KAREN E. JONES
You began this project well before the watershed #MeToo movement in which numerous powerful American men, particularly in the media and entertainment fields, have faced allegations and repercussions for sexual harassment and rape. Can you pinpoint the inspiration for addressing the topic in an exhibition? Have you found yourself framing the exhibition differently within the current cultural context?

MONIKA FABIJANSKA
The inspiration for the show came in December 2014 when Carolee Thea prepared a slide show of her artworks for me. Among them I saw Sabine Woman (1991) – a life-sized installation rendering a drastic gang rape scene. I remember coming back home wondering why I had never seen a work like that. Because I am particularly sensitive to censorship, I immediately thought that since I have not, there probably were other works by women about rape. I was right. But I could not guess what would become apparent within a mere couple of hours: a rudimentary internet search made it clear that the subject has been addressed by a majority of famous women artists, internationally. Its omnipresence meant that this would also be true for all women artists, whether more or less accomplished, and probably across time. I was stunned by the contrast between the number and quality of works about rape and almost complete absence of their discussion in literature.

Further development of my project was guided by people’s reactions to my interest in researching art on rape. At the beginning of 2015, they usually showed surprise, to put it diplomatically. Whether it was disgust or disbelief, it reassured me that the subject was worth inquiry. When I mentioned the idea of an exhibition, a common expectation was that it would be international and include artists from countries where “they rape,” like India. Such reactions made me aware of how strong the taboo was in the American society, and I decided that I had to make an American exhibition. The contrast between the silence around the subject and rape statistics was mirrored by the chasm between the silence of art exhibitions, art history and critique and the omnipresence of the subject in women’s art.

You have chosen 1968 as a starting point, and yet, the exhibition opens with Kathleen Gilje’s piece Susanna and the Elders, Restored with X-Ray that refers to Artemisia Gentileschi’s 1610 painting. Why bracket the subject within the last 50 years?

You would need a whole museum to give full justice to the subject. Yoko Ono’s 1968 film “RAPE” belongs to the earliest works on rape by contemporary women artists, and even predates them by a few years. The subject can easily be traced back to the early 1970s. It is more difficult to trace it before women gained broader access to the art world, and will probably be impossible to find more than a few artworks prior to the mid-19th century, except for works that used allegorical themes and were painted by the few women artists active then, like Susanna and the Elders by Artemisia Gentileschi (1610). Timoclea pushing the Thracian captain who raped her into a well by Elisabetta Sirani (1659) is more interesting as a type of representation and I would like to find historical works by women, at least drawings, representing rape realistically, and reactions to its impact on their psyche and sexuality. This, not “histories,” is the focus of works by contemporary women artists. I never intended to present the works chronologically within the exhibition, so Yoko Ono’s film does not open the display. Kathleen Gilje’s Susanna and the Elders, Restored (1998/2018) is the opening artwork because the exhibition is about iconography of rape, not about rape per se. It is not a selection of artworks on rape, which I found particularly compelling or formally interesting, but an attempt to analyze a representative sample of iconography of rape in women’s art. I marked this intention by opening the exhibition with a work that is a critique of the male iconography of rape in the history of art.

In your research, where did you identify the earliest representations of rape in both literature and visual culture?

I focused on how contemporary (mostly American) women artists represent the subject. At first, because rape is taboo, one might think that we have never talked or represented rape visually, but in the next moment the realization comes that rape is omnipresent in human culture, and therefore its descriptions and – to a lesser degree – visualizations. You find them wherever you look for the roots of our culture: in the Greek mythology, and in the Bible. In her book, Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (NYC 1975) Susan Brownmiller argues that the biological possibility of rape is the basis of the socio-economic relations of men and women, and that a marriage contract, according to which a woman belongs to a man, was just a safer way to secure a woman from another man than her abduction. Abduction of Sabines is one of the founding myths of Rome!

But as “heroic” rape is present in the dominant historical narrative, that of mythology and holy scriptures, and created by men, its different image is preserved in fables which were told by women and meant to be cautionary tales, like Little Red Riding Hood which early versions can be traced to the 10th century. When it was eventually written down and published by men (Charles Perrault in the 17th century and Brothers Grimm in the 19th c.), the girl was stripped of agency and wit, and the concepts of guilt, punishment and a male savior (the hunter) appeared instead, not to mention that rape was no longer discussed openly but disguised as wolf eating the girl.

When it comes to visuals, I don’t know what representation can be called the earliest. The context for my exhibition are numerous representations in painting and sculpture, which were popular in Western classical painting from the Renaissance through the 19th and even 20th century: Abduction of the Sabines, Rape of Persephone, Rape of Europa, Zeus and Leda, Susana and the Elders. I guess cave paintings also show scenes of rape. But what would interest me would be scholarly research of early representations by women, besides the era of Gentileschi or Sirani. Looking at modern and contemporary art is extremely interesting, too. The earliest 20th century depiction of rape by a woman artist I know of is the exquisite 1907 engraving by Käthe Kollwitz. I am sure there are more. We were made to believe that rape is an isolated event, a rare crime, happening when we come home too late, in a skirt too short. Rape happens all the time and everywhere. Women’s knowledge of that fact and its sharing, including art on rape, has been censored by patriarchal society. As a result, it is hidden in plain sight.

Why did you select Susan Brownmiller’s term the “heroic rape” that locates the glamorization and justification of rape? You upend the term as your title. Can you unpack the term and discuss why you selected it?

Brownmiller’s “heroic rape” refers to “the direct connection between manhood, achievement, conquest, and rape.” In art, the male narrative of the conquest includes a dramatic struggle ending with romantic submission. Also, the focus on action is characteristic of the male perspective as shown in the history of literature and film. One does not have to look for historical representations to find it. A 2017 film Wind River, ironically distributed by the Weinstein Company (in October 2017 its producers cut relations with TWC), which seems progressive because it draws our attention to the atrocities happening on Indian reservations, shows the raped woman only twice: running through frozen fields and lying dead in a pool of blood during the captions, and during the rape scene reconstruction as part of explanation of what happened. It is not a film about rape of a woman. It is yet another film of a man in pursuit of another man; “a good man” chasing “a villain.”

What makes works by women radically different from those by men is the focus not on the action or drama, but on the lasting psychological devastation of the victim: her suffering, shame, silence, and loneliness. Upending Brownmiller’s term seemed right for the title of the exhibition, which was intended to show how women narrate the rape of women, and call attention to the history of rape misrepresentation in culture. The adjective “heroic” used by Brownmiller is descriptive in the context of historical representation of wars, but already contains more than a hint of sarcasm. I planned an exhibition analyzing iconography of women’s art and I needed to illuminate the counterpart: the existing and charted iconography created by men.

Why did you decide to focus on women artists and the US? Could you see the exhibition expanded to include international artists?

The exhibition was originally planned as international. The reactions of its potential audience made me limit its scope. I am referring to my conversations from the beginning of 2015, before the #metoo movement was formed. I realized that New Yorkers often thought rape occurred predominantly in some “peripheries,” whether geographical or social; it happened elsewhere, but not “here,” not “to us.” By that time I knew most of American women artists made a work on rape, and I also knew that one in six American women has been raped. I thought that addressing our society was crucial: what happens now and here, in Manhattan, in the Bronx, in Ohio. There was also a problem of representation. Based on what criteria would I choose international artists? India but why not Sri Lanka? A Swedish artist because Sweden has one of the highest rape statistics, but only because its definition of rape is truly broad? Such a project risked finger pointing unless it were huge in scope and truly representative of many cultures.

I am fully aware of the fact that not only women are raped and I refer to it in the catalog. Men are raped, too, and quite a few men told me their stories during my work on the exhibition. LGBT people are raped. One may also think of a separate project about sexual abuse of children. A responsible exhibition cannot be about everything. Men’s rape is much more of a cultural taboo than the rape of women, and it requires a separate scholarly research of its specificity. Same with rape of LGBT people. I did not curate an exhibition about rape in general but specifically focused on women’s art.

Could you discuss the various artistic strategies in the exhibition, as there’s a wide range of practices here. For example, the abstract sculptural works of both Sonya Kelliher-Combs and Senga Nengudi to the document-based conceptual work of Susanne Lacy’s Three Days in May? Was it a conscious decision to have various working methods represented?

In order to curate a representative survey of some twenty works capable of representing hundreds that I found, the curatorial selection takes into account the following five elements at the same time: 1) three generations of artists; 2) ethnic diversity (artists of American Indian, African American, and Asian origins, and Latinas); 3) all visual mediums (from drawing to social practice); 4) themes that inspired artists to address rape (from fairy tales to rape as a war crime); and 5) varied visual languages they chose (from symbolism to performative re-enactment).The exhibition also explores themes that inspired artists to treat rape, such as trauma, domestic violence, child abuse, media coverage of sensational cases, college rape culture, the role of social media, criminal trials and responsibility of public institutions, rape in the military, rape as a war crime, slavery, rape epidemic on Indian reservations, women trafficking, rape in public and political discourse, and visual and literary tradition, especially art history and fairy tales. Often, several themes inspire one artwork.

The Un-Heroic Act examines remarkably varied visual languages artists employed in order to evoke feelings as contrasting as empathy and shock. Some employ realism (Ada Trillo, Carolee Thea), others symbolism (Sonya Kelliher Combs, Angela Fraleigh), sometimes verging on abstraction (Senga Nengudi). Some aim for poetic beauty in opposition to the act itself, in an attempt not to victimize again (Roya Amigh, Angela Fraleigh). Some avoid depicting the female body altogether and use text instead (Guerrilla Girls, Andrea Bowers, Bang Geul Han, Guerrilla Girls BroadBand, to some extent Jenny Holzer), others contest classical iconography through subversive representation (Kathleen Gilje, Kara Walker, Natalie Frank, Roya Amigh), or complicate the relation between reality and fiction in para-documentary treatment (Yoko Ono, Lynn Hershman Leeson). Yet others employ performative re-enactment (Ana Mendieta, Jennifer Karady, Naima Ramos-Chapman), activism (Suzanne Lacy, Guerrilla Girls, Andrea Bowers, Guerrilla Girls BroadBand), or conceptual instruction works (Yoko Ono). The artistic language of expression does not follow any specific theme which provided inspiration. Rather, expression follows the artist’s intention: to shock, to remember, to meditate, to heal, to express anger and pain.

It seems that you situate rape as a symptom of violence against and oppression of women, whether the psychological harassment and invasion of personal space in Yoko Ono’s “RAPE,” the brutal performance in Ana Mendiata’s Untitled (Rape Scene) — based on an actual event — orthe trauma and aftermath addressed in Naima Ramos-Chapman’s film, And Nothing Happened.

Each of the works you mention represents its time, but also the artist’s intention and cultural experience. For example, even though both Mendieta’s and Ramos-Chapman employed re-performance, Mendieta decided to re-perform the harrowing scene of rape with an intention of shocking her audience (a set of photographs documenting a performance Rape Scene, 1973/2001), while Ramos-Chapman re-performs her living with and battling trauma, clearly with an intention to win, and to give example to other young women to speak out (a film And Nothing Happened, 2016). Rarely a millennial artist represents a vulnerable female body avoiding re-victimization. Naima Ramos-Chapman’s work expresses the voice of the generation that finally speaks about rape, female sexuality and psyche openly, and despite pain, asserts that voice.
Ono’s work is an exception in the exhibition because the artist most probably considered it a metaphor, where stalking a woman and a threat of rape were to portray abuse of power and tensions in contemporary world, from international relations in the era of Vietnam, to the artist’s own experience of being stalked by the media. Ono’s conceptual score for the film said that camera may also chase men. Nevertheless, “RAPE” is also a great work on abuse of women.

What has been the reception and discourse within the university community? And what kind of critical reception are you getting?

I am independent curator but I volunteered to guide many John Jay College student groups through the exhibition. The exhibition makes a strong impression on them. I received several letters from John Jay professors praising the exhibition and thanking me for both addressing the subject, and for selecting renowned artists and bringing their art to this community. They appreciated guided walks and gallery labels. I was told that the gallery had many more requests for tours of the exhibition than usually. It is important to mention that a majority of the John Jay student population does not have much interaction with art and they do not visit museums. They have professional knowledge though on many subjects covered by the exhibition, like domestic violence or trafficking women and the exhibition certainly opened their minds to new language of expression. The College of Criminal Justice has been a great venue for this exhibition.

The exhibition has, so far, been very favorably reviewed in the press. Jillian Steinhauer in The New York Times not only praised it but picked exactly what I wanted the audience to understand, through careful presentation of varied iconography: that rape has been a major subject for women artists. The review also emphasized the historical aspects of women’s art and of the subject of rape. I couldn’t dream of a review closer to my intentions for the exhibition. There were also excellent reviews in The Brooklyn Rail and Art Papers, as well as interviews in the Hyperallergic podcast and Bomb.

How do you see the discourse on rape expanded by activist practices such as the Guerrilla Girls artworks in the exhibition? Do you think that their practices affect change?

No ultimate goal of activism is ever achieved. Our lives, both in the singularity of our individual biographies, and our collective life, are woven of doing, not of having things done. No single exhibition or artwork can make a change. But together they do. As part of the project, Guerrilla Girls Broadband organized a workshop with John Jay students, which resulted in two anti-rape culture posters. In order to make them, students first needed to learn the language of expression based on facts. I observed them working on it, and it was obvious what an amazing experience it was for these young women. Once students posted them on the campus, they obviously received mixed reception and had to learn and practice the language to explain and defend their project.

If you think of Suzanne Lacy enormous projects involving thousands of people, they definitely bring change. Among her nine projects devoted to rape, Three Weeks in May (1977), documentation of which we show in the exhibition, was re-performed at the invitation of the Getty in 2012 and the comparison of its many elements, reception, and impact in 1977 and 2012 is telling. We will never eliminate rape but the City of Los Angeles, Los Angeles Police Department and local media changed their attitude, developed the language to name rape, and mechanisms to fight it. It is impossible to prove what percentage of this change can be credited to Lacy’s project. But I strongly believe she had an impact. For example, as part of her 1977 project she organized a dinner for the City officers to discuss the language used in relation to rape. Three Weeks in May was one of the founding projects of social practice.

The post Regarding Rape: Monika Fabijanska discusses “The Un-Heroic Act” with Karen E. Jones appeared first on artcritical.

I was only four and yet I had a job already. I’m walking, hand in hand with my mother, down crowded, chaotic New York streets and my job is to provide protection whenever we pass a group of men. Even though we were a mother-daughter duo, they’d be watching her like a hawk. I never forgot the helplessness I felt at that moment, because I knew that the men’s gazes demoralized my mother, yet what could I do?

This distinct memory came to mind the other day at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. A show of portraits of grand ladies like Marie Antoinette and Russia’s Princess Alexandra Golitsyna created during the late 1700s showed off the artist’s meticulous skill and way with vibrant pigments. The artist who painted these portraits of such esteemed individuals was a woman: Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun, who was active as a portrait painter from teenage years until her death. Vigée Le Brun spent her early years in a convent, moving to the Rue Saint-Honoré in Paris when her widowed mother remarried a wealthy jeweler. Thereafter she grew up in an influential circle of court artisans. She was accepted to the Royal Academy and was then allowed to show her work in their Salon. Nevertheless, Vigée Le Brun was a fish out of water, since the academy was completely dominated by men. I can only begin to imagine the ridicule and disdain that her fellow male artists showed her, just for being a woman and endeavoring to fulfill her passion. In 1776 she married painter and art dealer Jean-Baptiste-Pierre Le Brun, whose great-great uncle was Charles Le Brun, the first Director of the French Academy under Louis XIV.

As I strolled around the Met, looking at her paintings, I felt a strong sense of pride, respect, and indeed gratification towards Vigée Le Brun for helping to pave the way for female artists and women in general, just through her unconventional success. The painting that had the most drastic impact on me was one of a famous subject in a non-traditional dress: La Reine en gaulle (1783) whose subject is Marie Antoinette. In this painting the doomed queen, unadorned by royal jewels, wears a loose fitting muslin dress with a simple sash around the waist. She delicately holds a rose and wears a straw hat. This painting caused quite a stir when it was first shown, what with the Queen of France in such a relaxed and un-royal pose: It was a major faux pas. Yet to me, even though the painting does not show her in the typical grand style that was the custom with the royalty during that time, I believe that Marie Antoinette exudes a sense of regality—even though, at first glance, one would not recognize the subject as a royal or a wealthy individual, since it has all the bearings of a commoner. When I first laid eyes on this painting, despite the casual aspect of it, I knew that the subject of the painting was someone of great importance, simply through her stature and poise. Even in a simple smock, Marie Antoinette exudes elegance and that is what I find most striking. Marie Antoinette had a reputation for disregarding tradition and etiquette at Versailles, one that this painting confirms. It shows her “wild” side, the individual she might have become if she wasn’t a royal. That’s what attracts me to this painting, the unconventional female artist and her equally unconventional royal subject.

Due to public uproar that greeted this risqué painting, Vigée Le Brun was forced to execute another, this time with Marie Antoinette adorned in a lavish headdress and a heavy corseted blue satin gown. Ironically, the new painting mimicked the old, with the same body position, and Marie Antoinette once again posed holding a rose—a rose that by any other name would smell as sweet. All that differs is the style of dress. The curators have placed these paintings side by side, inviting comparison. I almost feel as if Marie Antoinette and Vigée Le Brun planned it so, as if to say “take a hike” to their harshest critics.

Max Weber once wrote, “Power is the chance to impose your will within a social context, even when opposed and regardless of the integrity of that chance.” I believe that this applies to Marie Antoinette and Vigée Le Brun. In a time where women had little or no power, art was the outlet in which these women interpreted themselves. That is why I find this work so powerful. Most art is meant to please, but La Reine en Gaulle was meant to provoke.

Since the dawn of time, society has regarded women as incapable, unequal, and subordinate to their male counterparts. The same can be said for the art world. According to a famous poster by the Guerrilla Girls from the 1980s, less than 4% of the artists in the modern section of the Met are women, but 76% of the nudes are female. This is only one statistic that shows how the art world is a man’s game. My mother, who I mentioned earlier, the artist Brenda Zlamany, has always been an inspiration to me, a single parent trying to create art in a field where the odds are set against her. She is a portraitist and has used me as the subject of countless paintings, which might be why I took such a liking to Vigée Le Brun who also created many a painting with her daughter as muse. Both artists show the stages of growth of their daughter, from infant, to tween, to teenager. Vigée Le Brun is not as well known as Jacques-Louis David and Jean-Auguste- Dominique Ingres, but women who are equal to men in every way are often left in the shadows. Even now in the “modern” era, women can still make less money than men for the same job and are often excluded from opportunities, just because of their gender. I hope to use Vigée Le Brun as an example and express my feelings about gender equality through art and the power of words. Art and words can change the world. Maybe I’m an optimist for saying that, but I really believe it.

The post Walks on the Wild Side: Female Empowerment and a Right Royal Faux Pas appeared first on artcritical.

Guerrilla Girls: Art in Action at Pomona College Museum of Art
January 20 to May 17, 2015
333 N College Way
Claremont, CA, 909 621 8283

Alien She at the Orange County Museum of Art
February 15 to May 24, 2015
850 San Clemente Dr
Newport Beach, CA, 949 759 1122
traveling to the Pacific Northwest College of Art and Museum of Contemporary Craft, Portland

SOGTFO at François Ghebaly
February 28 to April 4, 2015
2245 E Washington Blvd
Los Angeles, CA, 323 282 5187

What is the value of a woman’s work?

I find myself contemplating this question after spending a total of four unpaid hours learning to edit Wikipedia in the service of helping resolve its gender imbalance.

Only 13% of Wikipedia editors are women, according to a 2011 census, a statistic that prompted the Art+Feminism group to spearhead and sponsor worldwide “edit-a-thons” to encourage the creation and expansion of Wikipedia content related to women and feminism in the arts. I took part in a local chapter at Whittier College where I and a handful of students and faculty members learned best practices, notability guidelines, and how to create, edit, and cite on the world’s most-used reference website.

In four hours I managed to add one little paragraph of text to Hannah Höch’s Wikipedia page. Accounting for the learning curve and the chatter in the room, this isn’t really as inefficient as it sounds, but it did prompt me to question the value of my time and work — as a woman, and as a writer.

Not that I would have been doing anything different. Were it not for the edit-a-thon I would have devoted that time to writing this article for artcritical, an article that I’d promised my editor would survey a number of exhibitions featuring women artists in the greater Los Angeles area. There’s an exhibition of Guerrilla Girls ephemera at the Pomona College Museum of Art, a survey of the influence of the Riot Grrl movement on visual arts at the Orange County Museum of Art (OCMA) in Newport Beach, as well as a recent exhibition of female sculptors at François Ghebaly Gallery in Downtown L.A. What unites these exhibitions is not only the gender of their participants, but the insistence on gender as a uniting principle.

A month ago, in Pomona, two black-clad, gorilla-masked activists greeted an auditorium with armfuls of bananas, tossing them out to the crowd before mounting the stage and presenting a lecture/performance/artist talk on the Guerrilla Girls’ objectives and activities. One of them, using the pseudonym Käthe Kollwitz, a founding member, has devoted a career to anonymously fighting for equal representation of art by women and people of color. The anonymity here serves to “keep the focus on the issues” rather than on the personalities of those who bring the issues to the table. But, I wonder, who is it behind the mask, who has toiled for 30 years with no credit, no personal recognition for such incremental concessions to the overall state of the arts? What is the value of this work, this lifetime of work? Certainly there are speaker’s fees, which are how the Guerrilla Girls fund their activism, but meager remuneration isn’t what gives value to this work, it is simply what enables it. The value of her work, rather, could be seen in the faces of the hundreds of young women in the audience — young artists and curators, ready to embark on their careers in an environment that is steadily getting better, more inclusive, but not perfect yet. The value is in the transmission of the message, in the hopes that more people will help carry the torch, keep the tallies, and expose disparity.

The message can be transmitted in other ways, in the case of Riot Grrl through music and mail order. The walls are lined with zines at the beginning of the fascinating and engrossing “Alien She” exhibition at OCMA: cheaply photocopied-and-stapled rants, poems, and comics, on topics from punk rock, to coming out, to resisting rape. Like pre-Internet proto-Tumblrs, zines were distributed through independent channels just like underground music, via independent record labels, in small bookstores, record stores, by direct mail, and at punk shows. Miranda July’s Big Miss Moviola project (1995-2003, later known as Joanie 4 Jackie) connected female filmmakers through a “video chainletter” distributing each work, each artist to one another. Born out of the frustration July experienced trying to get her work into male-dominated film festivals, Moviola cost only $5 to participate, was advertised in teen magazines like Sassy and Seventeen, and completely circumvented all the usual channels of distribution, production, and display, sidestepping “mainstream” audiences, and building instead a small community comprised only of likeminded female filmmakers. The value of this work is in the network, and in the recognition that you can create it yourself. Who cares what the boys think?

The exhibition “SOGTFO” (“Sculpture Or Get The Fuck Out”) at François Ghebaly, a grouping of five early- to mid-career female sculptors — Amanda Ross-Ho, Andrea Zittel, Kelly Akashi, Kathleen Ryan, and Nevine Mahmoud — paradoxically makes a bid to “undo the gendered vernacular” while using gender as a lens through which to observe sculpture and culture in practice. (The title is a play on the phrase, commonly found on male-dominated web forums, “TOGTFO”: [show photos of your] Tits Or Get The Fuck Out [of the discussion].) The young artists Akashi, Ryan, and Mahmoud are absolute revelations in this show: their forms, both light and heavy at the same time, slump, drip, curl, perch, and sway in the space. The show opens ideas and concerns beyond gender. Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer’s essay in the accompanying single-sheet catalogue, “Sculpture…,” perfectly encapsulates the condition of constant questioning that comes with the desire to see beyond gender while recognizing the effects of the gender gap: “Being sick of crude binaries, false oppositions, extrinsic responsibilities and coerced competition,” she writes, “She wants a break from options phrased as this ‘or’ that.” Most pointedly she writes, “…or bypass phallogocentrism altogether! I’m so over it. SCUM says, ‘What will liberate women, therefore, from male control is the total elimination of the money-work system, not the attainment of economic equality with men within it.’” Amen.

The sculptures, on their part, seem unbounded by such questions, despite the sad fact that, in all likelihood, given the art market’s enduring skew, these works will ultimately hold less value at auction than works by male sculptors (not to mention less attention in the press, in galleries, in museums, and in all the other parts of the arts apparatus). What is their value then? What is value, in monetary terms at least, if it’s so arbitrarily granted to some works and not to others? Certainly it’s not inherent in the work itself, so how do you measure it, and, more importantly, who gets to do so?

Like women’s work and artists’ work, art writing involves the transmission of a message, is likely to be viewed only by a small network of devotees, and is of questionable value. Composing tweets for a corporation or public figure pays better than writing art reviews, but writing for bigger audiences often pays nothing at all.

In the end, I suppose I should find a way to tell you that no matter the value, it’s somehow all worth it. I’m not sure exactly why or how, but I can confirm that by adding one paragraph to Wikipedia about Hannah Höch’s relationship with the insidiously abusive Raoul Hausmann, I was offered some slight feeling of catharsis (and a rather startling and grand experience writing for the mass audience of Wikipedia). Perhaps it’s a similar feeling to what Höch must have felt when she published, in 1920, shortly before leaving Hausmann, a biting short story parodying her lover and his hypocritical stance on “women’s emancipation.” Publishing it probably didn’t pay all that much, but no doubt she received tenfold dividends in satisfaction alone.

The post Women’s Work: Considering Feminist Art Through Three Recent Shows appeared first on artcritical.