Women and art : empowering narratives

51351 Transcript No. BB-04 WOMEN AND ART: Empowering Narratives Acting on Commitments to the World's Women  Welcome to "Beyond Beijing" For two weeks in November, 1995, the issues and inspiration of the UN Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing (September 4-15) were revived at the World Bank. "Beyond Beijing: Acting on Commitments to the World's Women" (November 6-17) was organized by the Office of the Senior Adviser on Women's Issues and the Gender Analysis and Policy Group, to highlight gender issues in development and in organizations. The program provided a forum to reflect on conference outcomes, their implications for the Bank and the Bank's commitment for future action. Through exchange of words­ and through art and music-colleagues from inside and outside the Bank explored the themes of Beijing: Equality, Development and Peace. Here are some highlights: • Translating C oncept into Action: A Marketplace of Gender Resources brought together representatives of the Bank, international agencies and NGOs, to share information about their work to address gender issues. • I~Jessages from Beijing and their Implications for the World Bank-the formal opening gave World Bank staff a chance to hear from president James D.Wolfensohn and a panel of Vice Presidents about what the Bank is doing, and will do, to promote gender equality. • First Lady of the United States Hillary Rodham Clinton raised an eloquent voice on behalf of the world's women, captivating her audience with the keynote address followed by a lively question-and-answer session. • Panels a nd speakers-Women's World Banking President Nancy Barry, UNIFEM Director Noeleen Heyzer and African economist Germina Ssemogerere explored the role of women in economic life. A group of artists, writers and curators examined women's role in the world of art. Anthony Comper shared his experience on breaking glass ceilings as president of Bank of Montreal. Staff had a rare chance to enter into a dialogue with the Bank's Executive Directors. • Looking to the Future:A Celebration of Women in Song-Elaine R. Wolfensohn introduced Musikanten, a choir which marked the program's finale with music by and about women. Printed words cannot capture the sights, sounds and energy which animated the program. But they can provide guidance and inspiration long after memories and excitement have faded. The sponsors of "Beyond Beijing" are pleased to share the transcripts of selected sessions, in the hope that they will provide food for thought and fuel for the work ahead of all of us, to realize the goals and dreams of Beijing.  Transcript No. BB-04 A World Bank Program on Gender, November 6-17,1995 Tuesday, November 14,1995 WOMEN AND ART: Empowering Narratives Alicia Hetzner, Chair Panelists: Jenny Marketou, Artist/Photography Professor, Cooper Union Diane Karp, Publisher, New Observations Caterina Pizanias, Writer Berta M. Sichel, Curator/Professor, The New School for Sodal Research M. M. Serra, Director, Film-Makers' Cooperative (New York) Carolee Schneemann, Artist Sponsored by: The Office of the Senior Adviser on Women's Issues and The Gender Analysis and Policy Group Organized by The World Bank Staff Art Society © The World Bank (text reproductions must include this copyright statement)  BEYOND BEIJING: WOMEN AND ART, EMPOWERING NARRATIVES The following transcript has been minimally edited; no substance has been cut. MS. HETZNER: We welcome everybody to the Beyond Beijing series. This session is entitled Women and Art: Empowering Narratives. Jenny Marketou has put together this panel of artists from New York -- and one from Vancouver -- and she will explain to you what they plan to do. But first, I just want to say one thing about the Bank. Sometimes people say, how come there is no art at the World Bank? We do have a collection at the Bank, but in the UN system, UNESCO was created to take care of culture and education, and the World Bank was supposed to take care of economic development. But as things have evolved in the past fifty years, I think we are starting to understand that we need art everywhere. I found a quote this morning that I pasted on the walls leading to this room: "There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action. And because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and will be lost." That was Martha Graham, as quoted in The Artist's Way. There are some books out now such as Women Who Run with the Wolves, and The Artist's Way, which are encouraging all of us. We all are artistic -- everybody has creativity within. I think in this mechanized technological society, many times we are not allowed or we don't think we are allowed to develop creativity, but we all have it. And if we listen to our voices, we can find it. I think the panelists are here to help us do that. Please welcome all the artists and Jenny Marketou. [Applause.] MS. MARKETOU: Hello. I want to thank everybody for coming, especially in this nasty weather. I know it was an effort to come when the weather is so bad. I want to say, and the panel shares my feelings, that we feel very honored to be part of the Beyond Beijing conference. I especially would like to thank the people who were involved in making this happen -- Anette Pedersen, the World Bank Senior Advisor on Women's Issues, and Sheila Reines, from the Women's Issues Office, for all their work in coordinating the symposium series and for including "Women and Art: Empowering Narratives" as part of the conference. I also would like to thank Regine Boucard, the President of the [World Bank Staff] Art Society; Vasia Deliyianni, the curator of the exhibition "Women's View"; Alicia Hetzner, who has been our hostess and supporter on all questions that we had to ask, for organizing the exhibition "Women's View," and helping with this panel. Beyond Beijing 1 Art Panel (11/14/95)  I also want to give very sincere thanks to the World Bank President, James Wolfensohn, and Mrs. Wolfensohn who is with us this morning, for their strong support for the arts. And, of course, I have finally to thank the panel for their support and their energy to come from New York and participate this morning. I don't want to spend very much time talking because I would like the panel to start so that we have a discussion in the end, and I hope everybody will get involved. The idea of doing this session came to me as I was working on my installation for the women's art exhibition, which is a video installation in the lobby of the World Bank. I felt it was very empowering to know that women artists from all over the world have been invited to voice themselves in different languages in a corporate lobby always associated with man's empowerment. For me, the idea of bringing together these women in public also is a continuity of the way I teach. For the last two years I have been teaching at Cooper Union, the New School, a seminar called "Images, Identities and Representations of the Self." And the way I teach is to invite women artists, curators, writers to share these two hours with me. I find it very important to share ideas and bring into the public forum the work and the energy of women who have worked hard, so that the rest of us feel empowered to involve ourselves with issues in our art, in our lives, that are difficult for whatever reasons. This is the panel: Diane Karp, Caterina Pizanias, M.M. Serra, Berta Sichel and Carolee Schneemann. I would like them to introduce themselves in a way they feel most comfortable. MS. KARP: I am Diane Karp. It is wonderful to see you all in this room, despite the fact that the government is shut down. I am the publisher and executive director of a not-for-profit magazine called New Observations, and today I am going to be talking about the ways in which the alternative press can, and I quote, "empower women's narratives". No, don't applaud. Wait until later. MS. PIZANIAS: Hi. My name is Caterina Pizanias and I am a feminist writer and an itinerant academic. When they hire me, I work; when they don't, I attend conferences. [Laughter. ] MS. PIZANIAS: As a feminist, I have committed myself to document the work of contemporary women artists. As an academic, I have committed my work to ferreting out the contradictions and the puzzles in the contemporary art world. Today I will be talking to you about Western Canadian practices, and some Canadian women who have overcome Beyond Beijing 2 Art Panel (11/14/95) the contradictions, as well as raise some questions that I think are timely. MS. SERRA: My name is M.M. Serra. I am the Director of Distribution for the Film-Makers' Co-op, the New American Cinema Group. We were founded in 1961, by a group of twenty-two New York artists, as an alternative to Hollywood. These artists' purpose was to promote films of personal vision. They organized for exhibition, publication, distribution; it included Shirley Clark, Jonas Mikas. We were the first distributor of Andy Warhol. They are non-theatrical distribution. We have over 700 members now, and over 4,000 films and videos. I also am a film-maker and my work researches female sexuality. In it, I recently have been exploring the idea of women and erotica, exploring the body as a source of pleasure, pain and passion. I recently toured Europe and curated a selection called "Coming to Power, Twenty­ Five Years of Sexually Explicit Art by Women," a survey of women who have dealt with their sexual experiences. We had over 23 shows in four different countries. What I am going to be speaking about to you today is actually child abuse. I have selected three films transferred to videotape to present to you. MS. SICHEL: My name is Berta Sichel. I was born in Brazil. I have been living in New York for twelve years. I went to school in New York, and today I teach at the New School for Social Research, two graduate seminars. One is about technology and culture, and that is the idea that I am going to develop here. In addition, I am a cultural writer, a journalist and a curator of contemporary art. In my work I have been very much interested in the relationship between art and technology and science, and especially now with this growth of new technologies. That is what I am going to be talking about, how technologies can be a channel for empowerment. MS. SCHNEEMANN: My name is Carolee Schneemann. I am originally a painter who took the body and the taboos surrounding the body into personal life and lived space, developing forms for examining this center of experience in film, in performance, in installation. I will talk about taboo and the motives and cultural surround to the body. MS. KARP: When I was considering my presentation, I was challenged by the problem of how to present a coherent, comprehensive view not only of the alternative press, which is a complex morass in and of itself, but the many ways in which that alternative press can empower women's narratives. As with any short presentation, the problem was that there is simply so much to say. So today is going to be a very much consolidated and cold version of the review of the alternative press. Beyond Beijing 3 Art Panel (11114/95)  One needs to'tiegfu with the monumental amount of work that it takes to produce any publication, especially a publication that doesn't have a solid financial/commercial support, and one that is deemed alternative. The word "alternative" is the core of this discussion, and there are many definitions. Within each of those definitions, there are many variations. Alternative, for the purpose of today's discussion, will be defined as that which is essentially apart from, or other than, the mainstream and commercial publications. To begin with, I think any review of the alternative press would demonstrate that most alternative arts publications are non-profits. They are 501(c)(3)s if they are American, and they are [in] the not-for-profit sector of most other countries. That means that they are supported by federal, state, local, city funding -- which we all know is a problem in and of itself -- and a few very generous contributors and sympathetic foundations. Many foundations will not fund the alternative press for a variety of reasons, the first of which is that they do not fund publications of any sort; and the second of which is, that the nature of the alternative press, by virtue of its being other than or different from the mainstream commercial magazines, tends to take risks or to defend and present voices and ideas and perspectives that are not deemed within the mainstream. So there is a very complicated problem in terms of the funding. Of course, there are bookstand sales, bookstore sales, newsstand sales and subscriptions, but in the very best of magazines -- even the commercial magazines -- the newsstand, bookstore and subscription sales would only amount to about a quarter of their operating budget. That leaves a rather large gap. Many sell advertising, as the commercial magazines do, but that is not what differentiates a non-profit from a profit magazine. The only thing that really differentiates non-profit from profit is that at the end of the year there is nothing left if you are running a non-profit. If you are lucky, you get to the end of the year and you have broken even. Most of them sell advertising, as I said, and some of them don't. But with reasonably small circulations, which is also an aspect of the alternative press, ad revenue tends to be very small. And when you do sell ads, what you often find is that it is exceedingly hard to collect. One of the things that drove my magazine away from advertising -- and I will talk a little bit about that later -- is that we spent more time, more energy and more money trying to collect the uncollectible ad revenues than it was worth. We finally turned around, looked at each other at a staff meeting one day and said why bother; we would rather have those pages to allow the voices that are really our mission to present, be heard. Beyond Beijing 4 Art Panel (11114/95)  Many of the alternative publications, I think, coul4 be generalized as functioning as cooperatives. By that I mean that usually they are produced in-house, by a small staff that is a combination of people who get paid for what they do -- and hopefully get paid reasonably well-- and volunteers. All of them, whether they are paid or not, work, I think, more from a personal commitment to maintaining the independence of the magazine and its voice or voices, than from interest in any economic gain. Most of the non-profit alternative publications are run almost purely out of passion. There are, in essence, three basic types of alternative arts publications. The first is the regional. Regionalism was for a very long time considered the art world's "other," Le. a counterpoint to New York City, so that the art world was defined by what went on in New York City -- and then slightly later, what was happening in New York and Los Angeles -­ and all the regional aspects of the United States were considered the other. So regionalism is the first alternative in and of itself. The regional publications -­ you see one here called Reflex Magazine [slide], which is published in the Pacific Northwest -- constitute a large third of the alternative press. Reflex provides [coverage of] the Northwest. There are art papers which cover the South and Southeast. Dialogue covers the Midwest. Art New England is obvious. Art Issues essentially covers California. Magazines like Parachute, which covers the arts in Canada, is an example of magazines that are not American but are typical of the alternative press. Another magazine that needs to be mentioned is The New Art Examiner. It is essentially the mother of all regional arts magazines, and one of the earliest. of the alternative press. It was one of the first publications that promoted a critical forum for art outside of New York City, and it spotlighted the art of Chicago as early as 1973. The 1970s is where the alternative arts press really begins, and The New Art Examiner is one of the very first. Reflex is an example of a regional magazine that does more than simply provide a focus and a forum for arts and writing in the Northwest. It also provides a forum for discourse with a monthly discussion series that they have on the arts, at a tavern in Seattle called the Two Bells. Here [slide] you see Gail Trembly, an artist and writer, who is talking at their last monthly conference about her experiences at the NGO forum outside Beijing, to which a large group of artists went. The woman with her elbow on the table next to her is Shirley May. Shirley May was a rather dramatic force at the Beijing conference, because she organized most of the programming for the forum that was held outside of Beijing. This photograph was taken by Marita Haldaway, a Seattle artist who works with Reflex, and was given a grant by the Puffin Foundation to go to Beijing and document the conference [slide]. This is an image taken by Marita, of Winnie Mandela addressing the conference in the African tent at the NGO forum outside of Beijing [slide]. This is Shirley May -- you saw her before in the other picture -- now in situ in Beijing leading an international group in songs and cooperative sharing activities. And the last of the slides that Marita sent to us Beyond Beijing 5 Art Panel (11/14/95) is a photograph of Irene Santiago, who was the Executive Director of the [NGO] conference, speaking with Eileen Newell, an artist from Seattle who was also at the conference. One of the things that takes Reflex and these alternative arts magazines a step further is not only that many times the alternative press support and sponsor public forums, besides the forums in print, but they gave Marita Haldaway the wherewithal to put about 140 photographs that she took of the women's conference in Beijing onto the Worldwide Web. So not only does the alternative press provide printed access and public forum access, but many of the magazines are connected with Webs and Internets so they can make their images, their ideas, and all of the voices of these women and many other artists, available to the broadest possible cultural community. Another kind of magazine provides special support to particular communities that are the focus of the alternative press. The first and the mother of these would be a magazine called Chrysalis, a magazine of women's art and culture founded in 1976 at the Women's Building in Los Angeles. It is a perfect example of what often is the case. Chrysalis published for ten years and went down in smoke in 1987 because of lack of support, rising costs and the inability to maintain the magazine with a small circulation and small support base. Other magazines like Heresies, published every nine months, address women's issues. Eight Walk is a contemporary African! American arts and culture magazine. Turtle Quarterly is native American. De Neuve covers Lesbian issues. Sculpture obvious; Public Art Review. Independent is a magazine of independent video and film. Art Hazards News is a newsletter that covers and makes artists aware of recent discoveries and problems with materials and practices in the arts. And then there are Fiber Arts, Ceramics, Metals. There is Inuit Quarterly. There is Marsh Art which is a women's issue magazine. Inuit and Marsh Art are Canadian. There is a magazine called Nueva Luz, published by a larger parent organization, which is how some of the alternative press survive, called En Foco. Here you see images published in their publication called Critical Mass. Nueva Luz is an interesting example of special communities because it and En Foco have as their mission to present the work of photographers of color. And in our particular case, they have been very supportive of women photographers of color. There have been a group of exhibitions and a group of publications. The image you see here [slide] is by Sophie Rivera. It is from a publication coming out next week called "Island Journey. " This is a Clarissa Sleigh image [slide], from one of the exhibitions that they had. Publications of those exhibitions [are produced] so that the images are not only in situ, but are then disseminated to a larger readership. Beyond Beijing 6 Art Panel (11/14/95)  Here is the work of Carrie May Weems. Whether it is Sophie Rivera or Clarissa Sleigh or Carrie May Weems, all of whom are beginning to gain a great deal of fame in the last six to eight months, they were published and presented by Nueva Luz long before they had any kind of public presence. The third kind of alternative press that I wanted to talk about is general arts coverage, examples like Bomb, which is arts writing and image; Meaning, Whitewalls, Arts and Language, and the magazine that I know best New Observations, of which I have been publisher for the past almost eight years. New Observations was founded in 1981 by a group of artists who felt the need for a way of presenting alternative voices to the mainstream commercial publications. It is a magazine that lets the artists speak for themselves, so that all issues are guest-edited. Every issue is drawn from proposals from the field. By so doing, we open our presentation to the broadest, most diverse series of editorial voices that we can access. I have lots of copies of these alternative press publications that you can look through, and at the end of the conference take them if you like. I don't want to take them back to New York. That is for sure. The alternative press can, by virtue of its freedom, its focus and its energy enable a diversity of voices [to be heard] that would otherwise be denied access to a broad cultural community. Our goal as the alternative press is to present possibilities as opposed to limits, to provide the opportunity for women's vision and talents to become communicated narratives. We do this knowing that [women's] ideas and their images will inspire others to strive toward the realization and communication of their own narratives. Alternative publications do more than present the ideas and images of women. They provide a forum for discussion, critical discourse, and an example that goes even further -­ a En Foco also has slide registry available for women photographers of color. The alternative press cannot truly empower women's narratives, but we certainly can enable them to be read, to be heard and to be responded to. We can provide a forum for discourse and exchange, and for sharing experience and concerns. The power of women's narratives is in their compelling, engaging quality, the quality of their voices, their stories, their dreams, their fears and their goals. That is where empowerment comes from. What we can do is give them the chance to be heard. I would like to leave you with the thought of a woman who has been very formative in terms of my education, my reading. In one of her wonderful discourses on life, Edith Wharton said that there are two ways to cast light into the darkness. You can be a candle and provide light directly, or you can be Beyond Beijing 7 Art Panel (11/14/95) a mirror, and reflect thel\igiit'bf'the candle many times"over. The alternative press is essentially striving to serve as a mirror to the artist's candle. Together our voices can be heard. [Applause.] MS. PIZANIAS: The title of my paper is "Who Counts and Who is Counting: the Art World, the Market and Women's Art." The title actually has been borrowed from a column that has been appearing in Matriarch, one of the alternative magazines in Canada, and they do keep a count on who counts from within the women's art community. Since the Renaissance, the social organizational aspects of the production, distribution and consumption of art has been under the protective mythical wraps of artistic geniuses, Bohemian free spirits and emancipatory avant gardes -- all of the male players within the institutions of art. Throughout the same period, women's differences in art making and other spheres of social life have been implicitly devalued unless, of course, proven otherwise. Proving this otherwise has been the impetus of much feminist work during the last twenty-five years. Amidst the contemporary euphoria of abstracted discussions about global restructuring, I would like to take this opportunity to draw attention to the need for a pause to examine particular art worlds, not through the totalizing lenses of theories of art for art's sake, but instead through specific socio-political analysis, which can provide the grounded data that will enable women artists to accurately place themselves in this restructuring. Following the lead of Michel Foucault's discussion of power, it is not enough to simply answer the question of who exercises power, unless the other question, the other side of the question -- how does power happen? -- is answered at the same time. All art worlds are not created equal. Some, because of diachronic and synchronic trajectories, carry more power than others, most becoming inevitably colonized by the more powerful ones. Doing art in Canada today from within its social margins -- gender, race, ethnicity and sexuality -- means doing art at a few extra margins removed from the center, since the Canadian art establishment is marginal to that of New York, Los Angeles, London, Chicago, you name it, and all the European centers. Despite the persistent work done by feminist women artists over the last twenty years in peeling off the layers of power and exposing the consecutive framings presented under guises such as tradition or internationalism, the core of the art system remains Eurocentric, white, male and modernist at heart. Beyond Beijing 8 Art Panel (11/14/95)  And now a very, very truncated story of what has happeQ.edrin Canada. It appears that French artists brought to Canada the learned arts, but very quickly the British took over and installed an art world that was an exact replica of its counterpart in Victorian England. The academics, the dealers, the critics and other functionnaires of the art world were brought from London between 1867 and 1910. During the same period, the ambivalent relationship between Canada and the United States also took its hold. The unending need to be recognized and validated without being swallowed by the neighbors to the south is a need that has been defining and complicating Canadian expressive culture throughout this century. These early years of the new Dominion of Canada were pivotal for the institutional­ ization of the arts, a process that was propelled by a number of Canada's viceroys who set out to civilize -- and that is their word -- Canada, and give it a national culture, within the tenets of British colonialism of course. From its inception, that system marginalized women, aboriginal peoples and settlers from other than the British Isles. Institutions such as the Royal Academy, the National Gallery and the public rituals of collecting, exhibiting and recording followed exactly the ideologies and practices of Victorian London. Canada's art world from its inception has been imbued with 19th-century notions of national identity, capital accumulation and an unwavering belief in the laissez-faire attitude of the marketplace. In 1870, British Columbia -- where I come from -- was threatening to leave the Dominion of Canada and join the United States (now, of course, you know who is threatening to leave). The central, government, in order to keep British Columbians within the fold, promised to build a railway that would unite Canada from sea to shining sea, thus ending the province's isolation from the centers of power in Toronto and Montrea1. The federal government kept its promise but at tremendous cost. In 1885, the last spike was driven home in the longest rail line at that time and the Canadian-Pacific Railway (CPR) was born. To recoup some of the costs, the CPR came up with the idea of capitalizing on the natural beauty of the Rockies, to sell Canada to those with money and a yearning for nature and exotic encounters. William Cornelius Van Home, a Montrealer of British descent, was hired to implement the decision. It was he who came up with the details of how to sell Canada as a tourist attraction, a decision that was to have far-reaching effects on the arts in Canada. Beyond Beijing 9 Art Panel (11114/95) Van Horne invited painters to travel for free on the CPR, provided they painted the scenery and that they did so in a picturesque, non-threatening manner. He then used many of these paintings in advertising posters to decorate the offices of the CPR in London and in New York. He also bought a lot of these paintings, thus becoming the first collector of art that would become shown and sold as Canadian art. When the Marquis of Lome, another one of the viceroys of Canada, set out to bring the country up to par with the civilized -- they loved to always talk about making Canada a civilized nation -- he established the Royal Canadian Academy and the National Gallery. The newly-formed academy was immediately inundated with pieces from William Van Horne's "Railroad Art School," which would eventually be canonized as the National School under the rubric of the Group of Seven. That there was no room for art from lived experience, i.e., from women, in this panorama of glaciers, snow-peaked mountains and roaming buffalo should not come as a surprise to anyone in this room. But women in Canada during the same period were, of course, making art, and many of them were selling it. During the early years of confederation, when a woman's work was put up for sale, it was marked in the catalogue with a star, followed by an explanation "by a lady" or "by a woman's hand." In the following years, Canada's art world went about its business following the British model, which really meant being totally supported by the government. This was a choice that Canada had to follow, because Canada never developed the class of money people, like the Guggenheims, the Mellons and the Rockefellers, that feel the need to legitimize their money through support of the arts. So the art world in Canada has been indebted to the government, which has managed to create a huge bureaucracy, an elaborate network of task forces, advisory panels, curatorial committees, commissions, juries, disciplined specific service organizations, arts -consultants, community liaison committees -- and I got that from a phone book of the government -- a system daunting to most seasoned bureaucrats, let alone the artists. The 1960s -- and now I am really jumping -- the 60s and 70s were heavy times for both Canada and the world. The separatist movement in Quebec, coupled with an emerging first nation's nationalism and an increased immigration from countries other than the traditional Western and Northern European countries, created an atmosphere of urgency regarding Canada's future as a political federation with a cultural identity distinct from that of the United States. The United States has been sort of a bogey-man of Canadian existence. This was also the time when New York, following the success of Abstract Expressionism, had taken the lead as the place for artists to be, creating more confusion and navel-gazing in Canada by both political pundits and art practitioners. Beyond Beijing 10 Art Panel (11114/95)  Also at that time, there was the coincidence of the Vietnam anti-war movement in the States and the fact that Canadian universities were expanding. In the late 1960s and 1970s when the universities were developing or establishing Fine Arts Departments, the people that were available to be hired were Vietnam protesters or draft dodgers, in general persons who came from the States. They became the professors, became the curators of the new galleries, received tenure. They are still in the late 50s, and guess what -- they were all and still are very modernist. So they have been blocking feminist ideas; they have been blocking feminist art, non-object-produced art, and that was a result of an accident of hiring and of institutionalization. But despite the odds, many feminist artists and community activists have come to realize that the time is right for collective action, for taking on and challenging the institutions of art, for bringing the community to art and the art into the community. Doing collaborative work, taking the audience into account and working for particular communities has been the agenda of feminists, women of color and queer communities. These women have been active in parallel venues or have been intervening by inserting themselves into the institutions affecting their agendas -- and all that to their great credit, because the climate in Canada is chilly, and I am not only referring to the weather. The tum toward the right is sharper than many other places; the cutting of funds has been very much influenced by xenophobia and homophobia. For the short time that I have, I would like to talk to you about two groups of women, just a handful of the women who are doing wonderful work out in the West, where I mostly live my life and record the art. Joan Caplan and Mary Lou Riordon Sello met in art school. They are two women who are married and have kids; they keep households and they keep making art. Over the years, they have collaborated with many other groups of women as diverse as the Women of Color Collective and the residents of a seniors' home in Calgary. They act as mentors for young feminists. They sit on boards of museums and alternative galleries, and they have really committed their artistic work to not only presenting their own work but to enabling other women to do alternative work. I will tell you quickly about two of their projects. One was titled "Current Connection Living/History Project." It was a two-part installation at Fort Calgary and the Deane House, which is world-famous for being haunted by cowboys -- both historical sites from the pioneer Wild West days of Calgary. Near the Fort, there was a seniors' home where Joan and Mary Lou befriended a couple-dozen women, senior citizens who had immigrated to Calgary from all over the world. They spent long hours with them, videotaping their stories. And while they were doing that, they crocheted hundreds of yards of colorful yam that they used for the installation. Beyond Beijing 11 Art Panel (11/14/95)  So on a big celebratory day about when the West was won in Calgary, they took the yarn and they crisscrossed the river with the help of young women from all the cultural bases of Calgary. And within the house they had twenty-four monitors, each one dedicated to the woman who had an opportunity to tell her story. Another of the projects was the "Feminist Spin." It was a grand-scale design that involved getting all galleries in Calgary, artist-run and commercial museums, university departments, arts magazines to devote their programming for March, 1994 to feminist art. And they succeeded. Calgary has never been the same. There were fifty venues covering all genres from the Glenbow Museum, which is the highest institution, to the strip malls. The other group of women I want to talk to you about is the Kiss & Tell. It is a Lesbian collaborative group which has roots in the anti-pornography movement. They are Persimmon Blackbridge, Lizard Jones and Susan Stewart. They began meeting in the early 1980s to discuss issues of sexuality and representation. In 1987 they became public with the work entitled "Drawing the Line," an interactive photo exhibition dealing with issues of Lesbian sexuality. It was presented in such a way as to encourage the viewer to consciously think [about] where one draws the line between erotica and pornography. The photographs and women's responses have become part of the record as a video and a postcard book. The same women wrote a book that is entitled "Her Tongue on My Theory" (1994). It is the first and only Canadian group to date that has received a Lammy (Phonetic), which is an award given out here in Washington from the Lambda Book Report. In closing, because I probably have one minute, I would like to put forward three questions that are important for us to think about. The first one is not so much a question as it is a statement, that contrary to the art gatekeepers' professed impartiality. artists are promoted and consumed in manners that guarantee the art institutions' survival. The art that still counts is object art, and we have to think about that. Second, the politics of art must be sought in the complexities of cultural and social practices and not in art historical discourse. And the last one, which is the most problematic: we have to critically examine the contradictory sites that our institutions have become, sites where the majority of labor from the critical/curatorial to fund-raising functions, is done by women -- and women are still looking in from the outside. There is something unfinished here. Thank you very much. [Applause.] Beyond Beijing 12 Art Panel (11114/95)  MS. SICHEL: I am going to be talking on how the new technologies can be a channel of empowerment. I am going to go beyond the art world, especially because we are not in an artistic environment. I am not talking in a museum. Since I am in an office [environment], I am reminded of when I was in school doing my graduate studies some years ago, and we had to read several articles and books about women and technology. And I was always thinking, why today are there so many studies that still look at the typewriter as the quintessential symbol of the feminization of the office? It is true that the typewriter was the first technological innovation that substantially changed the setup of offices, as well as the composition of the work force. To explain what the social-science jargon defines as the "women/typewriter connection," feminist writing on technology has sought several variables, such as employment patterns, labor-force characteristics, demographics, economics and business, and the prevalent ideologies related to the introduction of the typewriter. I propose that we go beyond the typewriter since no one types anymore. Right? Go beyond this women/typewriter connection, although it is widespread in the scholarship of feminism and technology, to one I think is more important to focus on in the techno­ scientific society in which we live. Today's world involves interactions of a different scale of intensity from an earlier time -- when exchanges between different cultural groups were generally restricted by geography and resistance to interactions. Seen beyond its ordinary connotation of machines, today's technologies can be a vehicle to link people and their audience around the world. The link between diverse pieces of knowledge establishes an innovative set of connections that propagates knowledge. Those connections also could open new channels of communication that enable us to send and receive information. Today information is power, and I think that is a very important thing to remember. They also can bring empowerment. Not necessarily immediate rewards or wealth and prestige, but they can bring another kind of empowerment. Beyond the typewriter exists a new world of communication from which women outside the office or the art world could benefit. The idea that I am expressing here can be used as an outline of approaches to telecommunications and communications as channels of empowerment. We are talking about technology, and we have access to technology. I am sure, even without asking, that almost everybody has access to a computer, a fax machine. Many have access to Internet, E-mail. So, the things that we have in our daily lives sometimes we take for granted. It is so normal that we have a computer, that we can fax, that we can E-mail, that we don't think [about] how we can use this beyond the office or the nine-to-five hours. Beyond Beijing 13 Art Panel (11114/95)  The innovation here is not to understand that we have technology and it is great that we live in an information society -- a technical, scientific society -- but to be aware that information is available and can be easily distributed through videotapes, computer diskettes, database printouts. I am not even talking about more sophisticated and costly things, like to produce a CD-rom or go into the Worldwide Web. But if someone is browsing in the Internet and they see something that is interesting, new information that could empower life, why not download this information and then make a printout? I am not saying that everybody has to have access, or that every woman or everyone in the world has access to technology. Of course, I am aware of the information-rich and the information-poor. The importance is not that everyone has to have access, but how people who have access can distribute this information. We can use this -- as Diane was saying about publications -- as an alternative way to distribute information. There are so many ways that this information can be distributed. I am going to show only three minutes of a videotape just to show how this information can be distributed. [Video shown on special police to combat domestic violence in Sao Paolo] MS. SICHEL: My idea in showing this videotape is to present something that was created in Brazil by a group of women without any kind of resources, and they are able to spread [word of] these women's police precincts against domestic violence. If we distribute this tape to different countries, maybe people, other women in similar situations can use it as an example. It is not an art tape in a traditional sense; it didn't cost a lot to make. The technical quality is not the best, but the importance here is not to see this as an artwork; it is its use. That is, it can be considered that it is an art form because I think today the definition of what is art is so broad. Everything that is involved -- new information, creativity, originality -­ can be considered art. I only have three minutes. Alicia just told me that they are videotaping this panel. So it would be very interesting if a copy of this tape could be sent to other institutions and maybe other offices of the World Bank, to give them ideas, and [then] we try to expand the discussion that we had. Just to finalize, as I said before, in a global society, art is everything that involves creativity, imagination and originality. Yet there is no place in a cultural universe for such art "information objects." I would like to see that in the context we live in, we understand that the most important innovation is not the understanding of a new concept, but the new technologies that have permitted the re-definition of geographical and cultural borders and Beyond Beijing 14 Art Panel (11/14/95) the creation of other discursive practices and the transfonnation of the art object into infonnation. The idea is to create and to expand this. Thank you. [Applause.] MS. SERRA: I am going to be speaking about women and sexuality, specifically women and child abuse. I have fifteen minutes of clips from three specific films. But first, I thought I would start with a quote from an artist named Birgit Hein who is presenting a film called "Uncanny Woman" at Harvard Film Archives, and I quote, "The worst fonn of oppression which women have to suffer is their sexuality. The repression goes so deep that many women, even willingly, relinquish sexuality. To win back desire, to show it in its total diversity and to break existing taboos is for me the most important task for contemporary women artists. " The reason I present this quote is that to me, the most taboo thing that a woman can talk about is her sexual experiences in childhood, particularly child abuse when it is related to the family. I have three tapes which are personal films; non-linear and non-theatrical. They are 16-millimeter films that appropriate from Hollywood feature films. For instance, the first film is called "Systems of Authority, Methods of Repression It is by a woman named II • Linda Tadec. She is Director of Media at the University of Georgia, and she is also a curator at the Peabody Institute. Her film appropriates excerpts from Hollywood's "Last Tango in Paris." My film, the second one, draws clips from "Pretty Baby," and the last one, by Jennifer Reeves, draws from "Blue Velvet." When you appropriate fiction films into personal cinema, you have the juxtaposition of the glamour of Hollywood even if the woman is being raped -- the beauty of the star, as opposed to the reality of the filmmaker talking about it, either in voice-over or the physical appearance of the speaker. These films also have many layers, quick-cutting, inter-cutting multiple voice-overs and non-linear editing. Also, Linda Tadec has actual political marches in her film. What I thought I'd do is to introduce these films, and then we can have a discussion afterwards. The first film is forty minutes; you are going to see a five-minute clip, from the beginning, the middle and the end. As I said, it is "Systems of Authority, Methods of Repression." It conveys the emotional terror of child abuse over a period of time. It is a long period, fourteen years. Tadec expresses her anger; it is also very brutal. Her anger relates to the personal experience, and she relates this to the social structure of our society -- family, institutions, religion and politics. Beyond Beijing 15 Art Panel (11114/95)  The second clip you are going to see is from "Mary Magdalene" and that is by myself. It is a thirty-minute film and I clipped five minutes in one segment. It presents actual therapy sessions. One of the problems with personal experience is how you represent it -- how do you as an artist present this experience as a memory to the public? I did the therapy and watching the therapy, I realized that words are limited, language does not convey the power of the direct experience. The horror you feel as that child, there is no language to represent the emotional shock. So I looked at films and I appropriated excerpts from "Repulsion" by Polanski and from "Pretty Baby." In "Pretty Baby" Brooke Shields is a very titillating child, but what I tried to show is the victimization of the child. It is shot on High-8 video and is put through a video toaster, and then I transferred it to film. Some of the images are going to be very soft and a little bit noisy because you are going to see it again on video. The last film you are going to see is "Girls Dream about Hollywood" by Jennifer Reeves. You will see this film in its entirety. It is black and white and she creates through multiple, layered imageries the confusion, the shock of the rape victim. She juxtaposed it with women in Hollywood films. She uses the language of the rapist. It is very blunt; it is very abrasive. The reason I am presenting this work is not to shock you, not to repulse you but to show you women who are empowered through their personal revelations. This isn't the type of film that will be played at a Hollywood theater. It takes courage to speak freely and emotionally about your sexual experiences, even the pain and anger. [Films shown.] MS. SCHNEEMANN: I am going to talk about the recuperation of the body, the means by which lived experience could be reintegrated into my materials. I begin with the images of possessing a space in a studio in New York, and the questions that opened from the privilege of being a young woman who escapes a traditional family where you are supposed to take care of the rest of the children, where being an artist is something that is unnecessary to the point of being deviant and unnatural. What is it that enables us to claim our motive and creative determination? There has to be some aperture. These early paintings were already causing trouble. They were considered inappropriate. A young woman was not supposed to be able to visually grasp bodies, both male and female -- although potentially she might give birth to them. But to exchange her nurturing position, her maternal position was considered something that should not be supported or helped in any way. Somehow there is a set of circumstances which enabled me to pursue my determination to be an image maker. Beyond Beijing 16 Art Panel (11/14/95)  You are seeing slides of early works: there are certain aspects that are going to recur that have to do with degraded materials -- finding what is lost and has no value to the culture, finding a way to structure materials with an aspect of the; a visual organization where the body remains central to the structure of the images. Another aspect is sifting through the cultural permissions of what art making might contain, what my traditions are, what I inherit as cultural tradition even though I am not given permission to have full authority in that culture. When I enter into the world of other artists, it is 1960 and I like to remind us that in 1960 there was no pronoun for the feminine except by inclusion. In those days I was able to be a kind of pronoun criminal by including myself or excluding myself. The degraded materials are fur in this early work [slide], things that were found in my New York City 10ft when I had come to New York from Illinois. As a painter, I had full permission to examine the body. As somebody growing up in rural Pennsylvania, I had full permission to put my hands inside and outside of livestock and poultry, to pull out their innards, to cut their limbs, to count their eggs, to sort their viscera. This was a propulsion, a permission, an aperture through which I began to consider that my body could be claimed as one of my formulative materials and to combine my body in 1963 with the structures that I was building in those first months in New York City in my studio space. The materials were reSIdual and a big studio loft in New York City was also residual. It was just a moment when the real estate had not taken over so that you could pioneer. The constructions are kinetic; they have motorized parts in them intensifying form, physicalizing my materials. This provides the background to one of the primary questions that will direct all my work -- can I be both an image and an image maker? Can a woman have authority as a body that leaves the realm of the canvas, the traditional canvas? Could my meanings change my culture? In 1964, the extensivity of abstract expression is in the energy of the canvas, of my own work, with kinetics, and activating form developed into actual performative works, 1964 "Meat Joy" I thought of as an erotic ritual. Could I eroticize my guilty culture? And what were the risks of an ecstatic presentation? Because the risks were very great. During one performance of this work, a man came out of the audience and tried to strangle me. The energy, the voluptuousness, the propulsiveness of the performance was such that only two middle-aged women in the audience who had no experience of the avant garde realized what was happening and actually dragged him off of me. Beyond Beijing 17 Art Panel (11114/95)  The extension of the body -- to situate ourselves as subject and as material -- was central to a performance in 1965 against the war in Vietnam, "Viet Flakes," which combines projections of the taboo and suppressed images of the destruction of the Vietnamese culture, collations of film footage and stills, many of them from Europe, projected into a constructed space of snow, lights, moving elements within which the performers evolved their actions. By 1975 I decided to get rid of the elements of performance, of training people, of having a fixed time and duration of work and situate myself suspended on a rope just with crayons, drawing usually for eight hours on and off the rope in the space where I had constructed walls to be drawn upon. "Up To and Including Her Limits" was adapted to various spaces for several years. My suspension from the rope introduced a meditative trance-like state, but again my culture found that the rope represented a sado-masochistic configuration. Could my use of the functional body as a means of drawing counter the projections of a basically sado­ masochistic, sex-negative culture? And by positioning myself raw, plain naked and completely available to everyone's gaze, could I subvert erotic expectations? In another sense, it was permission as a painter to begin to accumulate marks through my own physicality without repeating the habits as a painter or drawing process might. "Up to and Including Her Limits" finally became an installation, with accumulated videotapes edited from various performance sequences in museums, schools, galleries. My 1975 conception will be exhibited in 1996 at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art. These slides show a recent compendium of the issues that have formed my work titled "Unexpectedly Research." It establishes the energy of non-Western cultures, images of goddess figurations, Inuit and African from Guinea, Nigeria. Each image correspondence was found after my own work had spontaneously produced an association, a resemblance. I would discover the image almost by accident, as a gift from exploring outside of my own cultural terrain. It also involved a set of assumptions about these figurations from non-Western cultures that brought me the energy that I needed -- I could assume that they would benefit me, that they were not hostile or negative. In effect, I would take them from their own cultural domain and insert them into mine. The little Inuit starification goddess on the lower right who has no arms has a very pronounced, expressive vulva. Studying her and juxtaposing her with Victorian marble sculptures of idealized females who always have no vulva but arms full of grapes and babies raised the question of the tradeoff there. Can we have arms and vulvas? A very recent work, "Cycladic Imprints," is based on visual permutations of the double curve. It is an installation of 37 motorized violins, in a space about 20 feet high by 36 long; it involves four kinds of projection systems. The double curve principle that Beyond Beijing 18 Art Panel (11114/95) introduces these violins is based on Cycladic sculptures -- the early Indo-European marble sculptures that reiterate a very exquisite, simplified double curves of female iconic figures. I play violin curves into versions of instrumentality, taking as my key the vulva, the open vulva as a source of powerful form that non-suppressive cultures, pre-Christian, pre­ Greek revered and depicted as the sacred erotic source. All these projected images in the actual installation are in motion. They shimmer, they shift. The violins are motorized. Everything is in motion. The last work I am going to show you, "Infinity Kisses," introduces another taboo which in our culture is difficult to bridge: the erotic contact of a house pet with its owner, its partner. All kinds of taboos about animal, human, mouth-to-mouth contact occur with this work that develops from taking a little camera to bed and just having it there with no control over lighting or focus. When my cat chooses to kiss me -- which was every morning of his life for twelve or fifteen minutes -- I wanted to examine this visually to see where does this inter-species affection enter into the realm of lived erotic experience? Some of the, reactions of people would be that it is okay to kiss your cat, but tongue­ to-tongue exchange is really beyond the pale. I began to accumulate these images, printing them and inverting them so that they wouldn't be just like a snapshot, to begin to build a world of these images where not only the contact -- the kissing contact -- but the formal properties of light and dark could be examined in an accumulation over time. Finally the work becomes ten feet high by six feet across, composed of 165 photographs. And it is one of the only works in this lifetime of producing objects and images that has been bought. It belongs to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and it is in their permanent collection. The cat had died from a rat bite, and soon after someone left a book in my house of Egyptian hieroglyphs. This sculptural frieze was found in the book [slide]. The frieze and the hieroglyphs represent a fragment called "The Breath of Life." It describes the ritual in which a young child is given a lion cub to raise. If they can grow up together exchanging mouth-to-mouth, nose-to-nose contact, then that child will become a visionary for its culture. [Applause.] MS. MARKETOU: I would like to open the panel to questions. [Question inaudible.] Beyond Beijing 19 Art Panel (11/14/95)  MS. MARKETOU: [Inaudible] .. .! think we need to have both. We need the chance to write about ourselves and sometimes we cannot always do it ourselves. So I believe we need both in order to have access. I wouldn't mind talking about the piece I did, but this is not the original idea of this panel. The idea is to come here and exchange information. To have a dialogue with other women, about how they feel and how they express themselves. So before I talk about my work, I would rather insist on raising some questions with the panel. Do you want to ask any questions of the panel? QUESTION: I'd like to ask Ms. Karp about the magazine. Are you the "foster parent," as well as the entrepreneur who started it? MS. KARP: Well, I am not the entrepreneur that started it actually. The magazine was actually started by a group of artists in 1981 in Morocco in the course of an evening's conversation where they decided that most of the journals that published discourse on the arts (a) did not give artists the chance to speak for themselves, and (b) tended to be formulaic and limited in what they would be willing to present. They decided that there had to be another voice, and the way in which they were going to do that was start a magazine. It started as a very small-scale magazine; it remains reasonably small. It was run by Lucio Pozzi, an artist who lives, works and teaches in New York City and has exhibited all over the world and a group of other people -- Lynn Tillman, among many others. Lucio ran the magazine for six years, seven years. And it started to get to be too much work. As I said, most non-profit alternative publications are run as cooperatives. He found there were too many other pulls on his time and it was too expensive. I went up to present a proposal to do a magazine. And by the time we were done with lunch, it was my magazine. So I am the foster parent. MS. MARKETOU: But I want to add [that] talking from the artist's aspect, I think what is interesting about the magazine like Diane's is usually the editors are the authors themselves. So I think it is very interesting going back to the question why I don't talk about my own work, but I would like other people to express their voices. I think I wouldn't have a voice if I didn't have to come here today and voice my ideas and my work or if people like Diane don't give their pages and their time for us artists to write about our voices. If we don't have writers to write about women's art history -- because, as we all know, until recently there has been no such thing like history written about women's art -­ how will it exist if we don't write our own history and if we don't create our own writing? Beyond Beijing 20 Art Panel (11114/95)  QUESTION: [Inaudible.] MS. MARKETOU: Exactly. And that is why I found it important to be on a panel in this conference, especially when we know there is a continuity of issues discussed in the Beijing conference. All of these issues each of us has tried to bring together today. QUESTION: Would you please tell us what is the motivation for the eyes in your video art? MS. MARKETOU: The video sequence in my installation, "I Can Not Take My Eyes Off You," was shot here at the World Bank. All the eyes in the video belong to women who work in the Bank. I am always very much interested in interacting within my work with the community and the people who I work with or where I create my piece. There were two reasons why I did this [installation]. First was the idea of the lobby, the space, which I thought was very important -- the corporate space which has always been taken [over] by the presence of the male. This space is taken over by a series of eyes (all female) gazing at you as their voice-over repeats, "I cannot take my eyes off you. " We all as women know that we always have been looked at -- we are always aware of how we are looking or of how we behave, and we always act as if someone is watching over us. "Woman" is so much the object of man's gaze. In my installation, "woman" is saved from possession by the viewer, because her face and her body are never revealed. Only her "eyes." So I was very much interested to give the public space back to women, and actually my original proposal was not to have the five video monitors with the eyes on the floor. My original idea, which for many technical reasons, I could not realize, was to have all five monitors hang from the ceiling, to take the place of the surveillance camera, so as you walk in the lobby of the Bank, you see these "eyes" looking at you. The voice-over, repeats, "I cannot take my eyes off you", which is again a narrative that we always hear from men. So in a way, I am appropriating all men's slogan and giving it to women. I believe we should, as artists, give power to ourselves through our creative process and our artwork. So this is why I did this piece. I had to compromise, of course, to put my piece on the floor, but I hope it has the same impact of women's eyes looking at you as you walk in the lobby or pass by on the street. I feel strongly that the panel brought up some very, very interesting ideas, and I think it was very important what Berta suggested. I go back to the notion of using the media. Instead having the media always become critical and represent how we are supposed to look and we are supposed to be, to use this media as a form of information exchange and become another empowerin:g element. Beyond Beijing 21 Art Panel (11/14/95)  I think it is very important what Carolee and M.M. Serra did as they brought the whole panel more into the subjectivity of the personal. At the beginning we have an overall discussion about the system in which we work and this particular time of history -- as you all know, we have less and less funding for art. So we ourselves have to find ways and avenues to voice our languages, whatever they are, wherever they come from. And that is why I think it is very important to have people like Diane and Caterina, who is going to go back to Vancouver and write about us. I think it is very important for Carolee and M.M. that they use their own selves. They have been so inspiring to all of us with their work because it is very difficult to come and express taboos and issues that we all know but we are all so very afraid to confront and deal with. And I think they will always be very, very important in the history of women's art, and very, very empowering. MS. HETZNER: That is a brilliant conclusion. [Applause.] MS. KARP: I have copies of the magazines that I brought, many of the varieties of alternative art publications and a whole bunch of copies of New Observations. Please take them. They are here to be shared. That is the whole point. MS. HETZNER: Thank you everybody. And I hope if you haven't seen the exhibition that you will. Beyond Beijing 22 Art Panel (11114/95)  Transcripts Availablefrom the Beyond Beijing Series BB-O1 Messagesfrom Beijing and Their Implications for the World Bank {Bank staffonly] World Bank President James D.Wolfensohn, and a panel of Regional Vice Presidents chaired by HCO Vice President Armeane Choksi, discuss operational priorities for promoting gender equality through the Bank's work. BB-02 Keynote Address, First Lady of the United States, Hillary Rodham Clinton Mrs. Clinton speaks and answers questions on a wide range of issues including women's education, economic empowerment and strengthening women's organizations. BB-03 Beyond Beijing: Key Economic Issues/br Women Women's World Banking President Nancy Barry, UNIFEM Director Noeleen Heyzer and Makerere University Senior Lecturer in Economics Germina Ssemogerere discuss women's access to economic opportunities, constraints and effective responses. Chaired by Ishrat Husain, Director, Poverty and Social Policy Department. BB-04 Women andArt: Empowering Narratives A panel on strategies to empower women in the arts, organized by the World Bank Staff Art Society (WBSAS), chaired by Alicia Hetzner of the WBSAS. BB·OS Promoting Gender Equality: Our Shareholders' Views World Bank Executive DirectorsAli Bourhane, Ruth Jacoby,Jan Piercy and Shengman Zhang express their views on key issues related to women in the Bank and in its lending activities. Chaired by Vice President and Chief of Staff Rachel Lomax. BB-06 Breaking Glass Ceilings: The Experience of the Bank ofMontreal Bank of Montreal President Anthony Comper talks about his institution's ground­ breaking work to promote workplace equality. Session chaired by S. Shahid Husain, Senior Vice President, Management and Personnel Services (retired). To order transcripts contact: Office of the Senior Adviser on Gender Equality* The World Bank 1818 H Street, N.W. Room E3-0S7 Washington, D.C. 20433 *Formerly Senior Adviser on Women's Issues