Visual Art and Feminist Critique: A Proposition
When a female signature is assigned to authorship, autobiography, within
the literary histories in the West, has been named paradoxically both as
a mainstream writing genre and positioned as marginal practice. Traditional
opinions on autobiography usually have been grounded within the idea of
the "I" of self-identity as reflective self-presence
and discussed within the terms set by the Cartesian subject: a universal,
singular self - linked with the thinking, rational subject of eternal human
nature. Historically this has been codified as male. For women, autobiographical
spaces have been profoundly fraught with tension, since the struggles to
be the subject both of and in our own writing and speaking discourse incur
problematic gendered readings. By challenging the universality of self-identity,
women have culturally been identified as "Other" :
exotic, unruly, irrational, uncivilised, and different to the male norm.
These classifications established a hierarchy of naming as well as binary
oppositions ; this has had the effect of both legitimising the potential
of a female speaking subject as "other" to the
limits of cultural practice and at the same time, has fixed a conception
of autobiography as the feminine, natural self-portrait par excellence (1).
In another register, the coalescence between women and textiles has produced
a fixity of identity in the West, which has named but not always has expanded
or moved beyond a single definition of both terms (2).
This essay is concerned with this double paradox and ways in which I could
begin to situate the self, subjectivity, and the plurality of contemporary
textile practice as mobile entities that transgress the old borders and
boundaries of certitude and knowledge.
What is the cultural significance of the embodiment of this double dislocation
and fixity : woman / autobiography and woman / textiles? Could Rosemarie
Trockel's 1988 machine knitted abstract of Descartes' Cogito, ergo
sum (I think, therefore I am) be considered as a signpost out
of this double-bind and claustrophobic restriction? Does it not parody
the Cartesian subject referred to earlier? I speculate that the mimicking
of the "pure" canvas of Kandinsky is played off in two ways.
First, it is mimicked by knitting and second, by reinscribing the shaky
signature of the hand stitched, handwritten feminine "I" which
transgresses its smooth surface of production. This idea of transgression
which ruptures both the formal properties of a discipline and the "proper" place
of a gendered subject is profoundly disturbing and unsettling to the body
politic. Do Mike Kelly's failed power fantasies of dirty, messy, soft toys
trash and transgress traditional forms of heroic media that include ideas
of appropriate masculinity and false notions of domesticity? For me, each
of these works speak through an "autographies" of hybridity,
encompassing both the textual configurations of subjectivity in language
and the potential performative role of practices which deploy textile processes
and 'stuff' in disturbing and unstable forms.
As Jeanne Perreault has remarked, one way in which autographies differs
from autobiography is that it is not necessarily concerned with the process
or unfolding of life events as reflective self-presence. Rather, autographies
make the writing itself an aspect of selfhood through which the writer
experiences and brings into being the possibility of playful, even wicked,
self-invention (3). Fictional manifestations may go beyond
representation of the self, just as contemporary cultural practices may
transgress the very naming of their gendered categorisation to produce
an infinite undecidable set of contestations. These manifestations of 'throwing-out-of-joint' disrupt
any notion of stable and definable subject or genre and lurk at the very
margins of mobile, fluid identities and subjectivities. Perhaps l/you/we in
the West can speak with some confidence about women's achievements in general
both in autobiographical writing and textiles. I would argue, however,
that each category remains provisional as a tentative grammar of transformations
and differences. I believe that these are the new possibilities of both
disciplines - of writing and textiles in an ongoing relationship which
provides an eclectically errant and culturally disruptive range of practices
within an expanded field of cultural terms and definitions.
In earlier decades, the linking of the metaphors of pen and needle are
retold and recalled in a fragment of Elaine Showalter's own autobiographical
anecdote which denotes, for me, a hidden meaning behind the text and textile
which forms the very intertextuality of its pages. A women s language is
evoked as a social document of female experience. Piecing and writing are
analogous to the process of quilt making which "...corresponds to
the writing process, on the level of the word, the sentence, the structure
of the story or novel and these images, motifs or symbols that unify a
fictional story"(4). As Showalter reminds me in a
further essay, a number of women's 19th century texts discuss the problem
of reading a quilt, of deciphering the language of pieces like pages in
an album (5).
A century later, Lucy Lippard's oft-quoted observation that "the quilt
has become the prime visual metaphor for women's lives, women's culture" provided
a situated knowledge for a version of feminist art practice that now may
be seen as universalising female experience (6). Whereas
the "I" of the signature of Showalter is absent
inside "Piecing and Writing," it is always paradoxically present
in the writing as a controlling author of the text. Does Showalter not
insist on a common ground between women's lives, women's writing and the
reader/viewer who brings appropriate feminine sensibility to narratives
that any woman might know(my italics)? However,
this apparent coherence of the narrative and homogenisation of experience
is acknowledged and also mourned by Showalter as one who has "exaggerated
the importance of women's culture" in order to find "a literature
of our own."
To create a separate canon of women's writing through historical orientation
and the specific characteristics of language, genre and influence is comparable
to material counterparts in Lippard's search for a female aesthetic and
Judy Chicago's revival of feminine crafts in The Dinner Party.
Are we ruining our eyes, Showalter asks, in finishing a female heritage
that may have become a museum piece? Who is included in the "we" here?
Is this a nostalgic reminiscence for the past or a disturbance to the certainty
of knowledge in an early feminist's traditional faith of the liberating
effects of identity politics and women's rights?
Rereading these texts in the late 1990s provides another train of speculation
insofar as the decentered structure of a woman's text and textile fragment
is refigured in the processes of écriture féminine. In the "verbal
quilt" of (an) other feminist text, Rachel Blau DuPlessis argues that
there is an appeal to the voice of the female body which speaks of itself
as subject as: "non-hierarchic... breaking hierarchical structures,
making an even display of elements over the surface with no climatic movement,
having the materials organised into many centres(7).
As practiced by Hélène
Cixous,écriture
féminine becomes
impossible to theorise. Cixous describes this practice of "writing
from and of the body," as "feminine" in two senses.
First, that it is potentially available to both sexes; second, that the
new relations between the subject and "other" can be negotiated
once the "feminine" subject
position refuses fear and assimilation of the other's difference (8).
This way of writing does not claim unmediated access to the body since
the body is figured metaphorically and anti-naturalistically to create
fictions of the self. Although, for the French writer and theorist Luce
Irigaray, the conditions that moments of subjectivity signal the "irrational
feminine" as an enabling force within the symbolic order of language,
Julia Kristeva provides a reading of the "feminine" which
is not reducible to its verbal translation or biological naming (9).
A critical use of the self of the "feminine" and of
textile materials and processes act as metaphoric signs of autobiographical
patterns within cultural practice.
While I would not wish to remove women out of history, economics, class
or race, to "write" the body may allow for a construction
of the "feminine" against a fixing of identity within
categories that deny the complexities of subjectivity and creative, gendered
contradictions. As in the examples of work produced by Rosemarie Trockel
and Mike Kelley, gendered contradictions encoded critically in the hybridisation
of textiles are disturbing and troubling to viewers.
Reflections on self, on writing, on textiles are unsettling. When "I" reflects
on "I", what do I imagine it to be? Perhaps "I" will
only know myself when another is there? Is the "I" that
makes a piece of the work the same "I" that
will write its interpretation? How "I" move
will be in relation to others and to the other in myself, as a subject-in-process
tracking the psychoanalytic terrain of Jacques Lacan and Julia Kristeva.
The production of the subject, and the abandonment of the unitary subject
position required by the mastery of phallic language, permits us to adopt
a number of positions simultaneously. This also is primarily a question
of positionality in language which does not faithfully represent the already
extant life. For many contemporary practitioners like Trockel and Kelley,
who mobilise critical ideas in relation to their studio practices, this
positionality is indexed by placing subjectivity in process, where meanings
and readings are staged, played off and multiplied. Therefore, a will towards
the discursive and the reformulation of experience has consequences for
the subjectivities of both women and men.
A critical use of self, of the "feminine" and of textile materials
and processes, combine together as metaphoric signs of new autobiographical
or "autographic" patterns with cultural practice. Together they
operate as a lived tension between the "I" and
other, the life of the text and textile" and the terrain of the lived.
One of my favourite examples from writing is Carolyn Steedman's Landscape
of a Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives in which Steedman's story
of the "eye" and that of another "I",
the Usher of her mother's story, allows me, as a reader, to be involved
in the places where what has already happened is reworked to give events
meaning. Steedman tells of her mother wearing the "New Look" coat/dress
of gabardine which fell into pleats from the waist at her back. On one
level this is a literal image since throughout the narrative it figures
as a very real and constantly present thing. Yet, it also projects an image
of desire as the "New Look" of her dreams: a common
fantasy for white working-class women in postwar Britain. In Steedman's
story, the coat/dress has a dual function which not only refers to a specific
moment of postwar Britain but also acts as a personal structure of feeling.
This coat/dress is both an image and a product which represents several
fragments of an autobiography written as "bits and pieces from which
the psychological selfhood is made" (10).
Autobiographical references abound in the textile installation, We
Knitted Braids for Her, and explode in the many different voices
and guises of identity that are played with by the Austrian twins, Christine
and Irene Hohenbuchler, with their sister Heidemarie. In their first UK
exhibition held at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London in 1995,
language, texts and textiles are interwoven to probe the conditions of
subjectivity and autobiography in complex webs or chains of knitting, dream
diaries and woven bundles of cloth (11).
Here, the position of textiles as a language is enmeshed, in my view, with
the processes of écriture féminine. Textiles, as material processes and
stuff, are literally abundant both in the installation and figured as a
metaphor in a narrative flow of writing and speaking inseparable from the "feminine'
as it meanders between "I" and "other."
In May 1996, Tracey Emin opened "The Tracey Emin Museum" for
a month-long living autobiography to encourage people to tell their own
life stories that normally they would not disclose. In Hotel International from
the MinkyMankyshow in London in 1993 and in Tracey Emin Everyone
I Ever slept With, 1963-1995 (Tent, mixed media, 1996), reassembled
in her living museum, a tent is covered with patterned fabrics made out
of all her old clothes and old household fabrics. And yet, a comforting
environment is denied with a hundred names of past lovers and friends,
stories of abortion, suicide attempts and debt. While quilting and embroidery
techniques are employed, Emin's gigantic patchwork adorned tent refuses
the first wave of a woman's celebratory experience, cited earlier through
the example of Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party. Ideas
of home and household fabrics are frequently inscribed in those earlier
herstories that Elaine Showalter so meticulously recorded.
Picture-puzzle scraps of dislocated and fragmentary lives created a unified
pattern, as in the overall texture of the quilt. But below these surfaces,
as I know, the "monstrous feminine" resides: a place
of sexual energy which is both dangerous and pleasurable, angry and "chaotic
This is not the "feminine" designated subject-position of patience
and prudence, nurture and nature. As Tracey Emin explains in an interview
with Anita Chaudhuri, "It's boring to say that confronting these experiences
and making beautiful things out them is something of a therapy for me...
it's something much darker than that" (12).
I would argue that the repetition of unified patterns of experience pieced
and patched into a coherent, overall whole are broken by a new wave of "bad" girl
(and boy) scenarios of Tracey Emin and the Hohenbuchler sisters (13).
In my view, their work ruptures the verbal and visual narratives of stereotyped
femininity and autobiography to produce an autographies of hybridity. Stereotyped
patterns of masculinity continue to be transgressed. For example, Neil
Macinnis relates his experiences in a recent interview with Margo Mensing
: "Both the domain of textiles and sexuality are informed by the conditions
of habituated practice. Cultural artefacts and social interaction facilitate
a meaningful history of use through sensory experience located first in
the body rather than the mind''(14). If Macinnis' use
of Rococo French silks correlates with an immersion into gay culture and
queer theory, then the "Home Boys" described in James Levine's
essay of the same title critique ideas of any essential femininity or masculinity (15).
Frequently, staging the home is reworked through Freudian and Kleinian
theories of childhood. I enter through a restaged "home" of cots,
beds, mattresses, drapes, curtains, stuffed toys and chairs, mats, and
rugs which exceed their enigmatic forms, signifying future dysfunctional
autobiographical patterns.
The domestic, hybridised objects of the "English" artists, Christopher
Lee and Darren Caird, Permindar Kaur and Nina Saunders, continue to disrupt
familiar territories of place as rhetorical investigations of escape and
fixed identity (16). The questions as to who we are in
terms of autobiography can be replaced by what "we" are as the
self is understood as a moving line or thread that takes us toward becoming
other than that which we may think "we" know we arrive. As these
hybridised objects recede into a different sense of place, so the subject
is destabilised : both the maker and viewer risk their status as knowing
complete subjects with calculable, gendered subjectivities neatly intact.
In conclusion, the unpacking of certitude, manifested in the works referenced
throughout this essay, become further metaphors for transience, transgression
and the received models of selfhood in which possibilities of "autography" are
yet to be fully rehearsed. This would include my own tentative excursions
into invented identities as played in exhibitions like Pretext:
Heteronynms (17).
Janis Jefferies would like to thank the University of Wollongong in
Australia and Dr. Diana Wood Conroy for their support in the writing of this
text.
Notes
1. Janis Jefferies. " Autobiographies, Subjectivities, Selves," Act
1 : Writing Art, ed. Juliet Steyn, Pluto Press, 1995. Additionally, Autobiography:
Essays, Theoretical and Critical (ed.) James Olney (Princeton University
Press,1980), and Sidonie Smith Subjectivity. Identity and The Body:
Women's Autobiographical Practices in the Twentieth Century (Indiana
University Press, 1993) provide useful, gendered accounts of this areas
2. Janis Jefferies,'Text and Textiles: Weaving Across the Borderlines'
in New Feminist Art Criticism, ed. Katy Deepwell, (Manchester
University Press, 1995) pp. 164-173.
3. Jeanne Perreault, Writing Selves: Contemporary Feminist Autography (University
of Minnesota Press.1995). In her critique of autobiography Jeanne proposes
that "autographics" is a kind of writing which evokes and suggests
the flexible process of both autos and graphia. She proposes
that although an unwieldy generic term, "autographics" can just
about encompass the complexities of contemporary texts which index the
conventions of autobiography but resist the monadic by bringing into being
a "self" which the writer names as "I".
4. Elaine Showalter, 'Piecing and Writing' in Nancy K Miller, The Poetics
of Gender, (Columbia University Press, 1986), pp. 222-247.
5.Elaine Showalter, "Common Threads" in Sister's Choice:
Tradition and Change in American Women's Writing (Oxford University
Press Paperback, 1994) pp.145-175.
6. Lucy Lippard, "Up, Down and Across: A New Frame for New Quilts" in
ed. Charlotte Robinson, The Artist and the Quilt (New York, Knopf
Press 1983) p.18.
7. Rachel Blau DuPlessis, The Pink Guitar: Writing as Feminist Practice (New
York: Routledge, 1990).
8. Helene Cixous, The Newly Born Woman, trans. Betsy Wing (Minnesota
University Press, Minneapolis, 1986) and Susan Sellars, Helene Cixous
Authorship, Autobiography and Love (London Polity Press, 1996).
9. For example, Luce Irigaray, Sexes and Genealogies (New York,
Columbia University Press, 1993) and Julia Kristeva Desire in Language.
A Semiotic approach to literature (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980).
10. Carolyn Steedman, Landscape of a Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives (London:
Virago, 1986, p. 21
11. Janis Jefferies, "Text, Textile, Sex and Sexuality" in Women
's Art Magazine no. 68 (USA) pp.5-10.
12. Tracey Emin, interview with Anita Chaudhuri in The Guardian newspaper
(London: Wednesday 24th January 1996).
13. Bad Girls derives from the title of an exhibition held at
the Institute of Contemporany Arts, London, UK in 1993 and included the
work of among other English, Irish and American women artists, the late
Helen Chadwick. This exhibition was a smaller version of a larger one held
in New York in 1992 which also included the work of men. It was an exhibition
that proposed gender transgression in terms of traditional definitions
of masculinity and femininity. While Tracey Emin was not represented in
either show, her work nonetheless refers to an activity of practice which
consciously deals with transgressing the boundaries of the proper name
to produce a more, raw, improvisational approach to making. Process rather
than end result and deliberately low-tech methods are employed. See also
Neville Wakefield 's catalogue essay, Brilliant: New Art from London! for
Walker Art Gallery, Minneapolis, USA 22nd October-7 January 1 1995/96.
14. Margo Mensing, "EIectronic Textiles: New Possibilities" in Fiberarts Summer
1996, p.45. See also Neil Maclnnis' contributing essays to the preconference
publication (October 1995, Montreal, Textiles Sismographes and
the postconference publication, A Textile ldentity (Le Conseil
des Arts : Textiles do Quebec, Canada), March/April 1995 and January 1996
respectively.
15. James Levine "Home Boys" Artforum(October 1991),
pp.101-105
16. Christopher Lee graduated from Goldsmiths College, University of London,
UK with an MA in Textiles (studio practice and critical theory) in 1994:
Darren Caird graduated from Goldsmiths College, University of London with
a BA in Textiles in 1996; Permindar Kaur's exhibition.Cold Comfort,
was held at the Ikon Gallery. Birmingham and Mead Gallery, Coventry, UK
in May/June 1996; and Nina Saunders exhibition Familiar Territories, was
held at the Ferens Art Gallery, Hull, from November 1994- January 1996.
For an interesting discussion around illusions of home against which a
range of hybrid and illusory objects subvert the familiar and gendered
categorization, see Nancy Spector "Homeward-Bound" (Zurich :
Parkett, 1991), pp. 80-89.
17. Pretext: Heteronyms was the title of an exhibition which took place
in Clink Street studios, London, UK during November/December 1995. I participated
under a different identity and practice from which "I" would
normally be known. A catalogue, with an introduction by Juliet Steyn is
available through Rear Window publications.