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CRITICAL WRITING
Critical writing is going to be an on-going feature of the MAWA newsletter. If you have an idea for a piece about an art issue, concept or event, please submit a 50-word synopsis/proposal in writing to Shawna at dempsey_millan@mawa.ca. Note that because of space, not all proposals will be accepted. Also, because the newsletter is quarterly, these pieces should be more theoretical than topical. Each finished piece should be approximately 650 words in length. A writers’ fee of $200 will be paid for each published work.
A Golden Age of Harridanism
by Bev Pike
Baroque aesthetics appear during periods of radical cultural and socioeconomic transformations like the one we are in now.
This art movement began in Europe in the 17th century because male authorities were threatened by democratic movements. They needed to bedazzle their constituencies. Luxurious architecture hosted wild new entertainment such as opera, elaborate contrapuntal chamber music and ballet. These visceral communal experiences amalgamated many diverse elements to create gigantic, dramatic marvels.
In subsequent eras, the Victorian neo-baroque revival tried to anaesthetise the displacement of the body as a working agent during industrialisation. Still later, in the Depression era, monumental musicals distracted from world-wide misery. Today, as the main historical antidote to popular discontent, Baroque continues to provide mesmerising extravaganzas.
However, there was a subversive element to Baroque art. Unbeknownst to the nobility that commissioned showpieces like the Palais de Versailles, within these artifices artisans embedded their own imagery. At the same time as early invaders in South America over-built to quell dissent, indigenous carpenters created their own spiritual chambers underneath the new Spanish churches. This hybridisation is how Baroque became comprised of unusual juxtapositions.
Outrageous underground work is familiar to feminists. Think of our re-positioning of cartoons ridiculing Suffragettes, our flips of femi-nazi jokes, our re-takes on movies with the psychotic maiden aunt, and our send-ups of distortions of the female. As patriarchal infighting spawns new initiatives that mutate and mask themselves, women’s dissidence becomes more vigilant and creative.
The aesthetic pillars that underpin established order—that is to say rigorous purity and balanced good taste (colonial Classicism, monolithic Modernism)—have been unreliable friends to feminist art. This is because patriarchy prefers to associate what is different with what is uncontrollable and deviant, rather than with what is rebellious. Autocrats slander the bizarre and the proud together. Institutions repel contamination. Governments get agitated at the introduction of visual and political infections. Organised religion shores up traditional conservative earnestness. Mega-corporations become bilious from the vertiginous discomfort produced by emancipatory movements, swirling with equity demands. All those who benefit from the status quo look at feminism and see power spiralling down the drain.
To parody authoritarianism, activists have embodied baroque virtues. We imagine travesty, lampoon hypocrisy, create caricatures of hegemony, spoof autocracy, mock religiosity and pervert misogyny. Feminists employ elements of extravagance, impetuousness, virtuosity, thoughts abnormal and things bizarre. Dramatic devices can be vulgar, chaotic and exuberant. Baroque activism incorporates madness of vision, intertextuality and trompe l’oeil effects. Audiences can be swept away by carnivalesque excess, performativity and eccentric exoticism. Then as now, multi-media, multi-purpose art forms can contradict prescriptions for identity, for gender and even for space, time and reality itself.
That is how Baroque creates a mental labyrinth of inner and outer, before and behind, real and imaginary, posed and impromptu, captured and unfettered, present and past. In activist art, the posing of these conundrums contests dominant ideologies. Burlesque tactics help to expose propagandistic mazes. Baroque can manufacture distortions effective in questioning mind-numbing and exhibitionistic self-reflexivity.
Then as now, Baroque remains a tool of colonization. Idea control is embedded in such pastimes as video games (aesthetisized forms of military muscle), theme parks and picture palaces. Therefore, beware the Spect-opolis: the mise-en-scène in the urban setting. Be suspicious. Then as now, beware those who parrot Baroque simply to destabilise through over-stimulation. Research their agenda. Then as now, beware the man bedecked as a frothy female grotesque. Ask yourself, “Did or does any of this further measurable power-sharing with women?”
So when you see 3D blockbusters, Olympic games, G8 summits, gigantic fanciful architecture, touring blockbusters, reality shows and rock concerts, look behind these curtains for nation-state building. Someone wants to merge us together within one experience of beholding. Someone wants our co-operation, our investments of time, money and our very thoughts.
However, just like the cheeky satirists who flourished in response to the first Baroque era, feminist activists have very same tools… especially the element of surprise.
Link on contemporary baroque:
http://web.mit.edu/transition/subs/neo_intro.html
Link on the need for feminist activism:
http://agony-aunts.blogspot.com/
Bev Pike is a Winnipeg polymath whose work encompasses Baroque painting, feminist satire and artist-books.
Caption: Église Saint-Nicolas de Malá Strana, Prague
“Crafting” into Art: Why do we want in?
by Daniela Smith-Fernandez
It has only been since art came to mean something hallowed that people began to argue where to draw the line between art and craft.
Recently, there has been a push to have traditional craft mediums such as textiles included within the parameters of fine art; the shift to include “crafts” within the historical art canon and the modern art world is often framed as a progressive one. Inclusion can mean that there are more opportunities to see work made by women and non-Westerners, remedying some of the gaps in the notoriously Eurocentric realm of art history. Respect and access to support is also implicit. Potentially, craft artists can now complete an MFA, exhibit in galleries, apply for grants and command fair prices for work. It can also mean that artists who have been through copious amounts of training and have become highly technically skilled will not have their work dismissed on the basis of the medium they use.
However, as the subject of crafts has come into the foreground of artistic discourse, the question is what happens when you take “crafts” into an art context?
When admiring the beauty of quilts, coats etc., it is important to remember these are primarily functional objects; mittens can be beautiful but if they do not keep hands warm they will not be useful. Craftspeople have incorporated creativity in the process of making something that people need to have anyways, but the skills used are ones developed out of necessity. So when those mittens, designed to be warm, are transferred into an art gallery where they are judged purely on aesthetics, something fundamental gets lost. It is like putting a sculpture that incorporates a fountain into a book on water distribution systems and then determining that the sculptor was an inefficient well builder.
If deconstructing the elitist hierarchies inherent in the way we view art could be accomplished simply by the inclusion of functional objects, then the art-versus-craft debate would not be an issue. However, I am deeply skeptical as to how positive an impact the acceptance of craft-as-art will be, as long as the conditions craft is made in continues to be at best, devalued, and at worst, misunderstood. This is especially problematic in the case of work from non-Western cultures where it is often sacred or ritual pieces that are re-labeled “art” instead of being understood as valuable within a different context. This mistranslation amounts to co-option, not respectful inclusion.
Further, what happens to craft mediums when they join the art world? When it starts to matter who signed their name on the back of a quilt, it loses its value as a bed warmer. Traditionally, craft has been an area where contested aspects of art, such as the cult of the individual genius, does not apply. I worry what will happen if we lose that. What will happen to the spirit of collaboration, the appreciation for functionality, the non-elitist standpoint? Craft is inherently accessible; one does not need cultural capital to “understand” a coat the way one does a Renaissance painting.
Ideally, as the art-versus-craft debate continues, the relationship between the two will be re-framed as an exchange, where each tradition has something to contribute from its own rich history. Ultimately the question about what constitutes art is less about categorization than about whether something is worthy of respect. Now the issue is to re-examine underlying assumptions within the debate, and to ask why traditional forms need to be considered art to be appreciated, instead of being understood on their own terms.
When positioned as “art” functional objects lose their context. Clothing by Daniela Smith-Fernandez. Photo by Leif Norman
Freya Olafson’s Avatar
by Kendra Ballingall
A figure emerges from behind a white screen, enters the stage. She sits at her laptop, adjusts her webcam, hides apologetically behind greasy hair. Multiplies infinitely on screen and invites the audience to “view photos of Freya.” Channels pre-recorded voices, contorts her age. Disembodies her gender. Reincarnates YouTube videos of others, populates them, live on stage. Strips. Paints her body away with Chroma key blue. Returns to the floor and puts her best face forward. Generates himself, so grateful for her subscribers’ attention.
Avatar performs an intermedia study of ontology, incorporating conventions of dance, performance, video, and the Web. The hunched body of the vlogger and the gyrating, swooning online pornographic body become the body of the dancer in an annihilation and affirmation of the body that may be most familiar to performance art (let us leave dance school ignorantly aside). The discourse of the avatar somehow contains these simultaneous drives to erase and expose, deny and assert the body; in Hindu texts, online gaming, Internet forums, or social software, we may find that it is indeed this ambivalence toward the body that makes becoming possible.
There is precedence for such ambivalence within dance: as the Classical emaciates the singular body – reducing to it to line to draw the corps, the Modern resuscitates it – returning its volume and weight. A rejection of metaphysics, the modern revitalizing gesture relies on the same concept of the subject that allowed Camus to write that to create is to live twice. Articulated through an automatism of the body, the Expressionism of Modern dance takes the form of a Humanist becoming, an ontology that remains confident in the self.
The Internet’s recent avatar shares such an emancipatory promise to the self: claiming to be user-generated, dynamic and accessible, the Internet is a technological dream not yet rhetorically repressed beside 20th-century Western materialism. We still have faith in the indistinction between author and user; as artists, gamers, vloggers or Facebook friends, we somehow believe in ourselves as the authors of our own (corporate) genealogies. “Everyone can watch videos on YouTube”; “YouTube is empowering [people] to become the broadcasters of tomorrow.”[1]
Do such avant-garde and technological utopianisms program our freedom, or do they discipline the subject, making it “more obedient as it becomes more useful, and conversely”?[2] (Is the dancer, artist, programmer or user subjugated or empowered?)
Conventional and institutionalized, dance may be the optimal art of the human, a policy of coercions that acts upon the docile body. And is the Internet such an amenable medium, a form malleable to our desires, or are we newly governed by its conventions, too?
To reply, it is tempting to finally take refuge in “interdisciplinarity,” to collage together a place between disciplines where we can put our hybrid identities. Avatar presents a different ontology that threatens the status of the identified individual, performing a profanation of the body toward a redistribution of the concept of the self: the dancer steps down, the artist temporarily disappears, the user generates herself as someone different, and the body ceases to be the essential, sacred site of the self, becoming an interface among interfaces. This is intermedia as a practice rather than a place, as a potentially empowering method with which to confront technologies of the self.
[1] http://www.youtube.com/t/about
[2] Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison, New York: Random House, 1975, p. 138.
*****
Avatar was performed October 15 - 17, 2009 at the Rachel Browne Theatre, Winnipeg.
This text initiates a dialogue on ontology and the status of the human between Freya Olafson and the Winnipeg Free Museum.
photo: Phil Hossack
Sights of Summer: The Female Form, Diversified
By Noni Brynjolson
Allyson Mitchell, Ladies Sasquatch, installation, 2009
Summer descends, the little dresses and shorts come out, and thousands of Winnipeg bodies of all shapes, sizes and colours are exposed, at long last, to the sunlight. The unbundled season: bikinis on beaches, cut-off shorts, the miniskirt—all exposing beautiful flesh to the public eye. It seemed a fitting time for two exhibitions, one at The Winnipeg Art Gallery and one at Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art, to uncover, confront and reflect upon the female form and how it has recently been given shape by artists. Both exhibitions explored the tensions between celebration and exploitation of bodies, nudity and sex—issues that have surrounded third-wave feminist discussions. Should a line be drawn, and if so, where?
In Allyson Mitchell’s Ladies Sasquatch at the WAG, the girly monsters aren’t exactly nude; instead, they’re covered in fun fur and other kitschy domestic “feminine” materials. They have distinct personas, featuring what Mitchell describes as classic lesbian haircuts. The ladies flaunt their pink, furry pubes with abandon, creating a vision of female sexuality inspired by Mitchell’s own radical feminist attitude that she calls Deep Lez: “Deep Lez seeks to map out the connections between the second-position feminisms that sustained radical lesbian politics and the current third-wave feminisms that take apart the foundation on which those politics were built.”[i]
Pandora’s Box also centres on third-wave feminist issues. The works deconstruct various social and cultural mythologies, revealing a slew of conflicting poses. In Ghada Amer’s French Kiss, one has to look closely to see stitched figures with interlocking tongues. Loose threads dangle over the painted abstract expressionist surface, a witty play on gendered mediums. Amer also references the literal veiling of female sexuality within oppressive religious systems (Islam, in her case). In Chitra Ganesh’s Inside Pandora #2 a large doe-eyed nude smokes a hookah connected to her vagina. Ganesh’s work combines classic Hindu aesthetics with references to Bollywood and pornography. It is also a reminder of nineteenth century paintings mythologizing the Orient, such as Eugène Delacroix’s Women of Algiers, which depicts hookah-smoking women lounging lasciviously in a brothel. Women have been constructed as Other throughout history, and only recently have cultural stories and myths been taken apart to reveal sexual and racial biases.
Third-wave feminism continues to be fraught with tension. Pop culture figures such as Lady GaGa only make matters more confusing: she has discussed her bisexuality, professed an interest in Andy Warhol and performance art, and states that she “wants the imagery [of her performances] to be so strong that fans will want to eat and taste and lick every part of us.”[ii] While this sounds tantalizing, her message of female empowerment through sexuality is still packaged into airbrushed, plasticized and expensive looking images, and therefore subdued. Images featuring diverse bodies and sexualities are less visible, more intimate, and go deeper into the dark, wet space of female desire. Mitchell’s Sasquatches conjure up an entrancing spectacle of untamed female passion. Entering their circle, it is hard to deny feelings of power and female solidarity. Pandora’s Box presents the idea that “women’s sexuality might be about and for women.”[iii] The issue of exploitation lingers in these works, yet it is less thick than what oozes out of Lady GaGa.
So where does this leave all of us feminist ladies, who feel torn between displaying our bodies to the world, and keeping them out of sight? The summer is always a reminder that the problem of the gaze still exists; we are still likely to be ogled proportionally to the amount of skin we show. Should we reveal our lovely parts or cover them up with flowing skirts and collared shirts? The venerable Helen Cixous states, “By writing the self, woman will return to the body which has been confiscated from her, which has been turned into the uncanny stranger on display.... Censor the body and you censor breath and speech at the same time. Write yourself. Your body must be heard. Only then will the immense resources of the unconscious be heard.”[iv] I say, keep the little dresses, tank tops, and minis, but don’t be afraid to let your inner Sasquatch show.
Notes
[i] Allyson Mitchell, “Deep Lez I Statement,” Allyson Mitchell: Ladies Sasquatch (exhibition catalogue, Hamilton: McMaster Museum of Art, 2009).
[ii] “Lady GaGa Brings Her Artistic Vision Of Pop Music To New Album -- And A New Kids Song,” MTV.com, http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1589013/20080609/id_0.jhtml.
[iii] Amanda Cachia, Pandora’s Box (Regina: Dunlop Art Gallery, 2008): 13
[iv] Helene Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” in Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism, edited by Robyn R. Warhol and Diane Price Herndl (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1997).
***
Ladies Sasquatch was exhibited at the Winnipeg Art Gallery from
May 30 to August 16, 2009. Pandora’s Box was exhibited at Plug
In Institute of Contemporary Art from June 6 to July 18, 2009.
Noni Brynjolson is a Winnipeg writer and curator. In September, she will continue her studies of art, feminist theory and popular culture at Concordia University in Montreal.
