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A Letter
from Faith Wilding & Her May 5, 2001 Dear Faith, Thank you for sending the interview
and giving me permission to put it on the Cyberfeminist House site. I
hope to do this today before the "open-house" tonight. Your discussion of collaboration,
collective, activism--what these concepts mean and how that are enacted
and impact participants' livelihoods--is relevant to sorting out what
balance works in a group of varying individual practical and emotional
realities and the group's ideological positions. Best, |
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12/5/01 Hi.. . .Below,
I have pasted in an (uncorrected and slightly incomplete) version of an
interview for the on-line journal Switch (http://switch.sjsu.edu) that
I did with an on-line journal (Switch) about collaboration and collectivity.
It mentions Womanhouse and discusses the ways in which I Switch Interview
with Brett Stalbaum <Brett.Stalbaum@sjeccd.cc.ca.us> (1)FW: You are right to point out that the "Artworld" is composed of many intersecting smaller worlds which together create quite a broad cultural economy. Oppositional or "alternative"cultural workers often imagine a monumental bunkered Artworld with an impenetrable hierarchy of museums, galleries, international shows, important curators, collectors, magazines, etc. which they will never crack. And of course this system does exist and is more powerful than ever before in some ways. Monumentality is the business of capitalist culture. But it lives and feeds off a much more fragmented cultural economy where varying and shifting power relations operate. Oppositional and resistant cultural producers must be careful not to romanticize and essentialize "outsider" positions because these are easy to categorize, co-opt and render ineffectual. In fact, I don~t think radical and resistant artists need to worry a whole lot about co-optation. The strategy should be to pirate anything we can from the top-feeders and use it to nourish the bottom feeders. More than ever, inventive tactical thinking and action are necessary. I have been around long enough to know first hand that the Art System works in cycles. In my own case I experienced it something like this: Feminist art (and the Feminist Art Program which produced Womanhouse) was cutting-edge and hot in the 70s; condemned and silenced as essentialist and non-theoretical in the 80s; rediscovered, imitated, and historicized in the 90s; and food for dissertations, publications, exhibitions, and new formations~especially cyberfeminist formations in the 21st Century. I don't feel connected to (or very interested in) the Artworld at the moment except insofar as it is always interesting to see how its trends show the surfacing of what has been brewing in minoritarian cultures for a while. A good example is how museums like the Whitney (BitStreams) or San Francisco MOCA are now jumping on the electronic and net art bandwagon. Of course, it is their job as museums to do so as this is a significant new wave in art-making. On the other hand they as usual are museumizing this work and showing work that is for the most part easy, pleasurable, and entertaining. And of course it is still on the model of the art star or lone genuis, the signatory, owned, and copyrighted work. That~s to be expected. Museums can't afford to become part of the gift economy which operates among the best of the critical artists and activists in electronic culture. In my current collective practice
with subRosa I do benefit from my connections to diverse aspects of the
art world. Writing, lecturing, teaching pay our production bills. So there~s
always the round of university lecture trips, artist residencies, teaching
jobs, and publications (which in Europe and Canada actually pay real money).
I've also connected to the electronic culture circuit especially in Europe,
and subRosa is beginning to be invited to perform at festivals and colloquia
there. Currently, I have submerged my individual career with that of the
subRosa collective. Such an act can be sure death in the Art world~although
with prominent exceptions such as Group Material, for example. It is actually
an interesting experience to try to re-educate people and legitimating
institutions~such as granting institutions, universities, museums, etc.~about
how to deal with a collective rather than with already certified quantity
of a prominent artist or personality (which to my surprise I seem to be
in some of those little art world circles we~ve talked about). It makes
for a sometimes difficult but enormously educative dynamic within the
collective also, by the way. I see the Artworld as a limited and specialized
platform. And it is the platform which I think I have the least credibility
in. My interest is in continuing to build across platforms and to sully
the waters of what an art "career" might be. 2. I'll try to talk a bit about my experience with aspects of collectivity~which I don~t think is the same thing as collaboration. Collaborations usually have a more informal, or less ideological basis than collectives; they are usually entered into on the basis of pooling expertise and for the purpose of getting a specific project done. There are many examples of collaborations in the Artworld, for example, painters collaborating with dancers; video artists with performance artists, and the like Usually each collaborator is credited by name. Ownership of the work redounds to each artist separately. Collectives on the other hand are usually formed for political or ideological purposes. Collective members usually share similar political goals and desires--though they may have different degrees of political radicality. Collective members also share the desire to work together and to count this process as part of their "work." Many collectives use only the group name for identification and don~t label individual parts of works produced with the name of the member who was responsible for making it. This is often a problematic negotiation when it comes to trying to enter the Artworld system. More about that below. Using the above criteria Womanhouse was a collaboration. It was done by a class of students, under the leadership of two teachers, in the first academic year of the Feminist Art Program at California Institute of the Arts (1971-72.) Some women artists from the community were brought in to collaborate with us and were separately credited. Each room within Womanhouse, and each performance, was credited with the name of the woman who made it. The content and form of Womanhouse was evolved through consciousness-raising sessions. Since we were always working together, there was constant feed-back and response for the work and lots of informal kibitzing about processes and aesthetics. Each room strongly carried the stamp of the artist who made it, and in a way owned it. At the end of Womanhouse we auctioned off as many of the artifacts as possible in order to make money for the Feminist Art Program. After Womanhouse we never made another project that involved all the members of the same group. It is interesting to track the way that Womanhouse has been credited in the process of historicizing the Feminist Art Program. For example, you used the phrase "Judy Chicago~s Womanhouse" in your first question. And indeed Womanhouse was usually credited to "Judy Chicago, Miriam Schapiro, and their students" in any write up about it at the time, and it has largely remained this way until recently. For example, in the 1995 exhibition "Division of Labor: Women~s Work in Contemporary Art" ( curated by Lydia Yee at the Bronx Museum of Art and traveled to MOCA, Los Angeles in the same year) several of the original Womanhouse rooms were recreated, and artefacts represented, including Beth Bachenheimer's Shoe Closet, Judy Chicago's Menstruation Bathroom, Sherry Brody's Lingerie Pillows, Brody and Miriam Schapiro~s Doll House, and Faith Wilding's Womb Room. Also exhibited was the Womanhouse film by Johanna Demetrakas that features many of the performances from Womanhouse including my performance "Waiting." The catalog for the exhibition lists the individual names of the artists and the titles of their works. Since the original of my Womb Room had been stolen from Womanhouse in Los Angeles, I created an entirely new crocheted room in the Museum. (Footnote: I have written about
my ambivalence in remaking this piece in "Monstrous Domesticity",
published in MEANING, Ed. Mira Schor and Susan Bee.) Since this exhibition, I've noticed that several of the (student) participants in Womanhouse and the FAP have been invited to participate in exhibitions, colloquia, and publications as individual artists separately from Chicago and Schapiro, on the strength of their current status as artists and their feminist art history. This is especially true of Mira Schor and Faith Wilding. "Waiting" also has rather an astonishing history of publication and exhibition. To my surprise it has become a signature piece of feminist art in general, and a large part of my "claim to fame" in particular. I am baffled by the paradoxes this poses for me ideologically. On the one hand, Waiting came out of a feminist process and context of collaboration, and a feminist art politics which was trying to break down all manner of art world hierarchies and the notion of individual genius. On the other, I find myself being sought out as the creator and performer of "Waiting." Long ago I hit on the tactic of permitting Waiting to be performed by anyone who wants to perform it. Now I permit people to use it in publications if they run a text credit which contextualizes the performance within feminist art practice and the Womanhouse collaboration. Jump cut to my current work with the subRosa collective, which began when I became a Fellow at the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon University in Fall 1998. The STUDIO was founded to encourage and facilitate art, science, and technology collaborations mainly between people on the CMU campus. Previous to coming to CMU (as a visiting professor in 1995) I had spent about ten years in New York, working and exhibiting in various guises as individual artist, a member of the Heresies mother collective, a founding member of WAC (Women~s Action Coalition), a member of Old Boys Network (a cyberfeminist group based mostly in Germany), and in association with Critical Art Ensemble. My intention as a STUDIO Fellow was to form a cyberfeminist collective and to initiate a multi-part project called ~Sex and Gender in the Biotech Century. Consequently a group of between
15-20 women graduate students, faculty, and non-university affiliated
women began meeting regularly mostly at my house for a reading, discussion
(and eating) group. We focused on biotechnology, new reproductive technologies,
feminist health Only one or two of the women
in the loose group had ever been part of a collective or collaborative
group before; nor had many of them been in a women-only group. We debated
a great deal about how~and whether ~ to form a closed group and if so
on what basis since there were so many differences between us. In a way
the current subRosa cell of about 6-8 core members is still forming and
coalescing. It is as much through embodying our differences and our conflicts
as through conviviality and working together that we are evolving the
forms of our collectivity. In the past year we have done three different
performances/exhibitions (Knowing Bodies, Miller Gallery, CMU; Sex and
Gender Ed in the Biotech Century, ISA Digital Secrets think tank, Arizona
State University; ExpoEmmaGenics, Intermediale Festival, in conjunction
with the 7th Annual Performance Studies International conference in Mainz,
Germany) which have centered on the market forces and eugenic thinking
that drive the Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ART). Currently we
are also working on a text/image piece for nparadoxa; an article for a
book to be published by Kunst Forum in Germany, and a subRosa book. In
other words, we have been intensely active for a new fledged collective
all of whose members have full-time day jobs. SubRosa works with new media
and digital technologies in tactical ways. Currently we are quite self-contained
technologically within the collective whose members between them have
skills and experience in video, digital imaging and animation, photography,
WEB pages, graphic design, desk-top publishing, writing, plus the usual
traditional art skills of sculpture, painting, drawing, fiber arts, print-making,
sound, and installation work. At the moment we have no members who can
do advanced programming, 3-D animation, robotics, or machining. We are
interested in combinations of high and low tech, and in detourning consumer
electronics. Currently, half of our members do not live in the same city
so we do a lot of work and communication on-line and virtually. We are
committed to embodiment and conviviality as an important part of our practice
of trying to live our differences. Thus we spend time and money to have
flesh meetings, embodiment (spa) days, and retreats. Nevertheless all
of us feel the alienation of physical distance acutely. And it has made
our work together more slow and more difficult. Another factor which is having
a strong impact on the collective is the increased competition and professionalizing
of art careers within graduate schools and universities which a tight
job-market and over-production of MFAs have contributed to. Almost all
subRosa members are now MFA grads and are either in their first jobs as
professors or as graphic or WEB designers. In all these professional positions
there is pressure to produce and show one~s "own" work. No matter
how successful a collective may be, it is hard to use collective work
in personal application, promotion or professional experience packages.
Never mind that many artists are now practicing collectively or collaboratively;
never mind that the process of working with electronic media and digital
technologies often requires interdisciplinary collaboration and knowledge~the
professional (art) world still wants its geniuses and its signature artists.
It still wants to know (on grant applications and in hiring and promotion
interviews) "What part of this work did you do?" These hard
realities begin to create problems when it comes to documenting and crediting
collective work. For example, if the best way of documenting a performance
is to make a short video piece about it, should the emphasis be on making
the best possible documentation of the piece, or making sure that everyone~s
contribution gets pictured (represented) in the video? What of the person(s)
who did not perform/make something that is visible in the video such as
designing the WEB page or writing the script or doing the documentation
during the performance? What of the member who could not travel to a particular
performance and thus is not documented? My personal principle is that
the work should be shown to its best and clearest advantage no matter
who is personally pictured or not pictured, because a strong representation
of the collective helps everyone in it. But then I am in a very different
place professionally than all the other members who are younger than I
am and for the most part are just starting out professionally. So we try
various tactics of satisfying both the need of making the collective look
good and the need to make each individual look good. It is at these moments
that the real differences between collectivity and collaboration become
quite evident. One tactic to help that we use is to credit a project with
our collective name, and then we usually append a list of the names of
collective members and associates. Each member is also free to
make separate documentation which highlights her particular contribution
for her own vita. This brings up another difference between collectivity
and collaboration. Collective work is often not separable into
individual contributions especially in the conceptual phase. While we
each have distinct skills and expertise, we evolve concepts together and
several members often work together on various component of the performance/installation.
Ownership is a topic that arises in several connections. Who owns
the collective work, especially if the collective membership changes or
the collective dissolves? It seems self evident to say that it is owned
by those members of the collective who made the work together. But things
are never that simple. For example, with Womanhouse, the question has
come up many times about who owns the rights to reprint documentation
of Womanhouse. The concept of gift economy and joint ownership is a difficult
one for the capitalist economy of the Artworld to understand. It has been
pointed out that women are often more reluctant to participate in the
gift economy because they have less capital (in every sense) to give away.
Again, my personal practice is gift economy and anti-copyright and free
circulation and use of ideas and images. But this raises many tricky questions
when one is dealing with the work of people who are not being paid, or
are being underpaid and who are working full-time at a job in order to
support themselves and their art practices. There's also the problem of
commissions and/or support from institutions or grants that want to have
some ownership or credit
3. FW: Well, I think I've already
mentioned many of them: gift economy; anti-copyright; interdisciplinarity;
allowing others to perform your work for free with no strictures on how
they do it; working collectively, anonymously. Not confining oneself to
performing or showing in art spaces or recognized museums, but seeking
audiences everywhere and anywhere; refusing signature styles or purity
of method, media, or materials (Feyerabend's Against Method is always
a good kick in the pants). Working with consumer media and electronics
that don't have the patina of "art media" on them. Experimenting
with audience participation which cannot be controlled or pre-determined~this
is different that most so-called interactive art where viewer interactions
are essentially pre-programmed and limited to a set of responses. In the
kind of information theatre subRosa is interested in we hope to set up
a situation in which the exclusivity of expertise and specialization is
debunked, and viewers are given contextualized information that they can
choose to respond to in many ways. In our performances we try to deflect
questions as to what we think towards what the participant thinks, to
encourage more autonomous thinking and action on the viewer's part. I
further sully my art career by writing, lecturing, teaching, and including
all those things as part of my self-definition of being an artist. 4.a) BS What are your observations
about the models that run behind the activist 4. a) FW. I think you are right
that people tend to associate "activist" with a certain
kind of historical practice. I remember that at the Last 5 Minutes Tactical
Media Festival (1999) in Amsterdam I got rather sick of the word "activist"
because it was being applied so loosely to every kind of project that
had a hint of political content. I think there can be political art without
it being activist (all art is political in the sense that all art operates
in a social/political context.) But "activist" is perhaps not
really a useful term anymore since it connotes so many different things
to people. Same problem with"artist." Same problem with "cultural
worker" or "cultural producer." Same problem with "feminist"
or "cyberfeminist" for that matter. I like the terms "resistant"
and "interventionist" and even "pedagogical" more
because they are more specific to the goals or aims of this kind of work.
Most so-called "activist" practice these days seems to follow
two main models 1. Direct actions against specific
targets such as companies, government authorities; or specific campaigns
to influence legislation or public opinion and policy. Examples might
be the Clean Clothes campaign, No more Prisons, Boycott Monsanto, WTO
sit-ins and demos, and the like. This model uses activist political tactics
against authority like strikes, boycotts, sit-ins, occupations, net-terrorism,
hacking, etc. This model is usually more is more territorially specific.
2. More discursive, exploratory
projects whose goal is to create interventions into and
disturbances of the public spectacle and representations of complex contemporary
issues~such as biotech and bioinformatics, the Human Genome Project, globalization,
restructuring of work, eco and environmental policies, and the like. This
model uses performative, participatory, and/or pedagogical tactical media,
often creating a kind of information theatre in which participants manipulate
objects, perform experiments, or actions which give them understanding
and tools to make more informed decisions about the issues. This model
adapts itself situationally to various venues and audiences. b)BS What level of understanding
does a group need in order to successfully mediate, (or perhaps debunk
authority), in fields other than art? b) FW. That is an interesting
question which can often be answered only in the doing. The kind of projects
we~re talking about here take a certain amount of theoretical research
and reading, and learning some basic hands-on processes. This is really
no different than learning coding, or photo shop, or machining. Collectives
such as Critical Art Ensemble have worked with scientists on specific
parts of projects such as obtaining recombinant yeast with human DNA in
it for the Cult of the New Eve project (about the Human Genome Project);
and creating transgenic bacteria. It is relatively easy to learn enough
science to demonstrate or teach people to perform certain experiments
or processes that will help them understand basic scientific procedures
(thus debunking much of the authority of science. As my doctor used to
say "A monkey could learn to do a Pap smear"). subRosa has consulted
and worked with doctors, biologists and fertility experts, as well as
business entrepreneurs, to produce some of our projects like Vulva de/ReConstructa;
Sex and Gender Ed in the Biotech Century; and Expo EmmaGenics [www.cmu.edu/emmag].
We are always trying to combine real information and experience of the
subject matter or system, while providing critical ways of exposing the
ideologies which drive these discourses. So there is an interesting combination
of the Real, the metaphorical, and the critical--which is where the art
of it comes in, I guess. Irony, mimicry, appropriation, detournement,
mingle with the Real in complex and not always transparent ways. Our disclaimer
is that we are not scientists, but that we are informed artist amateurs
creating a platform for public debate and critique of authoritarian structures
or systems of knowledge. c) BS What future opportunities
do you see for effectively intervening in systems? c) FW: I think there will always be ways of intervening. No system or structure is impregnable or monumental. It will become harder and harder but people will become more and more ingenious. Finding ways of teaming up with people who work in these systems is a good tactic because there are dissidents and disgruntled or critical workers everywhere. It should be possible to find models of intervention that do not make individuals too vulnerable to punishment. In my experience, it is pretty easy to tap into people~s desires for autonomy and their hatred of authority. That's the affirmative energy activist artists can try to free up for creative resistance. Currently, for example, subRosa is very interested in looking at the medical system with particular emphasis on women~s health and treatment. Now we know that practically everyone has a problem with this system and there~s tons of potential resistance right there waiting to be tapped. And there are precedents in the Feminist Women's Health movement of the 70s and in subsequent activist groups like ACT UP, WHAM, and WAC. As long as we stay flexible, situational, and think tactically, we should be able at least to create a substantial disturbance. 12/4/01 email from Faith Wilding The cyberfeminist house sounds cool. Just wanted to point out two things: First, it is incorrect to designate it as "Judy Chicago's Womanhouse". This was a totally collaborative project and the idea for doing a house was originated by Paula Harper and carried out by at least 23 women. It is really important to not perpetuate the lone genius star system in feminism. Second, there was a virtual Womenhouse done by a group of women architects and artists which was on the web for a long time. It originated in Los Angeles and one of it's participants was Dr. Amelia Jones from whom you could perhaps get more information. And then there was the house project done by MOCA LA with myself, Beth Bachenheimer, Ernesto Pujol, and teenage youth in conjunction with the exhibition Division of Labor, Women's Work in Contemporary Art, September 1996. All the best, faith wilding |