Feminist Visual Activism and the Body

Basia Sliwinska, Basia Sliwinska

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000331479
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Storia dell'arte contemporanea

This book examines contemporary feminist visual activism(s) through the lens of embodiment(s). The contributors explore how the arts articulate and engage with the current sense of crisis and political concerns (e.g. equality, decolonisation, social justice, democracy, precarity, vulnerability), negotiated with and through the body.

Drawing upon the legacy of feminist art historical critique, the book scrutinises activist strategies, practices and resilience techniques in intersectional and transnational frameworks. It interrogates how the arts enable the creation of civil and political resilience, become engaged with politics as a response to disaster capitalism and attempt to reform and improve society.

The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, visual culture, fine arts, women's studies, gender studies, feminism and cultural studies.

1 Not White, Not Male, and Not New York

Race, Feminism and Artists in Pittsburgh

Hilary Robinson

I’m reaching out to share an idea, I’m very interested in a concept, one I have sat on for over a decade. I’m reaching out because I respect your work, your fierceness, and think you may be interested. Loosely and roughly I’m interested in creating an experience, ritual, poetic, musical, that highlights and/or explores identity from a biracial, multiracial, first and second-generation immigrant experience in America. I feel as this country slowly moves forward on the discourse of race, our experiences are not considered or included. For me, if change is to happen, all voices need to be heard, listened to. . . . The present title is #notwhite, and I confess it may take much to budge me from that. ☺ Thank you for listening.

—Christiane Dolores, email to a number of women artists she knew, 14 February 2016

What follows is part of a longer essay (‘essay’ as in the original English usage: an attempt to organise, or trial, thoughts) around feminism, activism and art. In particular, it emerges from my recognition that the stories told about the histories of feminist art generally imply that its foundations were in the east and west coasts of the territory presently known as the United States of America.¹ This narrative then suggests that ‘feminist art’ spread to London and thence to Europe and other Anglophone countries like Australia and Canada. Finally, it was taken up by ‘others’, whether those were in ‘further’ geographical locations or were ‘western’ feminist identifications of difference (from privileged positions in the art world, feminism and Anglophone publishing). However, tracing lived experiences, memories, artworks, networks and exhibitions of the 1960s–1980s demonstrates that this American/Anglo-centric view is a problematic, unreliable narrative. In the 2010s, complications of narrative dominance continued, particularly under increasing assumptions that ‘we’ all know what is happening, thanks to online communication. This Anglophone, geographic narrative dominance continues to be a problematic element, first, because of the same privileged norms in the art world, in feminism and in publishing; second, due to the sheer numbers of artists, publications, exhibitions, academics in America that need to be considered; and third, because of the dominance of New York and Los Angeles in global contemporary art markets and publishing. All these produce the dominance of the Anglosphere, particularly America, in international art and feminist discourses. Addressing this part of the problem, emerging questions in my longer essay are: what happens to discussions of feminism, art and activism if the privileges of masculinity are de-centred? And, similarly, if the privileges of race/ethnicity/faith/heritage are de-centred? And furthermore, if the privileges of those art-world-dominant cities are de-centred?

This leads to the clumsy main title of this chapter—‘not white, not male, and not New York’—with its three problematic terms. In reverse order: ‘not New York’ stands in for what is beyond the major cities in America; ‘not male’ indicates all those who do not identify as male; and ‘not white’ indicates all those living in America who identify as American but not as white, or as not American and not white, or as not American but identified as white outside America. These are problematic terms as they inevitably re-centre New York, maleness and whiteness through naming them; but I chose to use them here as they also indicate all further identifications that are manifest primarily through the body and, in particular, the body in a geographical location. This provokes another set of questions: if those with bodies that are white and/or male recognise everyone else as ‘other’, how can we mobilise that ‘otherness’ in our activist art practices? How can we shift from centring as naming to recognition of the links between that which essentialises (‘white’, ‘male’) and that which is political and ideological (white supremacy, patriarchy)? And how does this emerge through our material practices? Importantly, also in my title there is a nod to the #notwhite collective, founded 2016 in Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh is the geographic location for this chapter: my home from 2005 to 2012, I both know it well enough and am currently distanced enough from it to recognise an emergence since the early 2010s of activist feminist practices by artists of colour there. My prime focus here is the work of Vanessa German, with indication of the broader context of others such as Alisha Wormsley, Chris Ivey and the #notwhite collective (all of whom will be given more space in the longer essay).² My theoretical framework is developed through the work of Stuart Hall on assembly and conjuncture, along with a USA-based reading of that work by Paul C. Taylor.

***

In ‘Assembling the 1980s: The Deluge and After’, the late Jamaican-British cultural theorist Stuart Hall (2005, p. 3) warns us against assuming easy similarities between antiracism in the African-American context and the Black British context. He also outlines ways in which we can understand diasporic cultures as such. Born 1932 in Jamaica, Hall moved to Britain aged 19, three years after the first-invited of the so-called Windrush generation had arrived in 1948.³ Thus, he experienced both an established majority Black diasporic community and two ‘young’ minority Black ones: while there have been people of African and of Asian descent in the UK for centuries, the Windrush years (late 1940s–early 1950s) and the Ugandan Asian refugee crisis (1972) saw the arrival, constructed through state politics, of many more. Hall was the first editor (1960–1962) of the influential socialist academic journal New Left Review, and the second director (1968–1979) of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham, through which he and his colleagues established Cultural Studies as a major Anglophone academic field. In the 1980s, he was a supporter of the emerging Black Arts Movement, which was formed of both a born-British generation of artists and of transnational artists who had moved to Britain.

I draw from two of Hall’s papers on the Black British arts movement: ‘Assembling the 1980s’, mentioned above (2005); and the related ‘Black Diaspora Artists in Britain: Three “Moments” in Post-war History’ (2006). As with other UK movements of the time, ‘Black’ was coined as an inclusive political identity, referring not only to people of African descent.⁴ Hall says he uses the term ‘with a deliberate imprecision deriving from the ’70s, when the term encompassed all the minority migrant communities’. He goes on to elucidate:

it is used here not as the sign of an ineradicable genetic imprint but as a signifier of difference: a difference which, being historical, is therefore always changing, always located, always articulated with other signifying elements: but which, nevertheless, continues—persistently—to register its disturbing effects.

(Hall 2006, p. 2)

This is also how I am using the term: recognising that the terminology and shifts in its usage in America is distinct, more likely to refer to the African diaspora only. I will capitalise Black to indicate my usage of the word as a political term, rather than a bodily description indicating an Afro-Caribbean or African-American identity, while respecting original usage in quotes.

Hall (2005, p. 2) understands the Black Arts Movement as ‘driven by the struggles of peoples, marginalized in relation to the world system, to resist exclusion, reverse the historical gaze, come into visibility’, part of a global struggle to transform culture: a struggle that is ‘lateral, diasporic, transnational’. To do this, he treats his subject (1980s Britain) ‘as a conjuncture . . . a fusion of contradictory forces that nevertheless cohere enough to constitute a definite configuration’. He treats his method of writing ‘Assembling the 1980s’ as an assembling of elements, ‘not as a unity, but in all their contradictory dispersion’, allowing the artwork to appear ‘not in its fullness as an aesthetic object, but as a constitutive element in the fabric of the wider world of ideas, movements, and events, while at the same time offering us a privileged vantage point on that world’ (Hall 2005, pp. 1; 4). The four elements that Hall (2006, p. 21) argues ‘fused together’ in a conjuncture to make possible the emergence of the Black Art Movement in 1980s Britain were, first, a ‘collapse of “class” as the master analytic category’ and the ‘rise of the so-called “new social movements”’; second, ‘the rise of gender and sexual politics’; third, Thatcherism and free-market neoliberalism; and, fourth, ‘the theoretical deluge which swept across the 1970s and 1980s’. The weakness with Hall’s two papers is their positioning of women and feminism. While ‘the rise of gender and sexual politics’ are one of the conjunctural elements, his definition of this is limited to ‘feminine, personal, familial and domestic themes’, ‘masculinity, the homo-erotic gaze and gay desire’ and ‘black male desire’ (Hall 2006, p. 21), evoking a relational interdependency of women contrasted with the bodily, desirous, autonomy of men. While he notes rightly that ‘Black women did not slot easily into a feminism led largely by white women’, this appears to sidestep foundational feminist theory by such as Audre Lorde in America, and activism like the strike for Union recognition by the mainly Asian female workforce at the Grunwick Film Processing Laboratories, London, 1976–1978.⁵ Likewise, in identifying the first post-war Black Art Movement in the UK, Hall names 16 men and no women (ibid., p. 4). Finally, his comments on the exhibition Five Black Women (Africa Centre, London, 1983) imply that feminism was a new disruptor of the Black Art Movement rather than a result of existing exclusions and fissures both within the movement and beyond.⁶

My assembling (to echo Hall) of differing practices in this chapter is intended also to construct a reading of a collective moment in 2010s Pittsburgh and work towards identifying the conjunctural elements that have produced it ‘not as a unity, but in all their contradictory dispersion’ (Hall 2005, p. 1). As Hall (2005, 2006, and in Hall and Massey 2010 and elsewhere) argues, a conjuncture of contradictory elements can cohere into a broad cultural–political era, and he offers assembly as a method of observation: a map of diverse elements allowing interconnections to be made and for which a particular point of view can be offered. In Black Is Beautiful: A Philosophy of Black Aesthetics, Paul C. Taylor picks up this proposition. Assembly, he says (2016, p. 3), ‘refuses the quest for definitive interpretation . . . makes it easier to credit the complexity of historically emergent social phenomena’ and ‘allows us to see and account for the coherence of the configuration without glossing over the respects in which it remains, in a sense, incoherent’. Assembly, not birth, is what we need to attend to, he argues (2016, pp. 1–31). Taylor develops his understanding of diasporic Black cultures specifically in an American context: for him, ‘Black’ means African-American cultures. These cultures are undertaking this charge of assembly visually, materially, performatively and verbally, not only as written language but also in music, film, hair and dress, advertising and art. Taylor explores these fields of cultural practices, suggesting how American-domiciled diasporic artists are following a similar path to that outlined by Hall in making their analyses and reconfigurations of their reality and experience. The phrase ‘assembly, not birth’ also moves us to the cultural and away from the presumed natural, the bodily and the female, although Taylor does not explore this.

***

One of Vanessa German’s power figures lives with me, in the main living space of my home. She has been with me since 2012, the day that Vanessa brought her to my apartment in Pittsburgh; the day that two packers were there, getting my seven-years-worth of academic life in America ready to move back across the Atlantic. They watched wide-eyed as Vanessa unwrapped her: ‘You can do it’, she said to them; ‘I used to be a packer too’. The next day the packers brought a wooden crate they had made specially for the sculpture. They rewrapped her carefully, placed her in the crate and put her in the back of the truck. She arrived in England safely, adorned with electrical sockets for power, a fish for the ocean we both crossed and keys to unlock the way forward. Her big toes are lifted. She has a bird flying from her chest for joy; and the pedestal on which she stands shows a photograph of my Barbadian-British Great Aunt Bird, Marcia Reid. She has a halo with the words painted on it: ‘I see you Hilary’. She watches over me (see Figure 1.1).

***

Vanessa German’s exhibition 21st Century Juju opened at the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, 10 August 2012. Filling four galleries of the Center, this was a major one-person exhibition celebrating German being named ‘Emerging Artist of the Year’. As her nominator, it was my honour to present German to the people gathered that night. I note...