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 © 1998 |