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From Liberation to Lack
Art Journal, Winter, 1999 by Mira Schor
In "From Liberation to Lack," an essay I wrote for Heresies in 1987, I noted that "Feminism has little institutional memory, there has been no collective absorption of early achievements and ideas, and therefore feminism cannot yet afford the luxury of storage." I also noted that "Women of my generation form a living bridge across ebb tides of feminist thought."
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Quoting myself now is only to sadly make the point that as things change, so too they stay the same. For feminism, the problems of institutional memory and of storage of cultural work remain. At the symposium "The F-Word: Contemporary Feminisms and the Legacy of the Los Angeles Feminist Art Movement," held at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) in September-October 1998, two examples made this horrifically evident. The symposium was organized by FAWS (Feminist Art Workshops), a group of students and faculty, who were amazed to discover that there had once been a Feminist Art Program at CalArts, when a librarian found evidence of what one might argue was one of the school's most important contributions to late twentieth-century art history being consigned to the dumpster. Also, a trove of archival video material, both documentary and fictional, from the 1970s had just recently been put out on the street for garbage collection by the woman who had stored it in her home for twenty years. Providential ly, at the last minute, an archive took in this material. Thus, in less than thirty years, large chunks of the accomplishments of the feminist art movement in the United States had fallen out of history and very nearly out of existence. It is not surprising that during the 1980s the term postfeminism was popular, encouraged by a culture-wide backlash against feminism.
A variant of that phenomenon is at issue today. The responsibility I feel to provide a bridge of knowledge across generations of feminists is greater now, because so much more knowledge exists--and, often, has been forgotten or naturalized. This responsibility, which I so take to heart, puts a brake on the movement of thought in my work. This was not the case in the 1980s and early 1990s, when I was immersed in the politics of gender representation in both my visual and my crincal work. At the time, I painted sexualized body parts and texts that spoke about the gendered circulation of power in society, wrote about representations of femininity and masculinity in works by male and female artists, and analyzed the gendered nature of the critique of painting.
More recently I represent language in my paintings--words for colors or language at the level of sounds. The body most evident is the materiality of paint itself. I write about painting in relation to challenges from the real and the virtual. It is entirely possible for me to imagine writing an essay on painting in which the word feminism would not appear.
I like to think that the work remains close to feminism as subtext, if not image. I make a case for myself that the kind of fragmented narrative structure I bring to large-scale painting installations is a feminist intervention into the grand tradition of painting, as much a critique as a participatory gesture, and that what I write about painting will always contain the fact that when I began my career as an artist, its history and its philosophy excluded me and my desired content. But let's put it this way: one of the last paintings I did that retained a direct illustrative link to the polemical imaging of the feminist body was a vertical personsized white surface punctuated only by a single red period, more or less at the viewer's gonad level. But I would like not to have to make art about my period for the rest of my life. It's bad enough that contemporary science and youth culture demand that women's bodies be on hormone-replacement therapy. Does feminist art have to follow suit? Do I have to continue t o make my period visible in order to be seen as representing feminism? Or can I punctuate one paragraph in my thinking and go on to the next, without betraying my political ideals? This is the familiar problematic of political art: to be perceived as feminist in a polemical, activist sense, does feminist practice, in art, teaching, and critical writing always have in some sense to be representational?
Many recent encounters with young women artists have framed these questions about what constitutes a feminist practice. In October 1997, a panel at Art in General in New York, moderated by Faith Wilding, was the occasion for a contentious discussion in which a number of the women in the all-woman exhibition Between the Acts evidenced in their work both a catalogue of visual and conceptual permissions and influences from 1970s feminist art, yet considerable resentment for having to admit to the legacy. Various protestations, from "Yes, I'm a feminist but," to "I'm a woman, so of course I'm working from that experience, but I'm not a feminist," or "above all I'm an artist," crystallized for me that there was no point insisting that they must be feminists just because they used feminist-inspired forms and tropes. If they say they're not, they're not. It bugs my generation to know that this generic feminist style's permissions came from, generally speaking, our efforts, just as it drives some young women crazy t o have to acknowledge any legacy. I was heartened when other young women in the room rose up to say this kind of disclaimer was complicit with patriarchy. But I was disheartened when several young women artists preferred not to participate in this forum for Art Journal, whether because feminism is not their issue or because they were afraid of losing points in the mainstream by using the "F-word."
