you never know what you might miss if you leave an event early was stronger than the outrage that makes me spring from my seat and stop wasting my time: as far as I remember I’ve only walked out of one quote unquote feminist event, when Camille Paglia spoke at the New York Public Library, years ago. Also my friend Maureen Connor wanted to stay and say something to them, offer some information on the history of patriarchy and misogyny and also question their activism, now that they had just discovered feminism. She eventually did speak. In her comments she quoted Gerda Lerner, see below.

As I left the Future Feminism event, people in the audience were sharing some of their own experiences and seemed grateful for the discussion, naive and ahistorical as it was.

People come to a room because they want to learn something about feminism.There is a constant need. This crowd had slightly more men in it than usual for such events. But just because people sit on a stage or give themselves a name which contains the word “feminist” doesn’t mean they have much to say.

But all events are of interest, because it’s all theater, and because of what anything reveals about the state of a politics, and because even simple truisms and naive statements can have some genuine meaning. One of the FFs, Bianca I think, made my eyes roll when she hazarded that “the future is really this utopia thing…” but then the discussion turned to apocalypse thinking and she said that “to dream that there was a future that includes human beings” is what feminism meant to her. That seemed sincere.

Tweet around 9:19PM: @miraschor: Antony:”most people don’t hope so it felt radical to suggest hope”- that’s much more interesting than their feminist stance. I’m still tweeting at The Hole, future feminism but my phone is about to lose power.

A report of the show at The Hole and other concurrent feminism-inspired exhibitions quotes Katie Circone, member of the collective Go! Push Pops, as believing that “the future of the [feminist] movement is genderless, raceless, and boundaryless. Ms. Cercone said, ‘It explodes all definitions of what (feminist) art is and who should make it.’”

This utopian ebullience is wonderful and perhaps this will become the case if humans continue on this earth. Perhaps it is possible to all of a sudden explode old obstacles like the history of the inequality of women which Gerda Lerner among others has traced to the beginnings of archaic civilization. Instances of radical performativity can sometimes be genuinely generative of political transformation, but if there are no women, if there is no gender, then whatever society we are talking about, it is not feminist, according to the dictionary definitions of the term (“: the belief that men and women should have equal rights and opportunities : organized activity in support of women’s rights and interests : the theory of the political, economic, and social equality of the sexes : organized activity on behalf of women’s rights and interests”). And, according to the rules of the spectacle and social network society, if you make something unspecific and fun enough, it won’t threaten any status quo.

Lerner distinguishes between the “unrecorded past” and “History–“the recorded and interpreted past” and she notes that while of course women were always “actors and agents in history” with a small h, “history-making, on the other hand, is a historical creation which dates from the invention of writing in ancient Mesopotamia. …Until the most recent past, these historians have been men, and what they have recorded is what men have done and experienced and found significant. They have called this History and claimed universality for it. What women have done and experienced has been left unrecorded, neglected, and ignored in interpretation.”

Let’s put aside the “13 tenets” promoted by the Future Feminists, and–keeping in mind just some recent news items, including continued efforts to control female reproductive rights in the US, the abduction, rape, and enslavement of Nigerian schoolgirls by Boko Haram, and the NFL’s problem of how to manage reports of domestic violence by its players–consider how so much is still true from the first few of Lerner’s introductory propositions in her 1986 book The Creation of Patriarchy:

a) The appropriation by men of women’s sexual and reproductive capacity occurred prior to the formation of private property and class society. Its commodification lies, in fact, at the foundation of private property.

b) The archaic states were organized in the form of patriarchy; thus from its inception the state has an essential interest in the maintenance of the patriarchal family.

c) Men learned to institute dominance and hierarchy over other people by their earlier practice of dominance over the women of their own group. This found expression in the institutionalization of slavery, which began with the enslavement of women on conquered groups.

d) Women’s sexual subordination was was institutionalized in the earliest law codes and enforced by the full power of the state. women’s cooperation in the system was secured by various means: force, economic dependency on the male head of the family, class privileges bestowed upon conforming and dependent women of the upper classes, and the artificially created division of women into respectable and non-respectable women.

Tweet around 9:50PM: @miraschor The feminist wheel has to be reinvented all the fucking time.

In the September Issue of The Brooklyn Rail

This month’s Critic’s Page section of The Brooklyn Rail, organized and introduced by artist and Brooklyn Rail Managing Art Editor Kara L. Rooney, focuses on feminism and gender in the visual arts. Rooney asked a diverse group of contributors to consider the following questions:

What is it about this particular moment that has triggered a renewed interest in feminine and gendered voices? Is the recent prominence of self-identifying feminist art a sign of social progress or institutional neutralization? Is there a compelling momentum to be gained from these “victories” and if so, where do they lead us? And most importantly, why, over 40 years after the second wave banner was raised, are we still grappling with the issue of equality? What is it about the art machine that lends itself so conspicuously to the male, white perspective? And how, as women, men, trans, queer, or otherwise self-identifying individuals do we combat current (and often invisible) systems of control in a neo-liberal capitalist art world?

Because the communities of The Brooklyn Rail, A Year of Positive Thinking’s subscribers and readers, and my Facebook community don’t overlap as completely as might seem likely, here is the direct link to my contribution, “Amnesiac Return Amnesiac Return.”

*For reference to a previous, related, writing that I cite in my Rail piece, you can read “Amnesiac Return,” my contribution to the forum, “The Question of Gender in Art, Part 1,” published in Tema Celeste, Autumn 1992, here.