Cover of the Exhibition Catalogue Womanhouse (showing Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro). Design by Sheila de Bretteville. (Feminist Art Program, California Institute of the Arts, 1972). Photo © Donald Woodman. Courtesy of “Through the Flower” archive

In October the curatorial and activist collective a people is missing will republish and distribute a video documentary by Johanna Demetrakas entitled Womanhouse (1974, 47 min.) for this first time in France. I still remember when I first saw the documentary; an afternoon in New York in Laura Cottingham’s house. Laura had undertaken an expansive investigation about feminist artistic practices in North America in the 1970’s in order to make Not For Sale (1998), which is without doubt the best documentary about the theme to date.  In her personal archive was the Demetrakas video.  At the time I situated myself as queer, while Laura continued to position herself as a radical feminist. Watching the documentary about Womanhouse together, we reconciled each other and managed not to get trapped in the indeterminable debate between post-structural criticism and socialist feminism.  After all we have the same history in common. On the pretext that she had a double copy of everything, Laura filled my backpack up with videos with the frenzy of a bootlegger or somebody who had been holding a message that had waited years to be told.  Still inexpert, I went back to my apartment in Brooklyn and spent a week working through the videos (by Demetrakas, Martha Rosler, Ilene Segalove, Faith Ringgold, Adrian Piper, Ana Mendieta…and a copy of Not for Sale) as if they had been made only for me, taking notes that would constitute my first classes in gender and performance in the University of Paris VIII at the beginning of the year 2000.  Feminist art in the 1970’s was neither a style nor a movement, but rather a set of heterogeneous operations of the denaturalization of the relations between sex, gender, visuality and power. The documentary Womanhouse changed my way of thinking about artistic practice and helped me to understand that it was possible to transform the university and the museum into spaces of sexual and political emancipation.

Ignored for years by the hegemonic narratives of art history, the project “Womanhouse” emerges today as an indispensable work for understanding artistic practices of the 1970’s as well as for rethinking the future of art pedagogies and the relationships between architecture, performance and social activism. The documentary invites us to approach the first feminist pedagogical project initiated at the California Institute for the Arts (CalArts) by Judy Chicago, Miriam Shapiro and a group of students at the beginning of the 1970’s. In the autumn of 1971, Judy Chicago and Miriam Shapiro inaugurated the Feminist Art Program. With the school under construction and a lack of space, Chicago and Shapiro took on an idea proposed by Paula Harper: rent a space and transform it into a feminist project.  They found an abandoned house on a waiting list to be destroyed on Mariposa Street in a residential neighbourhood in Hollywood, Los Angeles. Despite the derelict state of the house, Judy Chicago decided that the “mariposa” (butterfly in Spanish; her lucky animal) was a good sign. During the following six weeks a group of 25 women would study, work and perform inside of the house, transforming each of the spaces and the 17 bedrooms into places of work and study. Demetrakas films the collective work sessions in Womanhouse and shows how the space transformed from a house to a place of exhibition between 30^th of January and 28^th of February in 1972. As if it were political allegory (or history’s bad joke), the first exhibition of feminist art would take place in an abandoned house: a domestic space about to be demolished, transformed first into a collaborative and environmental artwork and later into an ephemeral gallery.

Vickie Hodgetts, Robin Weltsch, and Susan Frazier.
Nurturant Kitchen at Womanhouse, 1972.

In Womanhouse, it is domestic space itself, historically naturalized as “feminine”, that is transformed into an object of critique and artistic experimentation. The heterosexual home, a privatized and disciplinary site, is politicized and denaturalized through language, painting, installation and performance. This process of investigation began in 1969 at Fresno State College (now California State University) when, in response to the exclusion of women in the university and the circuits of production and display of art, Judy Chicago began to distance herself from abstract art and organized the first course of “art and feminism” outside of the art school building. In the “Kitchen Consciousness Group”, Judy Chicago and her colleague Kathie Sarachild put in motion an experimental method of collective learning through speech and through the dramatization of exclusion.  Language displaces painting and performance takes the place once held by sculpture in traditional art training.  Chicago groundbreaking idea was that art could transform consciousness and therefore become also a tool of political emancipation. On the other hand, empowerment techniques and consciousness-raising sessions became tools to produce art. Breaking the hierarchy of teacher-student, the participants constructed collective autobiographical narrations of their political experiences of being artists and women. Rape, discrimination, abortion, maternity, lesbianism, masturbation, divorce, contraception… appear now as spaces of not only political but artistic intervention. In a process of dematerialisation of art and intensification of critical practice, learning in the context of artistic practice shifts from forms of material production towards an art understood as a process of cognitive and somatic emancipation.

The aim of art is no longer to produce an “object” but rather to invent an apparatus of re-subjectification that is capable of producing a “subject”: another conscience, another body.

Sandy Orgel, Linen Closet, 1972, Womanhouse project

It is both motivating and moving today to revisit the interior of Womanhouse through Demetrakas’ documentary: to attend the conscious-raising conversations, to enter into the kitchen transformed by Vicki Hodgetts into an entirely pink space in which fried eggs invade the walls as breasts, or Judy Chicago’s “Menstruation Bathroom” which was full of red tampons that would later be unfairly denounced as a cliché of feminist art (Chicago’s was just underlying the power of new biopolitical and hygienic techniques over the body), or to see the linen closet transformed into the body of a woman by Sandy Orgel, or watch Chris Rush performing the work “Scrubbing” in which she performs the act of cleaning the floor in real time before an audience as uncomfortable as they are surprised, or Faith Wilding (today known internationally for her cyberfeminist work) in her performance “Waiting” in which she narrates female existence as an indeterminate process of moments of waiting, or again Faith Wilding and Janice Lester dressed up as a penis and vagina performing Judy Chicago’s “Cock and Cunt Play”.

Screenshot of Womanhouse by Johanna Demetrakas (1974). Faith Wilding and Janice Lester, The Cock and Cunt Play, performance. “Womanhouse” Project, 1972

Womanhouse produced a critical intervention of denaturalization that also brought into focus the interrelations between 4 supposedly distinct institutions: the university, the museum, the domestic space and the body. Womanhouse posed a critique of domestic space as a technology of production and domination of the feminine body while highlighting the institution of marriage and sex as a regime of enclosement and discipline. The displacement of these first feminist art pedagogies to domestic space (to Judy Chicago’s kitchen and to Womanhouse), which were located outside of the university and museum, is a sign of the epistemological limits of educational institutions of the 1970’s. Feminist critique put in question the architectures of knowledge and its epistemological frontiers. It is possible now to understand Womanhouse as part of the work of Institutional Critique that other artists (Michael Asher, Robert Smithson, Daniel Buren, Hans Haake, Marcel Broodthaers…) were carrying out at the same time, and yet they extended the critique further: to the institution of domesticity and its relations with art education and the museum.

Institutional contempt directed towards the artistic practices and criticisms of feminism would cause the forgetting and even the total destruction of the archive of feminist art from the 70’s: the house in which the Womanhouse experiment took place, the installations, the murals, the architectural transformations, were all destroyed during Roland Reagan’s government. However, the images captured by Demetrakas return to us today, to put it in the words of Georges Didi-Huberman and Warburg, as a kind of ‘ghost’ or ‘survivor’ so that it is still possible to dream our own history and imagine other possible mutations of the institutions of the school and museum.

Curatorial and activist collective a people is missing
Womanhouse, a film by Johanna Demetrakas (1974 VOSTF)

L’article Revisiting Womanhouse est apparu en premier sur Peau de Rat.

Studio de Carol Rama, Turin, 2012, Photo Beatriz Preciado

Teresa Grandes (who is co-curating this exhibition with me) and I went to Turin to see the works. More comfortable moving among the artist’s circuits than those of the gallerists and collectors, I let myself be guided through the twists and turns of the sinuous territories of the commercial art world by the experience and know-how of Teresa Grandes. We have already seen hundreds of reproduced images of Carol Rama’s work but we’ve never seen them face to face. Furthermore, Carol Rama is still alive: born in 1918 she is approaching a hundred.

Everyone has warned us about the difficulties and challenges posed by getting access to Carol Rama’s work. We arrive in Turin as two curators dressed up as tourists. Our contact in Turin is Cristina Mundici, who has organised and curated many of Carol’s exhibitions and is now running the Carol Rama archive with a group of experts and friends. Cristina opened the rest of the doors for us, taking us to see all of the collectors. In four days we saw more than 300 works many of which continue to be unknown after years shut away in garages and basements.

Our hotel in Turin, whose only selling point was perhaps its modest price (European austerity has meant that the museum makes us travel like two candidates of the Peking Express), ends up being right in the middle of the Carol Rama constellation. Cristina Mundici lives just opposite the hotel. Going down from Principe Amedeo, where the hotel is based, towards the Piazza Vittorio Venetto until the Po river, leaving behind the Mole and the museum of cinema in the background, we arrive at the building where Carol Rama lived for the majority of her life on Via Napione.  While we kill time making sure that we don’t arrive too early for our meeting, we find out that the apartment of the architect and friend of Carol, Carlo Mollino, is also on the same street next to the river.

Meret Oppenheim, Le déjeuner en fourrure, 1936

The first thing that surprises us about entering what was Carol Rama’s studio for 70 years, is the darkness: all the windows in the apartment have been blinded with thick black curtains.  Just as Caravaggio, Man Ray or Dan Flavin worked with light, we could say that Carol Rama worked not only in but also with darkness.  The feeling is more haptic than visual: it was as if we had fallen into Meret Oppenheim’s furry cup of Le Déjeuner en Fourrure (1936). It wasn’t about seeing, but rather touching, sensing.  As we moved through this dense blackness we saw progressively more and more yellowing sepia photos; hundreds of images of Carol Rama who transforms herself throughout them as an actress directed by time. Passing over them stage by stage we find a shoemaker’s anvil, dozens of wooden moulds, her own works and those of Man Ray, Picasso and Warhol, an African ritual mask, collections of taxidermy eyes, fingernails and hair, dozens of bicycles tyres (a recurring element of her works made after 1970) hanging flaccidly from hooks and piles of old soap that have degraded over time appearing now as slabs of animal fat. Her apartment is like an organic archive of her own work in the process of decomposition.

Carol Rama, Presagi di Birnam (1970)

The work of Carol Rama is a mine that has laid dormant underground, hidden under the shiny surface of modern art. Encountering just one of her works can implode all of the grand art historiographies. Not only the dominant histories but also those of feminisms. Carol Rama was a contemporary to and in dialogue with (sometimes in person and other times through her work) everything and everyone: Picasso, Duchamp, Luis Brunel, Man Ray, Jean Dubuffet, Orson Wells, Warhol, Sanguinetti, la Ciccoline and Jeff Koons….but she is an invisible contemporary.

Carol Rama’s name doesn’t appear in any history of art. Not even in those which, due to some epistemological and political mishap, have been called the histories of “women artists”. The Italian critic Lea Vergine rescued her for the first time from this historiographic erasure when she included her in the 1980 exhibition “L’Altra Meta dell’ Avanguardia/The Other Half of the Avante-Guarde: 1910-1940”. Vergine is the first person to understand Rama. But this gesture wasn’t enough to make Rama’s unclassifiable work enter into the established international museum circuit. Apart from a few exhibitions in the 90’s (at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, which also travelled to Boston), the brief public acknowledgment of her work marked by the 2003 Venice’ Golden Lion and the distribution labour done by gallerist Isabella Bertolozzi, for the most part Carol Rama’s work still sleeps in the basements of Italian collectors. And yet as traces of seven decades of art production, her body of work shifts how we understand avant-garde movements. Carol Rama invented sensurrealism, visceral-concrete art, brut porn, organic abstraction… and more and more.

Carol Rama, Dorina, 1940 (Collection privée, Turin)

A history-fiction might propose that her works produced between 1936 and 1940 were made with the intention of being seen in 2014. The way in which Carol Rama represents the body and sexuality could be compared with a sort of Piero de la Francesca who would have painted “The ideal city” in the context of a society that didn’t recognize, or rather rejected, the notion of perspective. A woman shitting, a penetrated by a human penis, a body who opens up a vulva with two hands, a snake sliding out of an anus….The images that Carol Rama produced surpass the frames of the sexual intelligibility of modernity. And yet how are we to understand the works of Kara Walker, Sue Williams, Kiki Smith, Elly Stik, Marlene Dumas and Zoe Leonard without them?

Carol Rama, Appassionata, 1940. Courtesy Galleria civica d’Arte Moderno,Turin

Among other things, Carol Rama anticipates the transformations of the representation of the body and sexuality that will take place over the last three decades of the twentieth century. In the watercolors of her early work, Carol Rama invents a figure that, despite having never appeared in the grand catalogues nor entered the exhibition halls of MOMA, is one of the most iconic images of the 20th century: a body whose head is crowned with thorns that gradually become a small garden of yellow flowers. In the series Appassionata (1940), a body, naked apart from the shoes, appears lying on a bed strewn and hung with a web of restraining straps. In the background floats a structure that emerges from the crossing and interweaving of the bed frames and the straps. It could be said that this structure is the consequence of the schematic application of some of the visible laws of cubism but that Carol Rama has modified with the extra variable of “affect.” We could call it, following Deleuze, Affection-Cubism. Art is the result of the extraction of the image from its space-time co-ordinates in order to transform it into percepts and affects. The floating structure is at the same time madness and the incarcerating system of the subject, a possible man of unconscious and of its relationship to the disciplinary apparatus.

Carol Rama, Appassionata, 1940. Courtesy Galleria civica d’Arte Moderno,Turin

The representation of the body that Carol Rama would construct by the end of the 30’s is comparable in poetic intensity and acuity only to what Antonin Artaud would also be working on throughout the same period. In another one of the watercolours, the body, now with its arms and legs amputated, appears naked and fallen on a vertical plane with wheels. Here, as with the floating bed structure, the space-time of the wheels suffers a distortion as if it were observed from a multiplicity of viewpoints. However this multiplicity of perspectives doesn’t necessarily produce a sense of movement (as would have been the case with Muybridge or Boccioni), but, on the contrary, it forces the body to incorporate the inorganic: the wheels and footrests become prosthetic limbs. In the centre of the image the chromatic vivacity of the head-garden, the erect tongue and the vulva represented as an external organ and not as a orifice stands out against the subdued colour of the body. This body should be dead, but its not, it’s alive.

How did Carol Rama make these watercolors at only 18 years old? All the biographical summaries about Carol Rama mention the same event that is presented as foundational: her father, an industrial manufacturer of bicycles, went bankrupt and committed suicide when Carol was 22. Speaking with her friends, gallerists and collectors, however, there emerges a different story. Her father was homosexual and lived a double life. The dishonour brought about by being homosexual in the Turinian bourgeoisie in the 40’s was much worse than financial ruin. After the suicide, the mother ended up in a psychiatric hospital. But this story can’t answer these questions: Who is this amputated body? Who is looking at it? Where does this sexual desire come from?

In her apartment, after visiting her studio we approach her bedroom. The skin of Carol Rama is almost transparent and her white hands are the only soure of light in the otherwise opaque room. I get closer to her. Teresa is a little more discreet, waiting just by the door. I’m like an insect seeking out answers to my questions. But there won’t be any. Since 2005 Carol Rama has begun a terminal process of loosing consciousness.
It seems inconceivable to be curating the first big retrospective of the work of an artist who has been nearly entirely forgotten by the history of art, who herself is in the process of loosing her memory. The history of art is the history of our own amnesia, the forgetting of all that we don’t want to look at, of that which resists being absorbed by our hegemonic frames of representation.

I ask myself if this exhibition could be a form of reconstructing or inventing her memory or, alternatively, if our attempt will simply form part of the general amnesiac process that Walter Benjamin called progress. I ask myself if our act will be tautological or oppositional. If we are just another stage of this collective Alzheimers or if we could open a line of flight, undo forgetting, invent another archive.

L’article Carol Rama For Ever (2/2) est apparu en premier sur Peau de Rat.

Carol Rama, Appassionata, 1939. Courtesy of Galleria Franco Masoero, Turin

At the same time as I try to write a political history of the organs (not as quickly as I would like incidentally) I have also been trying to curate an exhibition of Carol Rama’s work, commissioned by the director of Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona (MACBA), Bartomeu Marí, which will open in 2014. Although I’ve been working in the context of the museum for over ten years now, my relationship with the format of the exhibition has always been distant. The museum, more than the university, has been an apt place for rethinking the relationship between languages, the representations of sexuality, of gender, of the body and the politics of resistance to processes of normalisation.  As an experiment in public micro-spheres, the museum puts in dialogue artistic practices, the processing power of social movements and the critical innovations of the humanities. It’s a place in which counter-fictions are invented; a place where techniques of dissident subjectivities can be tested.  At MACBA or the Reina Sofia, I have always privileged the invention of dispositifs of production of discourse and critical visibility over the exhibition format as they seem to allow for a large amount of experimentation and direct action. The Postporn Marathon, which I organised in 2003 at MACBA under the direction of Manolo Borja and with the support of Jorge Ribalta, could have been an exhibition but what I felt was necessary was to transform it into an investigatory meeting, a place for debate, live experimentation and performative production. The important thing was to create networks of collaboration, invent other languages and alternative practices.

When your work concerns political minorities (feminisms, dissident sexual and gender movements, anti-colonial movements…) there is a danger with the model of the exhibition (the list of examples from the last couple of years would be long and embarrassing). Especially in these contexts the danger is double: epistemological and political.

From an epistemological viewpoint, the ‘minority’ exhibitions run the risk of emerging as a mere footnote at the bottom of the page of the great narratives of the dominant historiographies. They seem to say “it’s true that modern art was mainly made for and by white central European men, but lets not forget about Sonia Terk, Liubov Popova, Claude Cahun, Dorothea Tanning… see how every now and again, although in the shadows, they make lovely little masterpieces!?” Many exhibitions respond to a paradigm that could better be described with a phrase uttered by an editor of Playboy: “There weren’t any women or black people in art, just as there weren’t any bikinis in the North Pole”.

From a political point of view, exhibitions concerned with the minorities can be roughly classified into two groups, depending on the criteria through which the selection of works is made. Many are “universalist” while others operate the logic of “the politics of identity”. With the universalist approach (the dominant trend in French institutions) the important thing isn’t that the works were made by “women”, “homosexuals”, the “mentally ill” or “non-white” people but that the experience represented allows access to a universal —or rather, it can be absorbed by the hegemonic narrative. On the other hand, when the “politics of identity” is at stake, other dangers spring up: how is it decided that artists are women, mentally ill or homosexuals? Do we use anatomical criteria, clinical archives, chromosomic evidence, speech acts, confessions found in personal diaries? In all of these example the risk is the same: in the place of demonstrating the techniques of normalisation of gender and sexuality, the majority of exhibitions by “women”, the “crazy”, “homosexuals”, “blacks” or “indigenous peoples” contribute to the re-naturalisation of these categories, integrating these ‘differences’ into the grand narrative as anecdotes (a sort of memorial of victims that is useful for celebrating women’s day or the day of the abolition of slavery). Far from dismantling the hegemonic narratives, they end up being reaffirmed.

I suppose it is for some of these reasons that until now I have been hesitant to face up the exhibition.  But this time, the subject is Carol Rama.

Carol Rama’s work produced between 1936 and 2006, is monumental and yet nearly entirely unknown. An exhibition of her work could function as a counter-archive of the art of the twentieth century and allows for a critical re-reading of the dominant historiography and a questioning of its foundations. Carol Rama’s work is as masterly as it is subversive, as marginal as it is irrefutable.  I would even dare to say that Carol Rama will be one day as indispensable and significant as Frida Khalo and Louise Bourgeois are now.

L’article Carol Rama for ever (1/2) est apparu en premier sur Peau de Rat.