Book Publications
Frostig, K. and Halamka, K. Eds. (2009). Blaze: Discourse on Art, Women and Feminism, 2nd edition. Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. 415 pp. Paperback ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-0239-0
Reviews
Simpson, P. H. (2008). Blaze: Discourse on Art, Women and Feminism. Woman's Art Journal, 29(2), 53-54
Herzog, M. (2008). Feminism and Art: Sparking a Revolution. Feminist Collections: A Quarterly of Women's Studies Resources, 29(3-
4), 5-11.
Frostig, K. and Halamka, K. Eds. (2007). Blaze: Discourse on Art, Women and Feminism, Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. 415 pp. ISBN (13): 9781847183767 www.blazediscourse.com
Blaze: Introduction, 2006
How has feminism matured over the years? What are the pressing agendas for today’s feminists working in the arts? How do women make sense of an increasingly interconnected world, where local and national concerns interact with a new set of global realities?
Destabilization of systems and hybridization of ideas, both highlight this period as an unusually rich nexus of opportunity. Unorthodox processes abound, and risk has become a highly valued commodity. Blaze: Discourse on Art, Women, and Feminism, emerges as a navigational text, celebrating past victories while charting new directions for today’s second wave and third wave feminists.
In developing a feminist framework for Blaze, the editors asked writers to consider the different waves of feminism in relationship to their own evolving practice and scholarship, as artists, art historians, critics, curators, and arts administrators. We sought clarifying dialogue about the waves; however, it was important not to reinforce existing, nor to invent new, feminist stereotypes. The incendiary word, “blaze” connotes both hot and new, in addition to trail blazing. It signifies that the experiences of women and feminists were anything but static, tame, or marginal, while the term ”discourse” grounded the text in a degree of formal, critical analysis.
Right at the outset, we established a number of specific objectives for this book. It was imperative that the book should honor the historic, as well as palpably discern the current pulse of the feminist art movement. We hoped our writers would map the loci of anger, yearning, fear, comfort, doubt, and concern that women artists, historians, and critics activate in their work. We were also specifically interested in examining how women defined success and meaning at this juncture in history, as well as how they contemplated changing cultural attitudes about the body, power, authority, and vulnerability. We warmly welcomed narratives that disrupted conventional timelines, and consciously looked for multiple threads of narrative, rather than a single account of any one period. Finally, we particularly hoped the book would shed light on new models of criticism, new methods of integrating theory with practice, and new forms of conceptualization, both of the problems and the solutions.
We provided writers with this vision for the book, and then encouraged Blaze writers to vigorously pursue their personal concerns, social agendas, and political aspirations. It was important for the breadth of the essays to present a rich array of honest and thoughtful experiences.
Writers for Blaze come from all regions of the United States and represent seasoned, as well as emerging, voices. Blaze features celebrated authors, scholars and artists: former and current presidents of national arts organization, editors of leading professional art journals, founders and curators of new museums, galleries and artists’ slide registries, and former and current university department chairs and professors. The text also includes new voices from artists, activists, and academics as first-time authors. We felt committed to this combination, which we believe emulates the current mix of second-wave and third-wave feminist artists and scholars shaping contemporary feminist discourse in the arts. Many of these writers feel equally at home in cyberspace, and they regularly work on international projects and collaborations.
The book spotlights 14 detailed and well-documented feminist histories that narrate a number of pertinent strands of activism regarding feminist art, scholarship, organizational development and community initiatives. In developing new historical narratives, it behooves writers and readers alike to ask themselves: Whose history is it? Who is empowered to tell this history? Have there been any omissions? These questions, first asked by feminists in the 1970s, also enrich the readings of contemporary feminist histories, deepening the critical analysis of these histories. These core questions reoccur in Blaze with persistence and relevance.
The context of the Women’s Caucus for Art (WCA) conference, and this organization’s enormously influential history, is given prominent attention within this book. Eleanor Dickinson’s detailed report on the history of the WCA, Patricia Hills’s close look at the development of the WCA Boston chapter, and Susan King’s in-depth discussion of the unique WCA Honoree Lifetime Achievement Awards all provide readers with multiple viewpoints on a number of important historical moments within the life of this remarkable organization.
A number of new histories, freshly experienced, are also contained in Blaze. Jeanne Philipp creates an account of the history of new media and feminism. Joan Marter chronicles feminist art journalism over a 30-year period, noting the rise and fall of various important journals during that time, and some of which continues to thrive. Maria Elena Buszek and Dena Muller define and deliver charged portraits of second-wave and third-wave feminists. Patricia Rodriguez provides a critical review of institutionalized exclusions of Latina and Chicana feminist artists. She places the spotlight on surprising continuing exclusions. Cynthia Fowler highlights both the status of disappearing nude, and the meaning derived from its recent relevant return to prominence. Aviva Rahmani and Anna Shapiro produce examples of timely ecofeminist activisms, contextualized within the broader feminist movement. Harriet Senie imparts a sobering and fresh feminist reading of New York City’s public works memorials, and Christina Lanzl presents a partial history of Boston’s public works projects, examining the power of collaboration. Finally, Anna Wexler and Janet Gillespie provide the reader with a historically derived, cross- cultural analysis of feminist performance art.
Within this confluence of vibrant histories, particular themes begin to emerge around issues of representation. Teaching and exhibiting, in addition to the rise of new divisions and alliances between the waves, play a key role. Other essays address topics derived from the feminist histories. For example, what does the explosive number of public works projects, launched by feminist artists in recent years, indicate about feminist concerns and interests in the public domain? Ann Rosenthal and Ruth Wallen provide further examples of ecofeminist activism and leadership, which reflects the timely values of global interdependency. Pam Allara, Ellen Driscoll, and Mags Harries discuss public works project development with a particular concern for its relationship to the marketplace, the gallery system, and tenuous regard within higher education. Noreen Dean Dresser and Laurie Elizabeth Talbot Hall use different perspectives to analyze economic implications for art-based professionals, picking up on pertinent issues related to arts economies; and Ruth von Jahnke Waters shares with us her own insider’s story as the first feminist founder of a regional museum of art.
Another subject receiving due attention in these essays is the importance of innovative approaches to scholarship. Jennifer Hall and Ellen Ginsberg join to introduce new models of collaboration and interdisciplinary research, creating a vital dialogue between art and science. Jennifer Colby looks closely at art-based feminist scholarship, while Elinor Gadon addresses the clear need for new forms of mentoring relationships between women. Susan Siskin and Cher Krause Knight discuss new pedagogies, and interactions with students, and Joan Ryan examines the peculiar and persistent effects of popular culture on aesthetic development, questioning the role of kitsch in the feminist realm and general art perceptions.
The issue of “invisibility,” which has followed women persistently, comes home to roost in these essays from our third-wave feminists, Maria Elena Buszek and Dena Muller. They independently chose to open their essays with a short vignette: these vignettes ironically place both of the writers in an audience comprised largely of second-wave feminists, asking, “Where are the third-wave feminists?” Buszek retorts that they are right there “next to you,” while Muller notes that the third-wave has developed methods of circumventing the old paradigms.
Problematic issues of invisibility can also surface concerning employment opportunities, or lack thereof. This tension creates a new generational divide. With hundreds of new PhD and MFA graduates receiving degrees each year, there are growing numbers of third-wave feminists pounding the pavements, looking for academic and curatorial positions as well as exhibition opportunities. Despite increases in college student enrollments, new positions and new lines for studio arts and art history professorships have been agonizingly slow to materialize in U.S. universities and colleges. In addition, many second-wave feminist academics feel that they are just entering their prime, and that retirement is still years away. A new waiting game is being played out between the waves.
Concurrently, the opposite trend is unfolding within the art market. With the market’s emphasis on fresh ideas and youth culture, the power of accumulated experience and knowledge of institutional history have lost their power and relevance. The horizontal thrust of web-based communications, and the dismantling of hierarchy and privilege, further amplify this trend. Museums and commercial galleries tend to show the same circuit of second-wave artists over and over again, while relative “no-name” third-wave feminists and other women artists not identifying as feminists, are being ushered into exhibition halls and hot new alternative spaces in droves, under the trendy catch phrase, “emerging artists.” As Patricia Hills remarked at the 2006 WCA conference, many second-wave feminist artists have been “erased” from history.vii Are we entering a new paradigm of opportunity, whereby second-wave feminists hold the academic positions and third-wave feminists obtain exhibition preferences?
A heated twist on issues of invisibility can be found in Mira Schor’s essay about blogging, in Laurie Beth Clark’s essay about truth-telling and what one’s perception of truth might be, and also in THINK AGAIN’s collaborative project to examine links between the flow of international capital, minority women, and violence. It is timely to observe that by introducing blogging as a legitimate feminist practice, Mira Schor touches provocatively upon a host of related topics that trigger new divisions between women, sometimes correlated with age. These topics include different preferences for selecting communication formats, publication protocols, and patterns of organizational affiliations. In general, spunky third-wave feminists tend to “travel light” and are inclined to invent non-restrictive rules, rather than subscribe to legal codes that curtail movement and impede collaboration. Preferring e-mail to “snail mail” (instant versus time-based), creative commons licenses to copyrights (sharing versus ownership), and listservs to formal memberships in non-profits (platforms versus organizations), these feminists tend to select flexible systems of affiliation, virtual or otherwise. Tallied returns, regarding advantages for each group, are still coming in. Spontaneous, specific, short-term alliances, versus in-depth, face-to-face, ongoing memberships, seem to be a matter of preference, and one not clearly determined simply by chronological age.
On a different track, some of the writers here, including Thea Paneth, Simone Alter-Müri and Denise Malis, CoachTV and C.M. Judge, link a discussion of intimate relationships with new models of collaboration. These intimate relationships are often familial in form, but the definition of family continues to expand. Geography holds little to discourage collaboration in our connected, cross-cultural modern world. L’Merchie Frazier, Catherine McGregor, and Mari Novotny-Jones look at performance and ritual practices, also within a cross-cultural framework. The physical, spiritual, and metaphysical dimensions ripple through this group of essays. The emphasis here is on the inherent creative value of collaboration.
After reviewing the essays, the editors asked once again: “What characterizes this writing as feminist?” Previous historians have credited second-wave feminists of the 1960s and 1970s with establishing the feminist art movement. Inspired by the civil rights movement and the women’s liberation movement of the 1960s, women were incensed by gendered issues of power and privilege. The paramount focus of these times was on the persistence of patriarchy, and the complete omission of all women from the history of art. Institutionalized sexism was revealed. These questions rose again: Whose history? Who is included and who is omitted? Who has the power to represent this history?
Third-wave feminists emerged in the 1980s and 1990s. This group differed from second-wave feminists by representing a broader reach of inclusiveness. Third-wave feminists identified with a variety of subgroups, and positioned themselves along a continuum of political engagement. A critical examination of power and exclusionary practices continued.
Where does this leave feminists at this moment in time? Are we at a new crossroads? Although the 2006 WCA conference was focused on local and national discussions of feminism, new alliances between the local and the global seem to be more pronounced a year after the conference, than in 2004, when the conference was first taking shape. This is particularly true of transnational feminism and global social justice initiatives linked in spirit to third-wave feminist activism.
No longer exclusively focused on power struggles between men and women, feminists are now examining the power differentials between, and among, women. These conversations engage myriad groups of women: second wave to third wave; third wave to second wave; second wave to second wave; third wave to other women who do not even identify themselves as feminists. Similar to the situation at the start of the feminist movement, issues of representation and work claim center stage.
As we return to the longstanding issue of representation within the history of the feminist art movement, we seem to be at a new junction. Having accrued substantial power in recent years, second-wave and third- wave feminists demand that any history, written by or about women, must take into account, multiple voices, and multiple points of view. This contemporary feminist history, which represents 35 tumultuous years of passionate fury, sacrifice, and camaraderie between women, is also embodied in the complex history of the WCA.
In writing her report on the history of the WCA, Eleanor Dickinson relentlessly pursued factual data from all sources. Getting it right required extensive collaboration between large numbers of women who were active in the movement for many years. In the final reading, the persistent question “What characterizes this writing as feminist?” evolved into “What makes this book relevant to feminists today?” The artistic fervor of feminists working together across differences, captured so profoundly in the writing of the history of the WCA and manifested in the writing throughout this text, makes this book a feminist project. In this world filled with strife, it is this form of engagement—one that is closest to the hearts of many—that inspires continued activism.
Blaze: Table of Contents
LIST OF IMAGES .........................................................................................
PREFACE ...................................................................................................
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ...............................................................................
INTRODUCTION ..........................................................................................
PART I: LEADERSHIP
Recollections of the Early Years of the Women’s Caucus for
Art in Boston..........................................................................................………….Patricia Hills
Honoring Feminist Paths: The Lifetime Achievement Awards.....Susan King
Report on the History of the Women’s Caucus for Art ....................Eleanor Dickinson
The Color is Green ..................................................................……................. Noreen Dean Dresser and Laurie Elizabeth Talbot Hall
Growing an Art Museum.................................................….......................... Ruth von Jahnke Waters
Pioneer Chicana/Latina Artists: Creating Institutional
Inclusion ..........………………………………………………………………………………………………...Patricia Rodriguez
The Burden of Inclusivity: Second-Wave Feminism and the
Third-Wave Era………………………………………………………………………………………………..Dena Muller
New Paradigms for New Media................................................................. Jeanne Philipp
Critical Writings on Feminist Topics ......................................................... Joan M. Marter
PART II: CRITICISM
Perma-Wave: Bridging Feminism’s Generation Gap .............................Maria Elena Buszek
Expected? Curious?: The Place of Feminism in the Public Art
Classroom ..…………………………………………………………………………………………………………Cher Krause Knight
Gendered in Stone: Women in New York City’s Public Art .................Harriet Senie
Representations of the Female Nude .........................................................Cynthia Fowler
Ritual and Performance: A Collective Inquiry........................................… Anna Wexler, Mari Novotny-Jones, Janet Gillespie, L’Merchie Frazier,
Catherine McGregor
The Cow Culture: A Dilemma in Public Art............................................... Joan Ryan
Veracity .................................................................................................………………….Laurie Beth Clark
Anonymity as a Political Tactic: Art Blogs, Feminism, Writing
and Politics ...................................................................................……………............ Mira Schor
PART III: COLLABORATION
The Tipping Point Project: A Case Study in the Collaboration
between Medical Anthropology and Art.............................................…....... Ellen S. Ginsburg and Jennifer Hall
Defining Place: Building Communities Through Public Art ..................Christina Lanzl
Mentor and Mentoring: The Woman’s Way .............................................….. Elinor W. Gadon
Transforming Personal History into Paintings ............................................ Thea Paneth
Imagistic Imagery Exchange in Mother-Daughter Art Making..............Simone Alter-Müri and Denise Malis
Transnational Metaphors: Receptive Spaces in Public and
Private Rituals………………………………………………………………………………………………………….C.M. Judge
CoachTV: Collaborative Process for Understanding................................. Emily D. Eastridge and Raishad J. Glover
PART IV: THE WORK
Artist as Scholar: Scholar as Artist.....................................................……........ Jennifer Colby
Conversations: The Parallel Universe of Public Art.................................... Pamela Allara, with Ellen Driscoll and Mags Harries
Practical Ecofeminism............................................................................……………….Aviva Rahmani
Enacting Relationship: Ecofeminism and the Local.................................... Ruth Wallen
Drawing the Circle: From the Private to the Public to
the Classroomand Back...........................................................................................Sharon Siskin
How to Make Waves .............................................................................………………….. Anna Shapiro
From Fire to Water: Crafting a New American Dream ............................... Ann T. Rosenthal
Hello/Hola ................................................................................…………………….............. THINK AGAIN (David John Attyah and S. A Bachman)
INDEX........................................................................................................
CONTRIBUTORS .........................................................................................
APPENDIX: WCA LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD HONOREES ..................
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