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On the making of Not For
Sale
It was a desire for history--to know, to acknowledge, and
to actively produce history--that motivated me to begin the
work
that has become, six years later, a 90-minute video tape
called Not For Sale: Feminism and Art in the USA during the
1970s.
Prior to this project, contemporary art had been my primary
focus. Although the basis of my work had been established
according to feminist concerns from the moment I began writing
art criticism
while still in college during the early eighties, it wasn't
until 1992 that it first made sense to me to go back to "the
feminist decade." As I witnessed an echo of the '70s
reverberating in contemporary works by Janine Antoni, Cheryl
Dunye, Ava Gerber,
Sue Williams, Lynne Yamamoto and other artists, I became
aware of how little I knew about the Feminist Art Movement.
Given
that the late sixties and early seventies marked the moment
in American history when women first identified themselves
consciously as a political group and organized for the right
to participate in cultural production as visual artists,
it seemed imperative to me to attempt to locate this radical
departure,
situate the terms of its emergence, and preserve its outward
appearance in art production--before it was too late to do
so.
In addition to its relation to my professional practice as
an art critic, returning to the 1970s allowed me access to
my own historical-autobiography. As a teenager during the 1970s,
this decade shaped my earliest self-adopted beliefs. Although
too young to have actively participated, I have vivid childhood
memories of the events circa '68 as witnessed on television
and magazine covers. Of course to consider the impact of the
Women's Liberation Movement and the mobilizations for civil
rights and Black Power, anti-militarism and student rights,
Gay Rights and the general challenge to traditional and governmental
authority that erupted in the United States during the sixties
and seventies, one is left to address the work left undone,
the changes still unmade, the political tensions as yet unresolved.
Obviously, change cannot happen without our assistance, just
as the status quo cannot perpetrate itself without us. Where
and how do we locate ourselves, individually and collectively,
in this process called history?
Politics and art both share the foundational premise of consisting,
ultimately, of a consideration of values; and of being defined
and played out according to what resources are or are not available
for the production or maintenance of values. In the intersection
between politics and art that ocassioned the emergence of the
Feminist Art Movement, the multiple and often contradictory
artstic positions adopted by its participants were quite diverse.
In the context of the ruling New York gallery art of the period--which
was Minimalism--the works associated with the Feminist Art
Movement are more united by their obvious departure from and
against Greenbergian formalism than they are by any other organizing
nomenclature.
Not For Sale introduces and reintroduces some of the art, artists,
and activities of the Feminist Art Movement. Many contemporary
artistic strategies and modes of production that are taken
for granted in the 1990s--including video and performance work,
activist-based practices, collective art efforts, sculpture
and painting that incorporate materials and processes previously
dismissed as craft, autobiography as subject, archival-based
installations and explorations in identity politics--were first
introduced and championed within the broad based aesthetics
and practices that constituted the Feminist Art Movement. Although
the most significant legacy of the Feminist Art Movement---its
construction of a deliberately female subjectivity and its
demand that women be allowed to participate in cultural production
in the role of the artist--was often naive, unstable, contradictory,
and partial, it nonetheless irrevocably transformed the terms
for understanding the meaning of images of women, the role
of women in cultural production, and the aesthetics of American
Modernism.
Much of the research base for Not For Sale was drawn from the
personal archives feminist artists of the 1970s had assembled
of themselves and their peers. Sharing slide reproductions
was one of the dominant organizational and distribution features
of the Feminist Art Movement. Although 35mm slides were the
standard format for most reproductive preservation of art made
in the United States during the 1970s, this format is not well-suited
to the video medium; and Not For Sale would be a very different
product if it were, for instance, a literal rather than a virtual
exhibition. As with any historical project, documentation--the
literal materiality of the documents, including their accessibility,
readability, and reproduction quality--greatly influenced not
only the parameters of my own knowledge as a researcher, but
also the possibilities available for transferring this information
into the specific terms accepted by, in this case, video.
Because so few women had commercial support for their art during
the 1970s, a sizable amount of the artworks I located had been
reproduced and preserved according to substandard technical
conditions. Even the works produced in the then-new media of
video and performance were often resistant to being historicized
in video in the 1990s, as many performances had purposively
not been documented (out of deference to an aesthetics based
in exclusively real-time experience) while other time-based
works that were documented or produced in half-inch reel-to-reel
had not been transferred to subsequent video formats and were
therefore literally lost (first generation video tape is fugitive,
much like Polaroid photography) or only partially retrievable.
Working on Not For Sale has brought me closer to the reality
behind the myth of the possibilities available for revisionist
history, especially when undertaken to uncover politically
marginalized cultural products and events. Although a revisionist
reading of dominant cultural artifacts is likely or at least
possible; revisionist reclamations of marginalized cultural
properties remain unlikely and difficult. Despite different
obstacles to historicization, the art and artists featured
in Not For Sale nonetheless account for less than 5% of the
archival imagery I have assembled-- itself only a small fraction
of the social activities, paintings, political organizing,
sculptures, panel discussions, performances, videos, consciousness
raising sessions, postal mailings, activist efforts, installations
and other art activities that occurred in response to and coterminous
with the Feminist Art Movement that emerged throughout the
United States during the 1970s. While researching, I was conscious
of not wanting to repeat the terms of exclusion dictated according
to 'majority politics.' Although the majority of women active
in the feminist activist and art movements were white and heterosexual,
non-white women and lesbians actively participated from the
beginning of the Second Wave and I wanted Not For Sale to reflect
this.
Although the movement was national, Not For Sale is biased
toward activities that occurred in and around New York and
Los Angeles. Even so, some events of obvious historical relevance
to the concerns of Not For Sale are notably lacking due to
my inability to locate either existing or functional visual
documentation. These absences include art works as well as
pivitol public events, such as the first feminist protests
against the discrimination of women from major museums. For
instance, in 1970 members of the Ad Hoc Women Artists Committee
waged a spirited, sustained and successful action against
the exclusion of women from the Whitney Museum of American
Art's
collection and Annual. In Los Angeles the same year women
protested the all-male survey exhibition "Art & Technology" at
the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The extensive textual
and limited photographic documentation of these events were
not easily or productively rendered into the terms of video,
but will be presented in the Not For Sale companion book (forthcoming
from êditions Blocnotes, Paris), which will feature
additional textual description and documentation and reproductions
of
art that are not featured or only presented in brief or in
part in the video tape.
My own aesthetic and political interests also guided the selection
process. I chose works that compelled me as well as those that
seem to best represent some of the movement's dominant aesthetics
tendancies and artistic investigations. The participants in
the Feminist Art Movement arrived from different artistic and
educational backgrounds. Some wanted to transform traditional
European-derivative media, such as painting and sculpture,
with feminist awareness; others, most notably the African American
artists, sought to introduce non-European aesthetics and values
into the American visual vocabulary. Still others eschewed
object-making altogether in favor of performative strategies,
championed video as the new frontier of artistic democracy,
called for an elmination of the division between craft and
fine art, united the aims of artistic freedom with those of
political activism, or set forth an aesthetics based in an
understanding of introducing female experience and female-coded
labor, the female body, women's history, and individual autobiography
as the foundations for a feminist art. Although the parameters
of the Feminist Art Movement can be charted according to specific
historical determinants such as exhibitions, meetings, individual
productions, letters, publications and other documents, the
Movement was first and foremost far from a unified front. The
disagreements between its participants--some of which are overtly
presented in Not For Sale, while others must be inferred by
the viewer--are as crucial to its definition as the consensus
that inspired and sustained it across ideological ruptures,
personal frustrations, and a general lack of access to significant
economic or institutional resources. Participants in the Feminist
Art Movement of the 1970s were motivated to transform the underlying
tenants of fine art--including the production, critical evaluation,
exhibition, distribution, and historical maintenance of art--beyond
terms dictated by sexism. The challenge they offered has yet
to be met.
Laura Cottingham © New York 1998 |
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