SUSAN:

First, I would like you to tell us how you came to be in dOCUMENTA (13), because it is a lovely story.

ROBIN:

My journey started in 2009 when I participated in ARTifariti, an “art and human rights” festival that takes place in the Tindouf Refugee Camps in Algeria, where two thirds of the population of Western Sahara have been living in exile since 1975. I learned about the festival from Federico Guzmán (with whom Kirby and I have worked collaboratively on various projects over the past 20 years) who was writing a blog about his experiences in the camps the year before. Looking at his photos and reading about the recent history of the country, all of a sudden I stopped and thought: “Wait a minute. I’m an educated person, why have I never heard anything about this place, the Sahrawi people, and their ongoing struggle for independence?” I’m talking about a country in North Africa on the Atlantic coast that was illegally occupied 38 years ago by the kingdom of Morocco. Obviously there are a lot of legal questions involved but basically during Spain’s withdrawal from the territory (formerly called Spanish Sahara), Morocco invaded by dropping bombs and napalm on the defenseless population.  The Sahrawi men remained at the front to fight off their aggressors while the women led the oldest and youngest members to safety across the Saharan desert into Algeria, where they have been living as refugees ever since.

When Federico was telling me about his experience, I realized, wow, I really want to learn about this myself and not hear about the political situation as UN statistics about war and peace. So I wrote a proposal to go to the five camps and live with a family in each, to prepare meals with the women in their kitchens and eat with their families and just by hanging out in their daily routine, I would get to hear their stories about what happened in this country and what this crisis is from the people themselves, particularly the women. My idea was to create a project about cooking, something that I do everyday at home—a shared language—to compile their women’s recipes, stories and memories into a book that describes not only their dishes but also how they have built their lives and kept hope alive in this extreme situation of occupation, war and exile.

When I went to the camps and I had this experience that was like nothing I’ve ever had before. It’s a completely matriarchal society there. The women built everything—all of the infrastructure: the buildings, an educational system where there is 99% literacy. They wrote a constitution-in-exile in 1976 guaranteeing women’s equal rights, and this is in a Muslim country! So, what we as Americans think of Muslim women was completely turned on its head for me. What I experienced was a truly cooperative society, even though it is a society-in-exile. The women work in a way that is really interesting.  They have formed cooperatives to organize and oversee all aspects of the educational, cultural, political and family life in the camps.   Each cooperative has a distinct role to play that can only work in relationship to how it is serviced by and how it services the people at the same time.

I’ve always tried to design projects that engage people and grow beyond my own authorship. It is the sum total of everybody’s engagement and interaction that creates a truly collaborative project.  And so when I went to the camps and I lived with families and I got to know them, I was truly amazed by the success of the women’s structured cooperation. They are living in the hottest part of the Sahara where no food can grow and they have to, not only to feed their people, but also keep Sahrawi tradition, culture, and history alive for their children who were born there and have never set foot in their own homeland, in their own country.  The Sahrawi people are patriotic, proud and happy in this unbridled way that—I mean, it’s a very complicated question—but their sense of purpose, creativity, intelligence, and effort are all directed toward and motivated by one common goal—survival. Every effort is a total commitment.

Here’s an example of what I’m talking about in terms of food. I followed the women when they would pick up supplies from humanitarian aid announced that day on posters at the main square.  A monthly ration of flour or onions would be dropped out of trucks at a specific time and place. They would help each other carry these huge bags of provisions to each other’s homes.  If one person had a sore leg, then her neighbors would assume the responsibility without hesitation. In my home in Camp 27, my hostess Salma Ali had a wounded arm and couldn’t make bread in the morning, so her friend Galia made two loaves every morning—one for her family and one for us … and that’s just the way it is.

Each family is issued a standard UN white tent. So from the outside, they all look the same. But once you go inside, each home is so unique, so colorful and comfortable, and all handmade! Consistent with their Berber origin, this tent or “Jaima” functions as the center of family life. This is where everyone takes their meals together, which is a very long time honored process. It begins with a long tea ceremony where, in between multiple brewings, you relax, play or enjoy music. Then large plates of food arrive. As you share various inventive and delicious dishes, you start talking about who you are and they start telling you their story. In between helpings, you might break off into smaller conversations or grab a pillow and take a nap.

Many times when I arrived at people’s houses, I was asked, “Would you like to take a shower?” The first time, I thought, “Why, am I smelly?” But actually you are so hot, it’s 102 degrees everyday.  The “bathroom” is a small anteroom with no plumbing but what they are offering you is—just to go into this dark cool private space and take a bucket of water and pour it over your head and put your clothes back on and feel rejuvenated when you rejoin the group. So I did that and I understood. This is the kind of Sahrawi hospitality that has welcomed strangers into the fold for centuries and it is still operative—it’s a cultural tradition about bringing people together.  And through rituals like this you get to know each other. That is how I learned about the Sahrawi people—about their history, their culture, and the nature of their struggle today.

SUSAN:

So, do you think this tradition developed there, in the camp?

ROBIN:

I think they are nurtured there, but they come from the memories of little girls who are now the matriarchs, who are my age and older, who escaped.

CHRYSANNE:

Were they a nomadic culture?

ROBIN:

Yes, they were originally a nomadic culture made up of tribes. European colonial powers in the mid-1880’s set up the Western Sahara and above it is the French colony of Morocco. So the Moroccans do have an argument that they were in there earlier too because the lines were arbitrarily drawn. But the thing is the Moroccans inherited their country as it was inscribed at the time of independence and now they have illegally occupied the country of Western Sahara so where are the Sahrawis supposed to live?

video ©2013 by MOMMY

CHRYSANNE:

So the French drew those borders?

ROBIN:

No, colonization was a complicated European initiative. The Sahrawi people are Berbers, Saharan Africans and Arabs. In the camps today, there is a real mixture of colors, cultures and histories all living together as families. It’s as close to a society in terms of mixing that I’ve experienced as New York. Being a mom of color, which I am, because I’ve adopted a daughter who is African-American, when we travel I am very conscious of how she is going to feel and be treated in a new community. In this Sahrawi culture, here in the middle of the desert, the people have so many different stories about how they became a family.  A mom might introduce her family to you and there are six daughters and they’re all different colors and that’s just the way it is.

SUSAN:

And one product of your day to day experience with these women was a cookbook?

ROBIN:

Yes. I created Dining in Refugee Camps, The Art of Sahrawi Cooking in the camps in 2009 and brought it back to NYC with the idea of approaching NGOs to fund its publication. That’s a new community for me, because I am used to working strictly within the art community, but I wanted to get this project beyond that sphere. But each NGO told me the same thing: “This is beautiful, this is really about empowerment and visibility but Western Sahara is not on our list.” “What do you mean? These people who have been living in camps for 38 years are not are your list?” “Well, America doesn’t actually support the Western Sahara Cause, so we can not give you funding.” So that negative reaction is what sent me running to the anarchist publishing collective autonomedia where Jim Fleming heartily agreed that is was a very important project to support. Let Anarchism Rule the Day!

And to top this good deed off, Jim then gave a copy of my book to another member of the autonomedia collective, the anarcultural writer and mystic philosopher, Peter Lamborn Wilson (aka Hakim Bey) , who was to conjure the prophetic dream that would soon land me at dOCUMENTA. A few days after he read my publication, he had lunch with the exhibition’s Creative Director, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev and he told her that the night he had finished reading my “cookbook-in-solidarity with the people of Western Sahara,” he dreamt that Sahrawi women were cooking couscous in Kassel…and the rest is The Dream Come True!

Peter called and left a message on my answering machine introducing himself and asking,  “Would you like to be in dOCUMENTA?” Insane…but it’s great. So I’ve travelled from the middle of Manhattan to the furthest, most invisible place imaginable—refugee camps in the hottest part of the Algerian desert—and reappeared in the dream state of dOCUMENTA .

Peter and I worked together on generating the ideological structure of the piece. My friend, the anthropologist  Mick Taussig, an advisor to the exhibition, was instrumental in supporting the project too AND he wrote a great catalogue essay about it.. I thought:  “If I’m invited, no way can I do a project about a Sahrawi cookbook that doesn’t involve people from Western Sahara.”  So I went back to the camps in 2011 and I met with the women’s cooperatives that run the five camps and told them about the invitation and we came up with the idea of an installation that would center around a tent (or Jaima), a typical Sahrawi home made by women in the camps. We would transport a home-in-exile from Algeria to the Karlsruhe Park in Kassel as a symbol of peaceful refuge and see how it can interact with the environment.

I worked for a whole year on the plans and designs. I was able to bring eight women who were born in the refugee camps to Kassel. First of all, they are the only ones who could put up the tent, which totally amazed the installation crew at dOCUMENTA. After it was raised, we filled it with brightly patterned cushions, rugs and pillows. Adjacent to the tent, we set up a cooking area built around a food vending truck. In order to enter the installation, the visitor had to first pass through a maze of billboard sized collages that I created in the style of the cookbook’s pages, each one introducing a new concept about Western Sahara: its history of war and occupation, the establishment of the camps by the women, the role that food plays, and the strategy of using hospitality as an introduction to the conflict.

When dOCUMENTA opened there were just hundreds of people coming through the installation. They would walk through the maze of collages, reading the info and then arrive at the tent’s entrance where they received a palm-sized bowl of delicious couscous. They then would walk into the tent’s beautiful lush setting, sit down and enjoy a bite to eat, and a conversation about their experience with women from Western Sahara.

During the first few weeks, the tent was covered with hand-stitched tarps to protect it from the non-stop rain. The dOCUMENTA staff had originally promised me that their technical team would engineer “a whole water-proofing system.” So for the 15 days of installation, I kept saying: “Well, we need to erect it now…so we can set up.” “Oh yes, we know. You need to trust us.” And wouldn’t you know it, the night before the opening, we were still with no covering. So I went out and bought these huge black tarps that looked like garbage bags and the women hand stitched them together and we threw that over the white tent.  Then the women could finally raise it and within moments, we were able to set up the carpets, the mattresses and pillows, so that the women could inhabit the space and make it as comfortable and inviting as in their culture.

SUSAN:

Did they live in the tent for the duration of the exhibition?

ROBIN:

Only from 10 a.m. to 8pm. dOCUMENTA would not allow anyone to sleep there. So I rented apartments for our whole gang. The women were all able to stay together in one enormous loft room similar to tent living in the camps.

CHRYSANNE:

Was there a reason?

ROBIN:

Yes, insurance. There were so many rules, it took me a year of just crossing t’s and dotting i’s, and filling out copies of forms of original. Then when I arrived in Germany for the installation, there were new rules. But I realized that this is the infrastructure of the culture. They use the excuse of protocol to appear in control, but the truth is that they are just as disorganized as any other culture. In the end I realized the only way to be ready for the opening was to break all the rules. Just do what you want to do because with all of their assurances, they really didn’t have so many things that they had promised me and it was the only way to make the best project possible.

SUSAN:

So you could break some promises too?

ROBIN:

Yeah. Can you believe this?  We were supposed to have running water and electricity, but it didn’t work—in fact some town inspector condemned the kitchen truck as an unsafe facility for cooking, so we had to have these plastic cubes of water brought in with a hose that you would suck the air out of so you could get the water to run into buckets. It was just so unbelievably primitive in that way. But fortuitous, because all of those things made the experience more similar to what I had experienced in the camps and to what had engaged me about being in the homes of these women and being a part of the meal and what that meal is.

CHRYSANNE:

How did the women feel about being in dOCUMENTA?

ROBIN:

Well, first of all, they said, “This is such a vacation.” When I said: “I’m so sorry you have to hand sew this tarp.” Basically, they were like: “Are you kidding? An art installation…. It’s a breeze.” They had a blast. And this was great. They arrived wearing these psychedelically patterned robes called melfas, which are their traditional Muslim dress. Basically all of the artists arrived at the same time and none of us knew who else was going to exhibit there. It’s the first day of the installation and the other artists and installers are skulking around in black clothing. We all converge on the commissary together around noon to eat lunch. In walk these elated women, dressed in brightly colored Muslim garb, who are chattering away, filling their trays with food, and just hanging out forever, commenting on their surroundings in Arabic. And I can hear every artist asking, “Who are those women?” So, in effect, they announced the project in this beautiful way.

SUSAN:

How were you communicating with them? What language were you speaking?

ROBIN:

Spanish. Because Western Sahara was a former Spanish colony.

SUSAN:

So, they speak Spanish and you speak Spanish?

ROBIN:

I speak Spanish and they speak Spanish, they speak French, because a lot of them grew up in Mauritania, which is now an ally, and Algeria too. I made sure that each woman could speak either German, French or English (in addition to Spanish and Arabic) so that they could have conversations with the public.  That was a premise of the piece. You enjoy some couscous in exchange for a conversation with the women about Western Sahara.

SUSAN:

Did they look at the rest of dOCUMENTA or were they always in the tent? Would the other exhibitions have meant something to them or were they mostly focused on their installation?

ROBIN:

Getting the word out about Western Sahara was paramount to our group. Here’s an example of how a simple exchange generated a spontaneous and amazing event. The Sahrawi Minister of Culture, Khadija Hamdi was there from the camps. The artist Issa Samb, along with his group from Senegal came for tea in our tent and then went back to his installation and returned with a gift of the Senegalese flag that he offered to her in solidarity with the people of Western Sahara. The Minister stood up and in French made a speech about how culture and art have the power to transcend boundaries in a way that does not exist in the political arena. It was so beautiful. And so later on, in exchange, I heard that she visited Samb’s installation with some of the other women and brought them the Polisario flag (the Sahrawi government-in-exile).

SUSAN:

How did the women assess their experience there?

ROBIN:

I am in contact with all of them all the time now. They’re my sisters and they had a great time. What they wanted to do was to enhance visibility about who they are and what their struggle is on an international level. By the end of dOCUMENTA, 875,000 people came through and a lot of them visited our tent many times because they were really comfortable there. They could get away from the “art exhibition” vibe and hang out, and have tea, hear music, and engage each other. So we really created a hot spot.

CHRYSANNE:

Would you like them to come to New York?

ROBIN:

Yes. I’ve been advocating for them. In fact, three weeks ago, I was invited by them to speak to the UN General Assembly at a Special Committee Meeting on Decolonization. I talked about my experience in the camps and about working with the Sahrawi women to make their cause more visible. I urged the delegates to pressure the UN to create a mandate protecting the people’s human rights and also for the global community to raise its voice in support of the Sahrawis’ legal right to self-determination.

SUSAN:

How did people coming into the tent react?

ROBIN:

I got all sorts of reactions, mostly very positive. But to those who sought me out to criticize the installation, I always asked, “Have you been in the tent yet?”

CHRYSANNE:

How would they criticize you?

ROBIN:

“Oh, don’t you think you are making a spectacle of these people?” or ”Oh, you’re putting these people in a cage and then saying look at them, they are so special and so different.” And I am not doing that. The whole essence of this project was engagement.

CHRYSANNE:

So they were approaching it from the point of view of Orientalism?

ROBIN:

They were talking about the 19th century approach to creating World’s Fair spectacles, but the project was not about “defining the other,” it was about “engagement.” I was actually very aware that I might get criticism from armchair philosophers. I had many conversations with Mick and Peter about just that. Finally Mick said: “You know what Robin, this is you. You love this. You built this project out of cooking and your sense of collaboration and how you define art and your kinship with these women.” Lets face it, hundreds of artists participated in ARTifariti but I continued that work after I left because it really means something to me and that’s what I wanted to extend in the form of art at dOCUMENTA.

SUSAN:

Now that we are talking about this, I want to read into the interview two excerpts that appeared in a thread on your facebook page while you were actually at dOCUMENTA, because I am struck by the fact that we often learn a critical paradigm that is extremely useful as an analytical tool and we accept it going forward without reservation and then over time apply it to situations that we don’t look at carefully enough and we fail to examine whether the paradigm is still useful or if it any longer applies to the situation we are applying it to.

The thread begins with a comment from Emma Zghal who wrote in precisely the kind of criticism we are talking about:

I have reservations on the natives displayed to visitors in their “exotic” tent and clothing as an expression of solidarity! It strikes me as the current incarnation of the 19th century Orientalism. So instead projecting all sorts of sexual fantasies, Westerners relish in their pity and guilt as a way to relate to the other. In my experience as a “native” among the well to do art types, this way of seeing the other is a far cry from respect. In many instances such imagery only comforts a harmful sense of superiority.

I think in this case the critical paradigm is coming from Edward Said, whose Orientalism was published in 1978, and which is certainly still applicable to certain current problems, particularly in our relationship to the Middle East, but it is assumed here that this paradigm can be placed neatly on top of your tent, and I think it is important to get across why this tent did not function in this way.

ROBIN:

The installation was predicated on engagement, exchange and interaction. You had to be there to have this experience. The atmosphere was in constant flux, changing with the arrival of each new visitor. Nobody was interested in force feeding a specific interpretation, instead what was being offered was a dose of hospitality, a peaceful refuge that was completely surprising in the context of art: a very welcoming environment constructed by hand in the camps completely by the women. It was about the political power that Sahrawi hospitality carries as peaceful strategy for engaging people, offering them the opportunity to think, to converse, to rest, to react…

SUSAN:

This is how Octavio Zaya responded to Emma’s comments on the facebook thread:

Did you get to engage the Sahrawis there, Emma? Did you get to talk to them about the historical information displayed in the corridor that preceded the tent: Did you meet the Minister of Culture of Western Sahara who visited the place, or the representatives of Polisario Front? Did you partake of the couscous and tea the National Union of Women from Western Sahara offered to all the visitors with whom they engaged in conversation? This presentation was not an exotic display, nor a projection of sexual fantasies, but an opportunity to address and discuss the plight of Sahrawi people, and their struggle for independence. It is not about pity and about guilt, Emma. It is about misinformation, Western oblivion, and an opportunity to correct them.

I wonder if a more useful critical discourse to frame your project with these women might be taken from the work done at end of Michel Foucault’s life; the point when he begins to talk about living one’s life as an art form, because it sounds from your descriptions as if that is what these women do.

ROBIN:

Yes, I make no distinction between life and art. Every act is intentional and that is what I experienced in the camps. The cooking is better than anything you make, the music sweeter, the homes more comfortable, the conversation deeper. There is an economy of means that is deliberate, finite and intentional. I truly appreciate that. I am consistently amazed by my friends’ capacity to react with genuine spontaneity. In an instant, singing and dancing is generated from clapping. It is so unusual to be in the middle of that experience as opposed to fielding questions from those who arrive with their catalogues open, asking:  “Wait, this isn’t in the schedule. What are we seeing now?”

Okay, if you want to read my project as propaganda, you can read it any way you want. I am not stuffing how you read this down your throat. I am presenting a project that is an extension of everything that I’ve ever done and for me—the personal is political. I mean, there is no distinction whatsoever. If you want to criticize it and especially if you want to sit there and write about it in the public domain, you should at least experience it.

When someone asked me, “Is this propaganda?” I always asked them, “Have you been in the tent?” And they said,  “No.” And so I said:  “Well, go in the tent and if you still have that question afterward, I’d love to engage with you.” Not one person came back. Not one.

I’ve done many projects and all of my work deals with women’s issues, empowering women, making their work visible, working with women across boundaries and barriers and race and culture, doing large scale projects that are about that and also all my own studio work is about that.  And the way I conduct myself, as a mother, as a partner in life, as a student of life, as a matron, as a cook—all the roles that a mother has, that a woman has in society, I assume those all in my work and every day and in every breath I take.

SUSAN:

Before we move on to talking about your earlier work, I do have one more question. This society that you describe is a matriarchy, so what are the men doing?

ROBIN:

That’s a really good question. So it happened that the men stayed on the front to fight in the beginning. Well, there has been a cease-fire since 1991 and since then everyone has been waiting for the UN to broker what’s going to happen.  Which is great, but if the UN doesn’t do anything then Morocco will stay in there. So the men keep training for the military but when they return to the camps, they are really bored and they let the women do all the work.

SUSAN:

I’ve seen this in other places too.

ROBIN:

So, it’s an issue.

CHRYSANNE:

When Susan and I first talked to you about this at the New York Art Book Fair you told us a story about what happened when you first arrived at dOCUMENTA.

ROBIN:

Yes. This was a personal experience that transpired in February when I was going to Kassel for the first time. dOCUMENTA opens in June, so I was going there to figure out where my site was going to be and have all the meetings that I needed to have with the various production teams (i.e., installation, publication, education etc…). So I was picked up at the Frankfurt airport by the person assigned to oversee my project and as we were driving to Kassel, she said,  “Robin, I have a surprise for you.” So, I’m thinking: “Oh, is there going to be a party? Balloons or a cake?” And she says: “Well, Carolyn (the Director) wants every artist to go to Breitanau, the concentration camp right outside of Kassel. Wait a minute, I didn’t even know what the theme of dOCUMENTA was or who the artists were. I was working on my own project and that’s all I knew and the idea that I needed to go to—it was a re-education camp that then filtered people into the concentration camps—was a perfectly horrible situation and I burst into tears. I’m a Jewish woman, whose family has never visited Germany and I firmly believe that it is my choice if I ever want to go to a concentration camp. I don’t need someone telling me, “This is one of your requirements.” I asked if there was some specific message, a piece of writing that would explain this motive but there was none. So I said that I was going to get really upset and that I’d go if she really wanted to bring me there but I didn’t know what I would do.

So we arrive there and this guy, the Director of Breitanau, takes us around the facility and he’s telling me its pre-WWII history as a re-education camp for vagrants and prostitutes, where offenders would be imprisoned for two years so that they could become “more constructive citizens when they were re-introduced into society.” And my response was: “Are you kidding me? Don’t tell me that the prison guards weren’t fucking the prostitutes for those years that they had them behind bars. I mean, what are you talking about? Explain to me what re-education means? This is a crime.” At which point, my assistant asked me, “Have you had enough?” And I said, “Absolutely.” And so, that was that.

SUSAN:

The one other question about dOCUMENTA I would like to explore is the debacle over the return of the tent. I just find it surprising that this is not being taken care of by them.

ROBIN:

Look, this was a hugely ambitious project. I was the least known artist at dOCUMENTA, way low on the totem pole and my budget didn’t cover even close to the cost of the project.  I had to raise money and put my own money in. I’ve spent the last three months since I returned in September negotiating the return of the installation because I would love to create some incarnation of the project that could travel around America. That would be great.

CHRYSANNE:

I would like to go back to the early ‘90’s. I was introduced to you by Anne Pasternak when Kathe Burkhart and I did The Abortion Project. Susan actually introduced me to Kathe, so we are all sort of sisters. I remember when The Abortion Project went to Real Art Ways, both you and Susan had works in the project. I always have loved the big fabric pieces with the embroidered IUDs that you showed at Andrea Rosen Gallery. I wanted to know if you want to speak about that early work a little bit and about how that informed the collaborative projects. I really feel like our connection, actually the three of us, has been as artists, as feminists and political activists. So anything you’d like to say….

ROBIN:

Yeah. We are sisters from way back and have re-met up in different incarnations throughout the years—collaborating together, exhibiting side by side or even sometimes brainstorming together.

My work in the 1990’s was largely images embroidered on fabric, on pinstripe. I was exploring cultural expressions of vanity and issues of power, both male and female.  At some point after grad school, I just stopped painting because who wants to imbue a white canvas with meaning when every minute of the day is filled with it? I mean my inner dialogue or internal conversation is always disrupted with thoughts about: “What am I going to make for dinner?, Have the kids done their homework?, Where is the birthday party happening the day after tomorrow?” And so, I started working with fabrics as canvas because those are materials that intrinsically carry meaning. I went to the fashion district to find out about sewing and met all these Jewish people who talked about the social vocabulary of the pinstripe pattern. Fantastic! I took that clue as the key to my path as an artist. How do I express or define myself as a Jew, a woman, an urbanite, an artist? And I began to concentrate on decoding the images from popular culture that express power, vanity or the loss thereof; the invisibility of women’s work, all of those things that are ingrained, but not necessarily as art. And that became the subject of my work.

At some point thereafter, I realized that my work was being included in exhibitions because it represented the “woman’s perspective.” I mean, “What’s that?” I can’t speak for anyone but myself. So I decided to start making more open-ended projects. I had the idea of making publications where I could invited my friends and they in turn could invite their friends to participate.  And that process began to make our community much larger and to make our discreet ideas resonate beyond the very elite circle of gallery dwellers. In 1992, I put together Special Issue, a recipe manual that had nothing to do with food and then Promotional Copy, a yellow pages of the artist community, where I invited anybody who identified as an artist to design one or two promotional pages about their projects.Then in 1995, I put together Time Capsule: A Concise Encyclopedia by Women Artists that was distributed to every delegate at the International Women’s Conference in Beijing.

CHRYSANNE:

Was that done by Creative Time?

ROBIN:

Creative Time co-produced it with SOS INT’l. It was their first publication-as-public space.

CHRYSANNE:

I also remember that you did a performance at the Guggenheim when it was in Soho.

ROBIN:

After Special Issue, I was approached by D.A.P. who began to distribute my publications (they have been very supportive throughout the years) and because of their relationship with the Guggenheim Downtown l got to use the museum’s lobby space for one night for the Promotional Copy publication party. So I conceived of the idea that the museum should function as a doormat to the street—you wipe your feet at the Guggenheim’s entrance, you get your book and then exit onto Mercer Street where are all these different artists and activists and neighborhood people would be painting, juggling, fortune telling and inviting you over to engage with them.  So the street , not the museum, really was the focus of the event.  I also invited a lot of friends who are artists to make interactive projects in the lobby space—to introduce their projects, sort of “promote” themselves as a part of the party. Chrysanne, you participated.

CHRYSANNE:

Yes, for Promotional Party Publication Party, I had a small printing press and I printed rose petals in honor of my friend Rob Flack, who died of AIDS and I gave them out in his memory. I still have some. So after Time Capsule, you published, and I have a number of them, a very beautiful series of artist books.

ROBIN:

Yes, afterwards I published a series of my own artist books.  There’s The Intelligent Women’s Guide to Art, where I reworked an actual manual of the same title that had been that written by a New York Times Arts Editor.  Can you believe it? He made a book for women about art and didn’t put any women artists it. So I thought, “This is really ridiculous.”  So I just covered over his name as author and replaced it with my name, and added my images to the pages and wrote this concrete poem naming/listing a selection of women artists who should have been included..

SUSAN:

How do you see publishing as an artist vs. exhibiting as an artist?

ROBIN:

Publishing is not really the word. Editing is what I do. I come up with a concept and I invite people and then they riff on the concept. But I conceive of the structure or framework and that’s a very creative endeavor. I really enjoy it. I also have put together lots of shows that are in untraditional settings, inviting artists to do things that they wouldn’t regularly do, like making ephemeral art or making a multiple that undercut the market or that can be taken off the wall. I put together GET OFF!, the first contemporary art show at the Museum of Sex. All of these projects are born out of the same drive. It’s taking a concept or a series of beautiful ideas and then connecting them in a logical way. But then they become something else as they are completed by those who are invited. That’s so much of my working process. That’s what I did at dOCUMENTA.

CHRYSANNE:

In terms of the publishing your own artist books, do you feel that it is an empowering act for artists?

ROBIN:

Yes. Never wait to be invited anywhere. If you are waiting for the invitation, I guess you just want to go to the exclusive party. Empower yourself. Books have a different life than a painting or a sculpture or a discreet work of art because they have a much longer public life. They travel. A friend called me from Paris on Valentine’s Day because Sexual Lovemaking for Dummies was in a really hip boutique! Books take on a different life. And don’t we want to engage larger and larger audiences or participation? I mean, that’s why we’re artists. It’s an intellectual endeavor.

CHRYSANNE:

Going back to the beginning, your initiative publishing Dining in Refugee Camps is what lead you to dOCUMENTA. If you hadn’t been self-empowered, by working with these women….

ROBIN:

There’s no formula. Before dOCUMENTA, I presented Dining in Refugee Camps and my experience in the camps at colleges, art schools, anarchist bookstores—to virtually any group who invited me. Really, the whole idea of making a project at dOCUMENTA was about engaging with and learning from a larger and larger pool of people. It’s not like I’m just putting it out there, I get so much back.

CHRYSANNE:

I have one more question. When you first made the book in the refugee camp and you showed it to the women, what did they say?

ROBIN:

Actually, they were not that inviting at the beginning of the process. It was really tough getting into their homes and getting them to trust this project. A lot of them said: “What can you do for me and why am I letting you into my private space?” Into the kitchen is different than into the tent. I put the book together with materials and images that you could find in the camps—from piles of garbage, from food labels and from my photos of the families and their neighbors. It wasn’t until October of 2010 when Kirby brought the published books back to the camps and gave them to the families—when they saw their names, their surroundings, their portraits, their words honored—that everything clicked.

Now, the Cooperatives in the camps are using Dining in Refugee Camps as their textbook for teaching English. The book is about them and it is also out in the world beyond. It’s been a process but I think they are happy. And I am happy that you have acknowledged its significance and invited me to share my ideas within this singular forum about and by other women artists. Thank you Susan and Chrysanne.

CHRYSANNE:

We met almost twenty years ago when you took a photograph of me in my installation, 1-900 Mirror Mirror, for your photographic series of women artists. What inspired you to start taking photographic portraits of women artists and how many have you taken?

BARBARA:

I was a painter for almost twenty years, then I made sculpture for about six years, and then I started using a camera in 1990 because I wanted to do this project. We all knew what the male art stars looked like, but even now we don’t really see that many photographs of women artists. I wanted to create a community and also to become part of that community, by meeting more women artists. I also wanted to acknowledge the fact that women artists are not what most people think they are. I think most people—in this country, at least—think of women artists as kind of weird and strange. I got this large format camera specifically to do this project, for a fairly formal portrait, because I wanted the women to be seen the way I see them—as intelligent, serious, committed artists who many times are quite gorgeous and are very “normal” in a lot of ways. I wanted the project to be very inclusive, so I have photographed women who were largely unacknowledged as well as famous ones, and also women who made work that was considered craft by many people but not by everyone. I didn’t want a lot of divisions or distinctions between one type of work and another. I always wanted to do 100 portraits and I have done 94 now.

CHRYSANNE:

The women appear to me to be quite majestic.

BARBARA:

Oh, thank you—that is a real compliment to the women as well.

CHRYSANNE:

They are all done in black and white, is that correct?

BARBARA:

Yes.

CHRYSANNE:

Do you think the 4 x 5, black-and-white format leads to that majestic, ageless quality in terms of the history of photography?

BARBARA:

It might, depending on the viewer’s perspective. Some people might just think it’s old-fashioned. Of course, I don’t look at it that way. The majestic quality has a lot to do with the demeanor of the women being photographed. And also, I chose that particular camera and chose to work in black-and-white, hoping to achieve that quality, a classic look. So you could be very right about that.

SUSAN:

Who was the first person that you chose to photograph and how long ago was that?

BARBARA:

I started in October of 1990 and the first person was a friend of mine, Jerelyn Hanrahan, who was making sculpture outdoors. Very quickly, though, I shifted to a couple of women artists who were older, because I was afraid we might lose them. So in February of 1991, I photographed Louise Bourgeois and Hedda Sterne. Louise was 80 at the time, but she lived another 18 years! (laughter)

SUSAN:

She surprised you.

BARBARA:

Sometimes the feisty ones do live longer. Hedda was 81 when I photographed her and she was four months shy of 100 years old when she died. So both of them lived quite a while after being photographed. Hedda was amazing. She was this diminutive little person, physically just tiny, but not in spirit. I don’t know if you are aware of the famous photograph that Nina Leen took of a group of abstract expressionists. They were called “The Irascibles” because in the 40s they objected to the Metropolitan’s big painting show that did not have a single abstract expressionist painting in it. Leen took a photograph in 1950 for LIFE magazine, which later appeared in The New York Times. And all the men are there—this whole group of them, all in their suits—Rothko, Reinhardt, Still, Newman, Pollock, de Kooning, Motherwell, Gottlieb—and there’s Hedda. 14 men and she’s the only woman. She is all the way in the back row, but she is standing on a chair. She aims to be seen, and she is! I love that photo. She is fairly unacknowledged in art history, I think, but she continued to paint probably right up until her death. So she is one of my heroines.

CHRYSANNE:

Did you photograph her again, or only the one time?

BARBARA:

Only the one time.

CHRYSANNE:

Have you ever done a group photo of women?

BARBARA:

No.

SUSAN:

By the time you photographed Louise Bourgeois, her career had really taken off again. Was she the first person that was very visible that you photographed? How did she respond when you asked her, and how did you explain to her what the project was?

BARBARA:

I explained my motivation for doing the project and she agreed immediately. She had just finished a shoot with Herb Ritts, and she wanted to swing her leg, I don’t know why, but we had very different ideas. We were in her studio out in Brooklyn and there wasn’t a lot of light, so I wouldn’t be able to shoot at a fast speed. I wanted a quiet, contemplative portrait. And she wanted to swing her leg! I was somewhat intimidated by her, of course. It was one of the most difficult shoots I have ever done.

I had agreed that at the end of the shoot I would give the film to her assistant, Jerry Gorovoy, who got the film processed. Then I came back out and met with him. We discussed which ones I could keep. I kept the one that was the best and they kept the rest. It didn’t bother me at all, because it was not that different from my approach with the other women, which was that even before the shoot, I explained that I would give them the contact sheets afterward and they could mark on the backs yes for those I could use and no for any they did not want me to use, and they could choose the ones they wanted for themselves. It sets up a sense of trust from the beginning, which I believe will result in a better portrait. I also think we need to control the images of ourselves that go out into the world.

And of course, there is also a difference between a woman photographing a woman and a man photographing a woman. I think that had an effect—helped them to relax, be themselves, and give me something authentic and real. And I hope that because I am also an artist, it is an insider view and maybe that also contributed to a feeling of trust.

Arlene Raven told me a funny story about Louise. One time, many years ago, a young man photographed her. Louise said he had to come back and bring all the negatives and all the film and all the prints and everything. He said OK. So he came out and she didn’t like any of them. So she boiled them. She didn’t burn them, she boiled them! That says something about Louise, doesn’t it?

CHRYSANNE:

Did she keep the film?

BARBARA:

I understand that she boiled everything.

CHRYSANNE:

But your film?

BARBARA:

Oh, mine. I don’t know what happened to the ones I gave back. It doesn’t matter.

SUSAN:

So you only have the negative of the one image?

BARBARA:

Correct. The one we thought was the best. And she is moving in the photograph, so it is blurry, but it is very much Louise.

CHRYSANNE:

You photographed Hannah Wilke?

BARBARA:

Yes, she was one of the first, because we were friends, and she chose to lie on the floor with her sculptures. She has her arm up in the photo, covering her neck, because at that moment the lumps had come back and she didn’t want them to show. Later, of course, at the end of her life, she did that kick-ass exhibition at Ronald Feldman, and she was no longer afraid of showing the effects of the cancer—she showed everything—very gutsy—so it was only at the time of our shoot that she was self-conscious about the lumps.

CHRYSANNE:

She is an interesting artist because she wasn’t exactly dismissed, but she wasn’t as acknowledged, because she had such incredible physical beauty. At the end of her life, she let go of all of it, and the work got re-examined. In the photographs that you have taken, do you see the women showing an interior that has nothing to do with whether they are beautiful in terms of how the culture sees them?

BARBARA:

I’m not sure if anyone comes to mind at the moment—they are all beautiful to me. I just try to get them to relax, to fall into very natural poses. I don’t pose them. Some of them seem to be very aware of the way they will be perceived, and the result is perhaps a bit superficial when they do that—they’re not showing their interior selves as much. But posing for the camera is also an aspect of who they are. I think the ones who are not posing, who are the most authentic, show how incredibly beautiful they are, as women, regardless of how our culture might see them.

CHRYSANNE:

Who is the most recent person you photographed?

BARBARA:

This summer I went out to Santa Fe and photographed Judy Chicago—she had to be part of this project—and also Barbara Gonzales, who is the great-granddaughter of Maria Martinez, the famous southwest Native American potter. Barbara is a well known and well respected potter, working in her family tradition. I also photographed Hilary Lorenz when I was there. She is a New York artist but in the summertime, she has a studio in Abiquiu.

CHRYSANNE:

Who will you photograph next? Do you have a wish list?

BARBARA:

Oh yes, I have been trying to photograph Shirin Neshat for a couple of years. She is a lovely person, and she is so gracious, and she wants to accommodate me so we are hoping maybe this winter, but she is just so busy. I have tried to reach Sophie Calle, I would love to photograph her, I am such an admirer of her work. And Yayoi Kusama, I have written to her, I don’t know what is going to happen with that.

SUSAN:

Are you going to photograph Patricia Cronin with her sculpture Memorial To A Marriage at Woodlawn cemetery?

BARBARA:

I hope so. We were supposed to do a shoot last year, but Pattie felt the landscaping wasn’t right.

CHRYSANNE:

Have you photographed Deb Kass?

BARBARA:

Yes, in 1991. That’s how I found out about WAC. When I was photographing Deb she told me that a group of women were going to get together—an activist group—and asked if I wanted to come. I said, “Absolutely!” And that meeting was the beginning of WAC, Women’s Action Coalition.

CHRYSANNE:

Did you get very involved with WAC?

BARBARA:

Yes, I was the “phone tree queen,” in charge of phoning people who would phone more people who would phone more people, until everyone had been notified of an upcoming action.

SUSAN:

I remember that. In fact, I think that might be where we first met.

BARBARA:

I was able to photograph a lot of women I met there.

CHRYSANNE:

I went to WAC too.

BARBARA:

You remember? Our first action was when the Guggenheim was going to open a branch in Soho. It was in our neighborhood and not only that, the opening show was going to have four white men, and not only that, one of them was Carl Andre. Even though the art world was split over his trial, many of the women felt he murdered his wife and got away with it. So we picketed the opening and a lot of people refused to cross the picket line. We were wearing these T-shirts that said, Carl Andre is at the Guggenheim. Where is Ana Mendieta?

SUSAN:

It’s wonderful that you still have that. I know I have some WAC T-shirts but I don’t remember this one.

video ©2012 by MOMMY

CHRYSANNE:

That is a fantastic T-shirt.

BARBARA:

It is.

SUSAN:

It is amazing to think that this was not all that long ago, and the Guggenheim was going to open a new museum with an exhibition of all white men. It does seem really incredible.

BARBARA:

We jammed their fax machine. That was the first thing we did. Just sent fax after fax. We also sent them a gazillion postcards, and later they put Louise Bourgeois in the show and claimed they had always intended to, which was a bald-faced lie.

SUSAN:

Yes, I remember.

BARBARA:

So it was a very successful way to start. I talked to women at WAC meetings and asked if I could photograph them, because in the beginning I didn’t want to just photograph my friends. Right after I photographed Hannah Wilke I went to Nancy Spero’s opening at Josh Baer because I didn’t know her and I was shy about approaching artists that I didn’t know. I thought maybe I could photograph her in the gallery in front of her work, and she said it would be fine. And then, during WAC, women were just amazing—they were so accommodating and accessible, no matter who they were. Elizabeth Murray, for example—she couldn’t have been more down-to-earth, and gracious. She was just wonderful.

SUSAN:

Do you think that graciousness was influenced by WAC? By the sense of community the organization generated?

BARBARA:

I do. Now looking back, I feel that was such a special time.

CHRYSANNE:

I agree.

BARBARA:

It was a lot easier to approach people and get them to say yes, and they fit me into their schedules. There were a few that didn’t, but most of them did. Now it is much harder, everybody is busy and we are a little more separate. It’s just not the same time. I did over 70 women’s portraits in the first four years. And part of that was the momentum from WAC, I am quite sure.

CHRYSANNE:

And so your end number is 100?

BARBARA:

I guess so, although it is going to be hard to stop.

SUSAN:

You don’t have to stop.

CHRYSANNE:

You could go to the magic 108.

BARBARA:

We’ll see.

SUSAN:

The work of yours that I am the least familiar with, but I am quite curious about, is the self-portraiture that you have done. When did you do that in relationship to these portraits of women, and how did that get started?

BARBARA:

Well, as soon as I started using this camera to photograph women artists, I wanted to do things with it besides those portraits. It was about 1993 and I had a house upstate, so I started photographing at night, and I had a large field outside where I actually felt quite exposed because the moonlight, when the moon is full, is as bright as daylight. But I went out there and started doing some of the naked self portraits with masks. One time when I was shooting at night, I finished this one shot and I sat down against a tree, and I was waiting for the clouds to go past the moon, and I heard this grrrrrrrrrrr, grrrrrrrrrrr, grrrrrrrrrrr.

Oh my god, you know how magnified sounds are at night. I thought, There are no bears or wolves here, it could be a dog. So I picked up a stone and threw it behind the tree. Nothing ran off. I kept looking up at the sky to see if it was clear, and then I saw three pairs of eyes moving around, up in the tree above me. They were raccoons! They were probably waiting for me to get out of the way so they could get down the tree and look for food.

It was a little bit difficult to expose myself like that, but it was also kind of fun.

CHRYSANNE:

I know raccoons. In Toronto we are swamped with them and they are very smart.

BARBARA:

Another thing that happened which was really funny was one time when I was shooting during the day. I had bought a pig head from the butchering place up there in the country. And I was photographing myself naked with this pig head and a mask and other props, sitting on my own stone wall outside my house, when my neighbors decided to walk through my property to get to the state land on the other side. And they had a dog with them, and I had my tripod set up with a long extension cord stretched out so I could take my own photograph. And there I was, buck naked on this stone wall. Excuse me, but I have a pig’s head here, I don’t think you want to come much closer with your dog! So I put on my robe and they walked by—both of them were psychiatrists—and I have no idea what they thought. But disaster was averted—the dog did not run into the cord and knock over the camera.

CHRSYANNE:

Did they ever walk through your property again?

BARBARA:

I don’t know (laughter), but I’m sure they called out a warning if they did.

SUSAN:

The other thing I wonder about is the work you’ve done at night, because I am a little bit of a scaredy cat when I am alone in the woods or alone in isolated places, even at a perfectly safe place like MacDowell, where city people confess that they have trouble sleeping. But you have gone to really remote places alone. I find this very brave. I wonder if you can talk a little bit about the experience of venturing out as a woman to places that are so isolated.

BARBARA:

What is brave for one person is not brave for another. Maybe what I do is risky sometimes, but of course we artists do what we need to do to say what we need to say. Especially in very isolated situations—where I have been photographing standing stones, they can be way out in the middle of nowhere—I think I rely on my sensitivity and my antennae. There have been some times when I decided it would be better not to pitch my tent in one of those locations but to sleep in the car instead.

There are other times when some strange things have happened. But generally speaking, I think most people are missing out on an incredible experience—when you are out there and all you can hear is the ocean or a night bird, and there are all those stars and the moonlight and this incredibly beautiful landscape—it is a humbling experience.

CHRYSANNE:

What is the most isolated place that you have been to?

BARBARA:

There are several, really.

CHRYSANNE:

You mentioned Ireland before.

BARBARA:

I drove a ways to get to those sites, so they were often far away from villages. And the site in Armenia was pretty far away from the nearest town. A lot of them are really remote.

SUSAN:

Talk a little more about these sites and how you decided to photograph them. I think most people know Stonehenge, but that may be it. And I don’t even know myself what the origins of all of these sites are. Because you end up with these star streaks from the earth moving, I know that the exposures are quite long, and I feel that whatever else the images convey they are mapping time. I was thinking about this today as I was looking at a book that illustrated different ways people have represented time graphically. Your photographs have that quality at the same time that they are doing something else. But I wonder, did all those places have the same function at one time? Do they date from the same time period?

BARBARA:

First of all, many of them pre-date Stonehenge by a couple of hundred years. And at Stonehenge, all of the stones are dressed—shaped by hand—and the lintels are fitted to the uprights and so on, so it is the supreme example. But it is comparatively recent and I wouldn’t be surprised if artisans had come from other parts of the world, with specific knowledge and skills that contributed to how they made that monument.

I like the older stones because they are not dressed, and they have a lot of character. Of course, they have changed since they were first erected, maybe as early as 3,000 BC. Some of them are more recent than that. That was before there was written language, so we really don’t know much about them, and that, of course, is what intrigues me. The mystery is one of the things that draws me to them. As Keith Carter says, “I always love what I don’t understand.” So they are definitely spiritual sites, and people are drawn to them because they can feel the power. Scientists like Euan MacKie and Elma Parsamian have shown that some sites were purposely aligned with the movements of the moon or stars or planets. There were probably astronomer priests at that time. The Celtiberians were probably the ones who used their shipbuilding and navigational skills to bring that knowledge to various parts of the world. The Libyans were also brilliant navigators and explorers during ancient times.

I like what you said about representing time graphically. Another reason I photograph the stones at night is that I believe they are connectors between the earth and the sky, so including star trails emphasizes that.

SUSAN:

How do you find them all?

BARBARA:

I did a lot of reading, although most of the books concentrate on the British Isles, and of course Brittany has huge formations. People know a lot about those. But otherwise there are some obscure books that have references to other sites and Julian Cope has a couple of books, where he traveled to as many stones as he could find. The internet helped a lot, because sometimes people just pose in front of a stone as a snapshot. Of course, I didn’t know if those stones were still standing or if they were covered now with trees or if they were too close to buildings or in the midst of cities. So it is always an adventure to find them, even with ordnance survey maps in the UK. Sometimes they just don’t want to be found!

CHRYSANNE:

Are there stones in Africa and Asia that you have found too?

BARBARA:

Yes, certainly there are some in North Africa, in Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco, and I photographed some in The Gambia. Some of those people probably never saw stones anywhere else but they heard about them or the formations were described to them, and they used local stones to make what they could. The ones in Mongolia that I photographed are very different, and I have read that there are stones in India. I know that there are some in Indonesia, and some in Korea. I photographed a stone circle in Japan, but the stones are very small. Whether they are connected with the ones in Europe, I don’t know.

A man named Barry Fell, who was teaching biology at Harvard and who was a gifted linguist, especially in regard to ancient languages, wrote about ancient inscriptions discovered in the Americas. People sent him pieces of stone from the northeast that had markings on them and he said it was Ogam, the ancient Irish script, which he could read. Some people thought the marks were made by plowshares, but they even did an experiment, trying to make marks on stone with plowshares, but it didn’t look anything like what they had found. One of the inscriptions Fell translated said, Dedicated to the sun god Bel (Baal). I photographed a dolmen in New York State that has a plaque next to it and it says it’s a glacial erratic—a type of stone that doesn’t exist there, that was deposited from elsewhere by a glacier. Which it probably is. The capstone is not from that area, but it’s supported on five smaller stones, exactly like the dolmens in Ireland. So I think it must have been constructed intentionally. I know Fell’s theories are controversial. But he had a colleague who went up the Mississippi and Arkansas Rivers and made latex molds of Punic and Ogam inscriptions that were apparently left by Libyans, Celts and Phoenicians around 500 BC. I think these ancient travelers were capable of going all over the world. So that is how this knowledge was probably spread.

CHRYSANNE:

And they are all photographed in the middle of the night?

BARBARA:

As many as I could.

CHRYSANNE:

That is interesting to me because in Tibetan Buddhist mythology and tradition, there are Dakinis, some of these flying goddesses. They come out in the middle of the night. They are night ladies. They are not out so much in the middle of the day. As I understand it, the night is female.

BARBARA:

Interesting that you say that. Traditionally, the moon and the night are female, whereas the sun is male. All over the world, as you know, the moon has been a symbol of the feminine, particularly female emotions and intuition. And of course there is a phallic aspect of the standing stones, and although we always talk about mother earth, I thought, What if those people in Neolithic times believed it was mother sky and father earth? If father earth were lying on his back, the standing stone would be his erect penis and mother sky could come down onto that, and that could be how people were born or maybe how the stars were formed. It’s possible, it could have been a mythology at that time. And I like the idea of mother sky being the active partner!

SUSAN:

How did you get started or interested in them in the first place?

BARBARA:

When I got my 4 x 5 and started photographing, I did six residencies for the National Park Service and one for a state park. I learned a lot by photographing outdoors, and I found that I really liked texture so then I started to focus on rocks. I started seeking out rocks that were solitary and that had a presence. When I was in Scotland, I saw my first standing stones at The Ring of Brodgar and I said, “Oh my, I think the focus has narrowed and the project will be about this.” It was an amazing experience. I pitched my tent there and it was pure magic. I photographed all through the night until dawn.

SUSAN:

One thing that is interesting to me is that both of these projects, making the portraits of women and photographing the standing stones, are long term, on-going works, and I wonder if you feel that they somehow relate to each other or are intertwined? Or do they just feel like two parallel lines of thought that have no relationship to one another?

BARBARA:

I think they are related, in that they are both concerned with women’s issues, women’s perspectives around the world. Very definitely. One is perhaps more about my personal relationship to the world, and the other is more a project that I hope will enhance the image that women have, especially women artists, in the eyes of the world. Some of the women, especially the ones who are not as well known, or not known at all, working in isolation as many of us are, have been somewhat empowered by being on the walls of A/c Projectroom in the early 90s or in Poland at the National Museum in 2010, on the same wall with someone like Kiki Smith or Jackie Winsor or Jenny Holzer, and this is important to me as well. One young woman that comes to mind was part of one segment of the art world, she was probably not well known by a lot of women artists even, and she died just a couple of months ago. I feel so grateful that she will be remembered as part of this project, no matter what happens to it.

CHRYSANNE:

Who is she?

BARBARA:

Eva Nebeska, a painter and one of the sweetest, kindest people I’ve ever met. I hope that being part of this group has some impact on the lives of these women. It is very important to me.

CHRYSANNE:

Have you done a book with all the photographs?

BARBARA:

I hope to, and I plan to. Right now I’m just beginning a book on my standing stones so that will come first, and then I will start working on the other one. Maybe the production of the two books will overlap.

CHRYSANNE:

Getting back to Mongolia, how did you find out that they had the stones and how was traveling in Mongolia? How was that different, east versus west?

BARBARA:

I first saw the photographs of the stones in a magazine and a friend at my day job wanted to go there and I had never really thought about it. The more I thought about it, the more I thought this would be great because they are making this huge transition from a nomadic society to a modern one and I wanted to see it before it changed. And also, it is a culture that has a very special relationship to the land, and I love landscape. And there are several spiritual sites. So I started researching sacred sites and we tried to find them. Some of those sites had standing stones. We didn’t go to the northwest, but we did go all the way east, near the Chinese border, where almost no tourists go. We had to bring tents. We hired a driver and an interpreter, which I never have done before or since, but we were able to determine our itinerary and change it at any time. It is a huge country, with mountains and forests as well as grassland and steppes, and then it has the Gobi. Our main driver was from a horse breeding family. They make everything from horse, and I milked a horse! We had a different driver in the Gobi and we visited a camel breeding family there.

CHRYSANNE:

Did you meet any shamans on the way?

BARBARA:

I would have loved to, but we didn’t.

SUSAN:

It is interesting that you bring up people from a nomadic culture because I think that nomadic culture, before Islam, had been matriarchal and the city was considered patriarchal. Perhaps that is part of the unacknowledged reason that nomadic people are reviled in contemporary culture. The gypsies have that problem and so do the Bedouin. And of course, nomadic culture resists the norms of capitalism.

CHRYSANNE:

Well, the Roma are the most obvious example.

SUSAN:

Part of the resentment comes from the way in which nomadic people think about the world around them. They have a different understanding about what is theirs and don’t recognize property in the same way. It is one of the reasons for the stereotype of gypsies as thieves.

BARBARA:

That is absolutely correct. Most indigenous cultures, like the Australian aborigines, feel like the land belongs to everyone. It is part of their whole existence—their history, their ancestors, their spirituality, everything is intertwined with the land they live in and the ecosystems they inhabit. But the idea of buying and selling land is incomprehensible. I suppose nomads are similar to refugees. Nobody really wants them and that’s unfortunate.

CHRYSANNE:

We have a friend who is a writer who terms himself a cross-cultural nomad.

BARBARA:

It is a charming term.

SUSAN:

In Mongolia, which is such a different culture, did you have a sense that the sites were respected as sacred sites, that they were part of the religion of the people who were there?

BARBARA:

Not sure about that. Even in Europe, the stones have been there so long that people will plough around them if they are in a field but that’s also because they are superstitious about them. They may be starting to honor them in some places because the rest of the world is paying attention to them, but many times they don’t revere them the way they did. In Ireland, the church had to adopt many pre-Christian things. They had to incorporate them because they couldn’t stamp them out. But many people may just disregard the old sites, not giving them importance. Sometimes the stones are defaced and so they get fenced off. At Stonehenge you can’t walk freely among the stones anymore.

SUSAN:

I didn’t know that.

CHRYSANNE:

So it is like the Parthenon.

SUSAN:

They attracted too many people.

Is it your feeling that the skill to build these stones was spread by one particular group or culture; that it came from one place and was dispersed by travel and exploration?

BARBARA:

Who knows, really? For a while, people were speculating that the knowledge came from the Middle East into Spain and then to Italy and Malta, which of course was a huge site, and on from there up the coast to the British Isles. But now some people are saying that it started in the British Isles. The more they excavate and the more archaeological work that is done, the more they learn about these cultures. I dislike the word prehistory. Why is it prehistory? It is history. It is all part of the continuum, and it is all our history as people of the Earth.

SUSAN:

Have you ever felt threatened or scared in any of these places?

BARBARA:

Well, once I wasn’t really scared but I was very tense, very anxious. I went to a site where there were fields all the way around so I could hear and see anyone approach. And the site was a square of earth that had tall oak trees, and it had a passage-tomb, and then it had some standing stones. It wasn’t near the solstice or any of those times so I thought, OK, maybe because it was on the weekend some hooligans might come and start drinking and cause some mischief, but I was not going to be in the midst of some solstice celebration or anything. I thought it would be alright to pitch my tent. But I pitched it so the entrance was facing the road that came up to the site.

So I was lying in my tent, facing this very narrow opening which faced the road, and at about 4:30 a.m. I heard a car come along and turn and come up the road.

I thought, Oh great. And the car stopped and I watched, horrified, as a man got out and started to walk up to the site. He had a black coat on with a cowl over his head and a black scarf wrapped around his face and neck, with only his nose and eyes showing. He began to perform some bizarre, personal ritual that lasted for two and a half hours. He lit a stick of incense and placed it in the ground and stood before it, facing east. He circled the site several times and again stood facing east. He was carrying a jar of some kind and it looked like there was an amulet or something, on a cord around his neck. At some point he sat down, and he was doing this rocking thing that I have seen people do in a mental institution. Finally he disappeared for maybe an hour behind the passage-tomb. It sounded like he was banging something with a rock.

I was thinking, OK, he has seen the tent, he wasn’t offended by it, somehow I have not violated the sacred space or he would have done something by now; he probably thinks there is a couple in there or maybe one man or two men, but he would never think there’s one woman in there. So I was pretty much OK but I didn’t dare take my eyes off him. I couldn’t relax or move a muscle. Finally he went to the eastern part, facing east again, and I prayed that he was waiting for sunrise and would leave then. He didn’t have the jar anymore. I didn’t know what he did with that or what was in it, and I didn’t want to know. When the sun appeared, he stood facing it. He took off the cloak with the hood and he was wearing a white sweater and multi-colored, patch-work pants! He made a slight bow toward the passage-tomb, turned, and put his arm, fist closed, across his chest. Then he went to his car and drove away. I couldn’t rest. So I just packed up my tent and went into town and had a good breakfast of crêpes with fresh strawberries.

SUSAN:

Would you describe yourself as having been wary or afraid?

BARBARA:

Not afraid, no, I decided early on that this was nothing directed toward me. Not afraid, but I felt vulnerable.

SUSAN:

Maybe we can wind down by having you tell us a couple of sweet anecdotes about the women that you have photographed.

BARBARA:

Oh, some of them have been just great. Sandra Fabara was one. She was a graffiti artist at a time when she was the only woman in the subculture of male graffiti artists. From ’79 to’83 I think she was using her tag, Lady Pink. I was glad to include her in the project.

One of my heroines is Jacqueline Livingston. She was teaching photography at Cornell, and in 1978 she got fired after she exhibited photographs of her husband, her father-in-law, and her son, and they were naked. When she asked why she was being fired, the head of the art department told her, “You cannot be a feminist and expect to work here. And you certainly cannot photograph men’s genitalia.” Although some of the faculty men were painting nude portraits of young women that were so realistic you could tell who the models were. Of course that was accepted.

CHRYSANNE:

Did she take them to court?

BARBARA:

She was part of a sex discrimination suit against Cornell, a class action suit, that was in court from 1980 to 1985 and considered a “win” when they got an out-of-court-settlement.

CHRYSANNE:

Was she able to get another teaching job?

BARBARA:

She applied for teaching jobs but was black-listed, because of the controversy of her art and the suit against Cornell. She opened a small gallery in Soho. I went to Ithaca specifically to photograph her, and I drove to upstate New York to get Jenny Holzer at her farm. When I was out in Idaho visiting my parents, I photographed women there, and when I did my national park residency in Michigan I photographed an artist there. I photographed an artist in Ireland, two women in Poland, one in Hungary, and three in The Gambia. I tried to make the project as inclusive as possible so that it wouldn’t be elitist or geographic, just this community of women, women who make art. I enjoy seeking out some of these women in other places. It was such a privilege to be welcomed into their homes and studios and to see them in their environments—just to hang out with them. I feel very lucky.

SUSAN:

And did you have a particular selection process?

BARBARA:

It was very organic. When I was in WAC, sometimes I asked people. I asked Laurie Anderson to recommend someone and she suggested Tina Girouard, whom I didn’t know. When I went out to Los Angeles, one of my friends, Tobey Crockett, suggested a couple of people and helped me get in touch with them. I went mainly to photograph Betye Sarr, but I ended up photographing some women I hadn’t known about.

SUSAN:

So even if these women didn’t know who you were, they would still entertain the idea of sitting for you? Did you have to present a proposal or a list of the women that you had already shot to legitimate yourself in their eyes?

BARBARA:

I do now. I sent a whole package to Judy Chicago and Barbara Gonzales, for example, to see if they were amenable. It’s not as easy as it was during the WAC time.

SUSAN:

It is interesting how communities can come together in certain periods of time and then dissolve, really disappear.

BARBARA:

That is exactly what happened to WAC. It was a wonderful thing while it lasted, wasn’t it?

SUSAN:

It was wonderful, I remember how great it was.

BARBARA:

Very empowering, some of the actions really had an impact—some of the cases where we picketed outside and filled the courtroom. We were very sedate in the courtroom, but we picketed outside and wrote letters to judges. One judge quoted from our letters in his decision, and it was just an amazing thing. It was a bonding experience for a lot of women. But you are right, it was very ephemeral—when it was over, it was over.

SUSAN:

WAC seemed to dissolve in the wake of Bill Clinton’s election.

CHRYSANNE:

I think that energy and those activities are coming back.

BARBARA:

I hope so.

SUSAN:

One of first things I heard about Occupy Wall Street, early on, was how male dominated it was and that women couldn’t get their voices heard. And I couldn’t believe it. It sounded just like more late 60s activism against the war in Vietnam where the guys thought they were the real Marxists and the women were expected to fetch coffee!

BARBARA:

Right.

SUSAN:

I thought, “This is ridiculous!” Women are having trouble getting themselves heard now in an activist organization that is a critique of current governance. I really couldn’t believe it.

CHRYSANNE:

But some of them, like Georgia Sagri, who occupied Artists Space for a few days, and was in the Whitney Biennial, are making their voices known. There are some women from that group who have made themselves known whether you like what they do or not.

SUSAN:

But that was a splinter group that was more focused on the art world. I think the main Occupy movement as it began in Zuccotti Park, at least in the very beginning, was not especially congenial to women.

CHRYSANNE:

But WAC was part of the art world.

BARBARA:

Right.

CHRYSANNE:

Where would you like to see the photographs, once you finish them, installed? And how would you like to see them installed? And who would you like to write about them?

BARBARA:

Well, of course I would like to see them in a book, and I would like to see that book in every art history department in the country. And I would like Lucy Lippard to write about the photographs. Of course I would like a major museum in the United States to show this work.

SUSAN:

I would like to see all of those portraits of women in the atrium space at MOMA.

BARBARA:

And they should own it as well. I have been a little hesitant to approach galleries and museums about this. I have sent the catalog from the National Museum in Poland to several places in this country, but I don’t know anyone personally at most of the US museums, so it is hard to make a cold call. Some of them you cannot reach by phone. Yes, a New York gallery would be great, I would love that.

SUSAN:

Are they editioned, the prints?

BARBARA:

An edition of ten.

CHRYSANNE:

How large do you see them?

BARBARA:

The edition is 13 x 19. I print them from scanned negatives on my Epson printer. But I have printed larger ones as well for the show in Poland. I might do an edition that is 17 x 22, but I don’t need them too large because I like the intimate scale of a slightly smaller photograph.

CHRYSANNE:

Any other dreams? To photograph? Is there a third project?

BARBARA:

I have started one but I’m not certain whether I’ll continue that, we’ll see. But in terms of the stones, there are three more countries I would like to do. I’m going to Morocco in November because it’s a nice connector between southern Europe and West Africa. Italy has some beautiful stones that I would like to photograph. And then in the spring I’ll shoot in the Crimea because it’s a nice link between southern Europe and Armenia, which is all the way east.

SUSAN:

Thank you.

CHRYSANNE:

Any words to women out there?

BARBARA:

Just keep working!

We are pleased to announce that MOMMY will be at the NY Art Book Fair from September 28th to 30th, at MoMA PS1 in Long Island City, Queens. A preview will be held on the evening of Thursday, September 27th.

Free and open to the public, the NY Art Book Fair is the world’s premier event for artists’ books, catalogs, monographs, periodicals, and zines presented by more than 270 international presses, booksellers, antiquarians, artists, and independent publishers from twenty-five countries.

You can find us on the 3rd floor at table X06. We will be presenting books by Cathy Busby, Vera Frenkel, Claudia Hart, Maxine Henryson, Linda Montano, Susan Silas, Chrysanne Stathacos, Betty Tompkins, and Barbara Yoshida.

On Friday September 28th, at 12:00 p.m. at Printed Matter’s booth (F03), there will be a book signing by MOMMY directors Susan Silas (for her book EYES  WIDE SHUT) and Chrysanne Stathacos (for her book The Wish Machine Travels, second edition).

MOMMY is pleased to show you a sampling of the books that will be available at our table. We hope to see you the NY Art Book Fair.

 

                                                            Cathy Busby

 

                                                           Betty Tompkins

 

                                                             Barbara Yoshida

 

                                                                 Claudia Hart

 

                                                           Maxine Henryson

 

                                                                 Vera Frenkel

 

                                                                          Susan Silas

 

  Chrysanne Stathacos

 

                                                                      Linda Montano

 

photo credit for Montano book cover – Gisela Gamper

SUSAN:

Yesterday I was studying your website and the first thing I noticed was a fabulous photograph of you taken in 1973, wedged between two enormous paintings, and the caption read Ellensburg, Washington. Is that where you came from or where you studied?

BETTY:

No, I was born in Washington, D.C. and I grew up in Philadelphia. I went to Syracuse University for my undergraduate degree and then I became a cliché and I married one of my teachers and he got a job at Central Washington State College, so we moved out to Ellensburg. I did my graduate degree and then there were a couple of years where we were going back and forth between New York and Ellensburg.

I started the first Fuck Paintings in 1969 and it was in the days of slides and it did occur to me that if you took a sheet of slides of mine and just held them up, that it was just way too close to its source matter, so I set this shot up for scale and I had it printed out so that whenever I sent out my slides, I sent out this photograph. Eventually, in 2004, I was part of Larry Clark’s Untitled Portfolio, done for Printed Matter. I was really honored that he asked me to participate. When he was here he said, “Do you have any prints?” I thought he meant like etchings, lithographs, and then I thought no, to Larry Clark a print is a photograph and I took this one out and he said, “That’s the one.” And we had it editioned and it was part of the portfolio.

SUSAN:

That’s a good trajectory for the photograph—to have wound up in that portfolio over thirty years later.

BETTY:

I was really interested and still am interested in the second life of anything, you know, because the first life can be really, really short. If you participate in an art fair your first life is over in three to five days for a painting or a group of works so you have to have a second life—you absolutely have to. It was really important to me at that time, to get that image in particular, established as part of my iconography so that people would know without a doubt that the paintings were large.

SUSAN:

It’s interesting that you talk about second lives because one of our motivations is to recuperate lost lineages and to recover things that aren’t totally in place the way they should be. I think for women this tends to be a bigger problem than it is for men.

BETTY:

You just defined my career, which began in 2002.

SUSAN:

The other thing I was thinking about last night looking through your site was that you talked about starting out as an abstract expressionist painter and I noticed that Philip Pearlstein says that about himself as well, and although his images were less explicit and in fact, much more conventional with respect to their representation of women, more in the vein of the images that John Berger describes, he had a much easier time getting his work out even though he too was described as swimming against the stream at the time by making “representational” painting. I wonder how conscious you were of him at that time?

BETTY:

Of course, he was a really big artist. But he was a realist and I wasn’t interested in realism.  I thought he presented the figure more or less the way you would paint a rock. And that didn’t really interest me at all, but he was a famous artist, so of course, I knew who he was even as an undergraduate. It was part of what you grew up on.

CHRYSANNE:

Were you in New York when you started the Fuck Paintings?

BETTY:

Yes. It was 1969 and I had just finished my Masters degree and my first husband, Don Tompkins, was getting an EdD at Teachers College so we moved from Ellensburg way uptown. I did one painting after graduate school that had to do with the ideas I had been working with of commercially derived imagery and then I did Fuck Painting #1.

CHRYSANNE:

Do you remember the inspiration or the genesis of that first Fuck Painting?

BETTY:

Of course I do. Don had this collection of porn, which he had gotten from Hong Kong. It was either Hong Kong or Singapore. It was illegal at the time. He was twelve years older than I was. He got these photos in the 1950s. It was totally illegal to send the stuff through the U.S. mail. At the time, he lived in Everett, Washington, so he went up to Vancouver and rented a postal box and sent off his money order and when he figured enough time had passed he drove across the border, picked up the envelope and then drove back, hoping that he looked like the all American boy and that nobody would search the car and nobody searched the car—so he had them. When I met him, the photographs came with him. It wasn’t that I had to seek them out, they were just there.

I was looking at them one day and thinking, you know, if you take off the head, and the hands, and the feet, all the identifiers, then what you have left is something really beautiful in an abstract way, plus it has this tremendous kick as subject matter. So that’s why I decided to do it. I was also new to New York City, going to galleries constantly. At that time you could actually get to see everything; you’d do 57th Street and the Upper East Side in one day or maybe a day and a half. So every month I could go and see everything and I was really disturbed by how little that I saw engaged me as a viewer. There was no essential engagement. So I was going to the shows, I was very dutiful, I went to see everything. I’d go in and I’d go out and I said to myself at some point: “This guy worked for two years, at least two years to do this work and I can’t even stand here for five minutes and look at it. There’s nothing here.”

CHRYSANNE:

Do you remember what period of work during that time struck you as so uninteresting?

BETTY:

It was a lot of different kinds of things. Anything that was realistic—boring. There was nothing abstract about the paint handling to get me so, OK, I get it, it’s a boy in a boat. Fine. I’m good with it. There is nothing else here, let’s move on. Or they were abstract paintings that were copies of essential … they were next generations down. The Pop Art I liked very much. That was really engaging to me but there was just so much that just did nothing for me so I thought: “Well, if I ever get a show, in ten years, like these people are saying I have to wait, I want people to stand there. I want them to stare at the paintings and see what I did as a painter.” When I started the Fuck Paintings, it seemed to me that I was just fulfilling my own ambition to do that.

CHRYSANNE:

And what was the first reaction? Who saw the first Fuck Painting?

BETTY:

Let’s see. I can’t remember who the first dealer was who I managed to get up there. It was really different. You could actually go to a gallery and ask them to come to your studio.

CHRYSANNE:

I remember.

BETTY:

It was different times. And they would come. And I don’t remember anymore who it was but whoever it was… you have to realize that we lived in Teachers College student housing and they were two room apartments. So the bedroom, which had the bed and the dresser was also my studio and there was a space (gestures at a small area) maybe between that painting and this stool, where I could set up the painting but obviously if I wanted to back up I had to hop on the bed. And then the living room, the other room, was Don’s studio and study, the kitchen was tacked on to one end and if you didn’t want to look at anything you put pillows in the bathtub and sat there. So that was it. So the first person to come to my studio walked in to the bedroom and ran out and then backed in. And I thought: “I wonder what it is that I really have done.”

SUSAN:

And it was a man? A male dealer?

BETTY:

Yes. They were almost all male dealers. And the men dealers were more accessible. More approachable.

SUSAN:

Because you were a woman?

BETTY:

No they weren’t interested at all. Not at all. But it was also very clear to me when I first came here because I would go around and I would act friendly and try to figure out—what is this scene that I am aspiring to join? And everybody said the same thing: “We’re not interested in people who were recently students. Come back in ten years when you have found your own voice.” And that was clear.

CHRYSANNE:

I experienced the same thing in Canada.

BETTY:

Yes, I think it was really universal. It was not the cherry picking of graduate students from studios that we have now.

CHRYSANNE:

Rothko was 42 when he had his first major solo show at Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century Gallery in New York. That was standard.

video ©2012 by MOMMY

BETTY:

There is this really wonderful video called Painters Painting, a documentary on painting.

SUSAN:

Oh, it’s wonderful, yes. It was directed by Emile de Antonio. (The full title of the film is Painters Painting: A Candid History of the Modern Art Scene, 1940-1970. It was filmed in 1972.)

BETTY:

I read about it, someone mentioned it to me. I’ve watched it about four times now. You have the 40s guys and none of them had shows before they were 40. DeKooning was 44. Newmann was 45 and Hoffman was 65. Then you have Rauschenberg and Johns and the age dropped considerably. And then you have Stella and there the divide is so totally complete, the focus, the expectation. I think expectation is the correct word. What he thought his life would be compared to what the older guys had expected. Just to get to that moment. I thought, “This is a historical moment.”

CHRYSANNE:

It is, it is.

Were their any women painters at the time that you thought highly of?

BETTY:

There were the wives : Elaine De Kooning, Helen Frankenthaler, Lee Krasner. I adored their work. I was heavily enthusiastic about it. When I was an undergraduate my major painting teacher entertained us for a full three hour class on why there were no great women painters. This was long before the exhibition and research of the same name. And I kept saying: “Well what about, what about, what about,” and he was incredibly dismissive of them all, including Marisol, who was the new one.

CHRYSANNE:

She was very popular at that time.

BETTY:

Exactly. I kind of got the impression and I actually don’t know if it’s historically accurate or not but there was a period where you didn’t have to be a wife—Marisol was nobody’s wife and she was significant but they were really only going to tolerate one per movement. So you had Marisol for one kind of work and Lee Bontecou for another kind of work.

CHRYSANNE:

And Louise Nevelson for another kind of work.

BETTY:

Yes, exactly, but there wasn’t room for multiples of women and that was very disturbing.

SUSAN:

At the beginning of the eighties that was still operative.

BETTY:

I think it’s Susan Rothenberg who was instrumental in putting an end to this. At a certain point at the height of her popularity (if she’s the one I’m thinking of, it was either her or someone of her generation) — she refused to be the only woman in a show. She recognized it for tokenism and she insisted that they include others or they didn’t include her at all.

CHRYSANNE:

At the reopening of MOMA in 1984, with the new building, the International Survey of Contemporary Art included over 160 artists of which fourteen or fifteen were women. Susan Rothenberg was one of them—it was a devastating moment for a lot of people who went to that exhibition.

BETTY:

Yes, you get to see it right there in front of you: no ifs, ands, or buts. When I was an undergraduate, one of my teachers said to me: “What are you going to do after you graduate?” And I said: “Well, I’ll get my graduate degree, my M.F.A. and then I’ll go to New York and be an artist.” And he said: “The only way you’re going to make it is on your back.”

SUSAN:

I remember that expression even when I was in college. Male faculty said that to women who had serious academic ambitions.

BETTY:

The first time I had an appointment at a gallery to bring my slides in, I was so terrified at the sexual threat that this guy had set up for me years before, that I threw up.

SUSAN:

I did read somewhere, either on your website or in a blog interview you with you that at one point—and I thought this was kind of wonderful because it reminded me of something in my experience in the ‘80s—you had begged your husband to take your work in as his.

BETTY:

I did.

SUSAN:

In the ‘80s after I finished my M.F.A. at Cal Arts, I remember sitting in a living room with a group of women discussing whether we should hire young male actors and have them take our work into galleries as their own.

BETTY:

What a wonderful idea!! In my case, I thought, “We have the same last name.” All I would do was label the work Tompkins. He was the right age, he was twelve years older than me so that made him the right age, the right gender. No, he wouldn’t do it.

SUSAN:

What was his reasoning for not wanting to do it?

BETTY:

The subject matter.

SUSAN:

Was he disapproving?

BETTY:

Actually, he was concerned because he was an academic, he taught at the time at NYU and he was concerned that it would be successful.

SUSAN:

That’s a good twist.

(Laughter.)

BETTY:

Yes, and what would that mean to his academic career if this was going to be the work that was associated with his name?

SUSAN:

That’s actually very funny.

BETTY:

I was a little pissed off at the time.

CHRYSANNE:

Did he like the Fuck Paintings?

BETTY:

Yes. He did and he didn’t. I mean, after all, they were from his photographs. Let’s just say there was a basic interest in the subject matter. I think that he was surprised at what I did with it and how determined and dogged I was with the vision of it and how I wouldn’t let anything interfere with my doing it. At the same time, I think he was mortified and nervous for himself. And probably not without cause for the period.

SUSAN:

I’m thinking there was some justification for his fears given the climate then.

BETTY:

Yes, there was. I was not a happy camper but certainly he was supporting us and I was not and so you had to pull together as a couple to keep the rent paid.

CHRYSANNE:

And the original pornography, that came from Asia?

BETTY:

Yes.

CHRYSANNE:

And was it shot in black and white?

BETTY:

They were all black and white photos, all about (gestures with thumb and forefinger) this big.

CHRYSANNE:

Were the images of Asian people or Western people?

BETTY:

They were mostly Asian. Sometimes you couldn’t tell. And sometimes I cropped things so fast and altered it so quickly it wasn’t important.

CHRYSANNE:

Do you think that the initial way that they took the images was very different from Western pornography?

BETTY:

No. All the cropping is mine. These were scenes, orgies, two people, three people, four people, ten people. It was probably standard porn for the time. American porn in print I didn’t even know about. I’m sure it existed but I didn’t know about it.

SUSAN:

I can’t help but think about all of the theorization of male gaze that I studied in graduate school, I wonder, were you conscious of cropping them in a way that gave some kind of equal space to both sexes?

BETTY:

No. That’s really fascinating because of course it does. It was not a conscious thing. I just wanted to get a composition that sang to me. That I wanted to spend those hours painting. Of course, we are all a product of the time we live in whether deliberate or not, feminism and ideas about equality were in full force. I would have had to be unconscious to have not been influenced and I was not unconscious. Does that make sense?

SUSAN:

Yes. In any case, the more strident dialogue that developed around pornography from the feminist perspective came a bit later.

BETTY:

The general dialogue when I was first in New York—my general impression, which I think is accurate, was that the feminists were not pro pleasure.

SUSAN:

No. And they were certainly not pro porn.

BETTY:

They were against anything that I was doing. If you were going to theorize about it.

SUSAN:

I remember being very influenced by Susan Brownmiller’s book Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape, published in 1975. I thought the way she delineated rape as a political tool was quite profound, and that’s how it functions in wars to this day, but …

BETTY:

In the stream of this current election it is a major theme. Akin is only saying what they all think. They want him to leave so that they can refocus on financial and fiscal matters but basically he has stated quite clearly their agenda.

SUSAN:

Where I wanted to go with that was that while Brownmiller’s analysis was an incredibly lucid description of power relations with respect to rape, some part of that thinking and energy became something else. The vilification of men with respect to rape was totally appropriate but it crept into the definition of sex, or somehow got laid on top of sexuality generally.

BETTY:

Yes, it did.

SUSAN:

Susan Brownmiller, I believe, was involved in the formation of Women Against Pornography, which was founded about four years after the book came out. Catherine MacKinnon was a strong supporter and while it was a crusade to prevent violence against women it seemed at the same time to be totally anti-pleasure. Their perspective made it difficult to separate victimhood from the act of sex.

BETTY:

Did you read Richard Meyer’s essay in the WAC catalogue? I’m not in the show but he wrote an essay, which I am in, and he starts the essay off by saying that almost everyone that he is going to discuss in his essay is not included in the show and that the common theme among them is as pleasure. And he goes into a terrific short history of the feminist movement, what their attitude was.

CHRYSANNE:

The well known photograph of Linda Benglis with the dildo—did you know about it at the time?

BETTY:

The dildo, I loved it! Sure I subscribed to Artforum and I opened it up and WOW! This is terrific! As a matter of fact I probably still have that issue of Artforum. I thought it was fantastic, really gutsy of her and she was beautiful, she was gorgeous.

SUSAN:

Were you attacked by women?

BETTY:

No I was ignored by everybody. You have to realize that my exhibition opportunities were so limited. I was in two group shows in 1973, one at Warren Benedict and LoGuiduce Gallery. The one at Warren Benedict was a bunch of emerging artists and the show didn’t get much attention to start with. The one at LoGuiduce Gallery got much more attention because there were heavy hitters in there. My painting hung next to an Artschwager. I have the announcement somewhere. As a friend of mine said: “I’ve heard of all of these people but who the hell is Betty Tompkins?” Don’t know. Were people upset. Well, the painting didn’t sell and as far as I know nobody ran screaming from the gallery.

SUSAN:

Was it one of the big paintings?

BETTY:

Yes. It was Fuck Painting #6 which is 84” x 60.”

SUSAN:

You must have had at least some exhibition history because in 1973 you had a painting that was going to France.

BETTY:

I was in these two shows and someone saw the painting in LoGuiduce Gallery and he was putting together a show in Paris. The idea was that it would be an auction and an exhibition—so basically, you’d get some money from doing it. So they came and they picked two paintings out and the trucker came and the packer and they were shipped off. This was before email, before internet, and phone calls were prohibitively expensive, but I got a notice that the paintings had been held up in customs and declared pornographic and were not being allowed into the country and therefore I was not going to be in this exhibition. So then there was the problem of how the hell was I going to get the paintings back, which did take a year for me to do. I didn’t know enough to call up ArtNews or Art International or any of the magazines and say: “If you’d run a little something on it maybe it will pressure them to help me get the paintings back.” I didn’t go to The New York Times. I didn’t do any of the things that people would do without thinking today. All I did was write letter after letter after letter, make phone call after phone call after phone call.

CHRYSANNE:

They might not have done anything.

BETTY:

They might not have anyway. This was happening just when Andy Warhol had some penis paintings or drawings that got stuck coming back from a show in Canada. The United States wasn’t going to let them in. So they were flopping back and forth around Niagara Falls for a while. So I read about this in the paper and thought: “Oh great, now you’re going to get the paintings back and they won’t be allowed into the country and then they will be sent back to Paris and they are going to spend eternity crossing the ocean, from one continent to the other, where I’m never going anywhere.”

SUSAN:

A nice conceptual art work.

BETTY:

I did finally get them back. And it was interesting, because even though people didn’t know about it because I really didn’t have people to tell and I didn’t know how one would go about it, there was a sense about my work that it should NOT be shown. Because that was it. After 1973, nobody would show them.

CHRYSANNE:

No one would show them?

BETTY:

Zero. Zilch.

CHRYSANNE:

When did you next show?

BETTY:

The next time I showed those pieces was 2002. What I did eventually was I took them off the stretchers and I rolled them up quite carefully, put a sheet between each one and I put them under the pool table that’s in the living room and they lived there for a couple of decades. I had a small retrospective at Monmouth College in 1997 and I put two of the paintings, one of the Cow Cunt Paintings and a Fuck Painting on stretchers. So they were included in that show.

CHRYSANNE:

What did you paint after these?

BETTY:

After the Cow Cunt Paintings, I did a series with language where I would use the defining noun of whatever it was, did a lot of animals: dog, cat, cow, pig, three or four letter animals. I did a huge series of those and I had my first solo show in New York with those paintings and the dealer was, it was a very bad experience and I got so disgusted with her that I lost the discipline to do the paintings, because they were difficult. They are all difficult. We all know that—they’re all hard. But I lost the discipline to keep that vision going because of the one particular dealer. So I stopped doing those and I did a series of Muzzlemen, which were animal–headed mythological creatures and I showed those quite a lot in the East Village, during the East Village scene.

I did a solo show with Steven Styles at Sensory Evolution and was in group shows at Gracie Mansion, Sensory Evolution, Civilian warfare, Now, Nico Smith, Zeus-Trabia, among others. It was a very exciting time. For a few years, I had a piece or two on exhibit somewhere almost all of the time. Eventually the animal–headed mythological creatures became statues from Roman and Greek times with animals, I just broke them in two, in landscape or ruin settings and they eventually led to my doing….

I wanted to do things with real people.I found these Taschen books and they were of softcore porn from the 1890s through the 1930s. So I started a series of drawings based on those and paintings, which I did on tools. And those led me right back to the harder core stuff. So it was like this one big gigantic circle.

SUSAN:

I did read somewhere, perhaps on a blog about you—that you photographed couples having sex? But I thought all of the imagery came from pornography.

BETTY:

I never photographed anybody. I have interesting things sent to me but I don’t photograph people. I have never wanted to be in that position vis-á-vis the model.

CHRYSANNE:

People have sent you photographs of themselves?

BETTY:

Oh sure.

SUSAN:

Just like they send them to Hustler magazine.

BETTY:

Sure. It’s very easy to find my email. And I have people who volunteer. And I go: “Don’t crop. High resolution please.”

SUSAN:

Just because he’s been so in the news lately, I’m curious if the show that Paul Schimmel curated with you in Houston in 1975 was of the Fuck Paintings?

BETTY:

Yes. The review in the Houston paper said they were about as interesting as a medical textbook. For a while, I wanted to put that on my card.

SUSAN:

So he supported that work so early on?

BETTY:

Yes, he did. I think he was still in graduate school studying with Jim Harithas at the time. Paul had been a student of mine. He was a student of mine when he was in high school. I taught in a private school—the Bentley School. I thought he was a little bored by school and I challenged him. We were very close. He was always welcome at my house and often stayed there when he was in college and beyond I am very proud of his accomplishments as chief curator at L.A. MOCA. I am particularly proud of the way he handled being fired there.

SUSAN:

I noticed on your website that in 1988 you got a grant from NYFA (New York Foundation for the Arts).

BETTY:

It was not for this work.

SUSAN:

That is exactly what I wanted to ask because that was the period when Ronald Reagan was President and two years later (at the federal rather than state level) we had John Frohnmayer vetoing the artists who were selected by their peer review panel as recipients of NEA grants. And this veto was famously supported by Jesse Helms in the Senate on the grounds of “decency issues”. And thus we had the NEA four —Karen Finley, Tim Miller, John Fleck, and Holly Hughes denied the grants that they had just been awarded.

BETTY:

That was a time when I would sit here and think that if I hadn’t already done those paintings—I’d be doing those paintings. That would be the moment to do the paintings. But the NYFA grant that I got was for the language pieces in drawing.

SUSAN:

I was made curious because I was startled by the timing of it. Because it was such a deeply conservative period.

BETTY:

It was very frightening. Although I think what is going on now is more frightening.

CHRYSANNE:

And I don’t think that NYFA was like the NEA. Jesse Helms was the problem with the NEA.

BETTY:

It was government money at the federal level. They weren’t going to give it out without conditions. It’s the public.

SUSAN:

But even NYFA is a state agency and answers to someone.

BETTY:

Yes, that is very true. There is a built-in conservatism to public money because it is public money. Makes no difference what level it is on—federal, state, local township. In my twenties, I did apply for NYFAs and NEAs. I didn’t realize it was a lost cause.

CHRYSANNE:

When you started showing again—you mentioned 2002—what happened in 2002?

BETTY :

What happened, actually happened in 1996 or 1997. I was talking to Chuck Close on the phone, and he said: “Betty, remember those paintings from the 1970s, it’s time to take them out.” I said, “What makes you think so?” He said: “I was at the Whitney Biennale and there are all these younger artists and they are trying to do what you did. And your paintings just blow them off the walls. So take those slides out.” My slides turned out to be G E3 and our mass version is G E6.  So I had a terrific photographer friend Ken Showell and I asked him if he could do anything with them and he did. He brought them up color corrected through three generations and gave me a master set.

I sent my slides around to about twenty places. I sent them around. One dealer, who is now out of business, sent me a nice note saying that he really liked them but nothing happened and everybody else just sent them back to me. And I sent them to very good galleries. My feeling was, that if they were going to go someplace, they could only go someplace with a gallery that was well established and nothing else would do. They were basically all rejected again. So I thought, “Ain’t their time yet.” And then what happened was that I heard that Jerry Saltz had said at a panel discussion that he was thinking about curating a show about sex. A friend said, “You should send him your slides.” And I’m thinking, “Oh God, not this again.” The third trip out and it’s not working and finally I decided, “What the fuck.” So, I sent him a set of slides and I put in a note that just said: “Dear Mr. Saltz, I understand that you are thinking about curating a show about sex and if you do, I hope you will consider my work. Sincerely, Betty Tompkins.” This was in 1998 or 1999.

SUSAN:

Did you know him personally at that point?

BETTY:

No. No, are you kidding. I didn’t know anybody. So I sent them off to him and nothing happened. I didn’t get them back so I figured he trashed them and he never did curate a show about sex that I knew about so I figured OK, he changed his mind. Then one day in 2002, I get a call from Mitchell Algus and he said: “ My name is Mitchell Algus, do you know who I am?” and I said: “Yes, of course, I know who you are and I’ve actually even met you.” I met him at Nicholas Krushenick’s funeral. And I said, “What do you want?” and he said: “Those paintings from the seventies; I’d like to see them.” And I was unsure actually if he meant the language pieces or sex pieces, so I said, “Sure, when do you want to come down?” and he said, “I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”So I thought, “Well this is new and different.”

I had the two paintings on the stretchers and I had tons of the word pieces, so I put them out and I dug up the sheet of slides and he comes over and he looks at the language pieces and he goes: “These are really interesting but that’s (points at the sex paintings) what I’m interested in.” So I said OK and I give him the sheet of slides and he says, “Yes, I saw this.” And I said, “Who gave them to you?” He said, “A critic gave them to me.” “But who?” How did this pop up years after I sent them off. I mean, it was at least three years. And finally he said to me: “Jerry Saltz came into the gallery today, put them on my desk and said: ‘I hate to see a good sheet of slides go to waste. You ought to go look at this stuff.’”

SUSAN:

That’s really wonderful.

CHRYSANNE:

So sweet.

BETTY:

I was stunned, totally stunned. And I did say to him: “You have to realize, I’ve never met Jerry Saltz, I’ve never spoken to Jerry Saltz, I don’t know Jerry Saltz. So if you’re thinking you’ll give me a show and Jerry will write about you (at the time Jerry worked at the Village Voice) in the Voice—I don’t think so.” And he said, “I appreciate your honesty.” So when he left he said: “I’m pulling together a group show that will open the season and I’m thinking about a couple of pieces for the group show. I’ll be in touch with you sometime late July or early August.”

So late July, early August comes and goes. So I think, “Get it over with.” So I call up and I leave a message on the gallery machine—because it’s August, nobody’s open. And I said, “I was just curious what was happening.” And he called me back within an hour and he said: “I’m having trouble pulling this show together, I’ll be in touch with you.” So I said, “OK, just let me know.” And in my mind everything is a no-go.

He called me about a month later and he said to me: “I didn’t like the way the show was coming together so I cancelled it. I won’t put up a show I don’t believe in and I didn’t believe in this show.” And I said, “OK. Thanks for telling me.” And he said: ”What I’d like to do instead is a solo show of those paintings and drawings.” And I said, “I’ll get back to you.” (Laughter) I didn’t know what to say. I said, “None of the paintings are on stretchers.” He said, “You’ll put them on stretchers.” I said, “None of the drawings are framed.” He said, “You’ll put them in frames, we’ll get them to the framer.” I said, “You don’t have a press release.” He said, “I’m a very good writer, Betty.” And I said, “I’ll get back to you.” He said, “When?” I said, “Tomorrow.”

So Bill comes home and I tell him this and he says, “Let me take you out to dinner.” So he takes me to our wonderful neighborhood Japanese restaurant and we’re eating Sushi and drinking wine and we come home and he goes, “Let’s look at them!” So we take the roll out from underneath the pool table and we bring it in here (into the studio) and we unroll them. I had not seen these paintings now in twenty-five years.

SUSAN:

You’d never opened that roll in all that time?

BETTY:

Once I rolled them up, that was it. History.

CHRYSANNE:

How many were there?

BETTY:

There were nine Fuck Paintings and three Cow Cunt Paintings and whatever the drawings were in my drawer. But it was the paintings of course, that were at issue—what kind of shape were they in after all this time. The light in here is not that great and it was night and we had a lot to drink and Bill is saying, “They’re in pretty good shape.” And I’m saying, “These aren’t bad, these aren’t bad.” So I called up that evening, I just called the gallery machine and I said: “I’ll call my stretcher guy in the morning and see if this is humanly possible but OK.” And he called me back the next day, started to make the arrangements, the stretcher guy came and he took everything that needed to be stretched—eight paintings. We used the Ellensburg photograph as the announcement, which I knew, if I ever did get a show with him, would be the image. Carrie Moyer was over here one day and I was showing her the catalogue from Monmouth College and that photograph is in it and she’s looking and she said: “You are going to use this for an announcement when you get to show these, right?” And I said, “Yes, yes of course.”

So there was no question what the announcement would be and after the paintings all arrived at the gallery, I had to go there because there was still a lot of cleaning up to be done on them. So I am in the big room in the back and Mitchell’s in the front room and there was a constant stream of people in and out and he knew who all of the people were. There were press people and collectors. This was my first show in Chelsea. You really have no idea what a total failure I was as an artist before all of this. I said to him one day: “Does this happen all the time, is this what happens if you have a show in Chelsea? Is there so much excitement because at shows in Chelsea everyone just shows up before the opening?” He said: “No. I’ve never seen anything like this in my entire life.”

I came in one day from lunch and he’s talking to some gentleman and he introduces me to the gentleman and I recognize the gentleman’s name as a very prominent collector who had been on my mailing list for fifteen years or so and had never attended anything or recognized my existence and he introduces me to him and I say hello and I go in the back and I’m listening to their conversation, which I can’t help but hear anyway, and so they go through: how’s your family, your gall bladder, your kidney stone, whatever it was. Finally, Mitchell says: “Why are you here, the show doesn’t open for two more days?” And the guy pulls out the announcement and he says: “I got this in the mail this morning and I thought I’d come right down.” The whole thing was amazing. An incredible experience.

SUSAN:

One of the things that is interesting to me is that we tend to think if there is no big first time around, that it’s very difficult to have a resurrection but in your case there was barely a first act. From there, was Mitchell instrumental in making things happen for you in Europe?

BETTY:

Everything that has happened to me has happened because of that first show. It is truly like a fairy tale. I am very grateful to Mitchell for showing my work and standing up for it as I am for all the dealers who show it. One of them, Rodolfe Janssen, who I am showing with in Brussels, and who is also giving my work exposure in the international art fairs, when asked in an interview for Daily Canvas, Dubai Edition: “One of the art world’s greatest unsung heroes is?” replied, “Betty Tompkins.” I was so impressed by that. I still am.

There was almost nothing before. I do sometimes wonder if I had had the big first time around or even the equivalent to what is happening to me now, whether I would still, at this point have a career or if it would have been all over with?

SUSAN:

It’s so hard to know. As a man, presumably it would have just continued.

BETTY:

It’s impossible to know because things have to evolve and things have to change. I have absolutely no idea. And it’s true that second acts are hard to come by but I think that for women it’s going to be their only act—the second act; for women of a certain age and I think it’s wonderful whenever I see it happening to anybody. It’s happening for Judith Bernstein, for instance, and it’s wonderful.

CHRYSANNE:

And in a way, for Marilyn Minter.

BETTY:

And Marilyn Minter as well. I ran into her in the street recently and she said, “The artworld loves us old broads.” (Laughter.)

CHRYSANNE:

And Joyce Pensato.

BETTY:

How old is Joyce?

SUSAN:

Early sixties?

BETTY:

I’ve never met her.

SUSAN:

She’s a fabulous spirit and this should have happened to her long ago but it just took forever.

BETTY:

And a critic like Jerry has been really instrumental in keeping that issue alive. When you hit menopause you do not lose all your juices and your creativity. If you read his essays and his books consecutively you see how consistent he is—on theme, on target—he’s incredibly supportive.

CHRYSANNE:

When did you first meet Jerry?

BETTY:

I first met Jerry at a Trisha Donnelly opening in 2004 or 2005 and I saw him there. I had spoken to him once or twice on the phone, because when the 2002 Mitchell Algus show opened, I called him up to thank him and we had a wonderful conversation about synergy and all sorts of things but I had not, in all that time, met him. I had been in the meantime, in 2003, in the Lyon Biennale. That was one of things that happened as a result of the show with Mitchell, and that was because of Bob Nickas, and I was also by then in the permanent collection of the Centre Pompidou, which came out of the Lyon Biennale and I saw him there and I went up to him and I said, “Are you Jerry Saltz?” And he said, “Yes.” And I said: “I’m Betty Tompkins. I’ve wanted to meet you for a long time.” And we had a lovely conversation and later Trisha said to me, “Oh, you have to meet Jerry,” and she took me over to him and said,”Jerry, this is Betty Tompkins.”

SUSAN:

This is interesting in that, I believe the late emergence of Joyce Pensato’s career was also due to help from a man who supported her work, I’m not sure but I think it was the painter Chris Wool.

CHRYSANNE:

It was a painter, yes. And she worked at David Davis for many years.

BETTY:

Really. Oh, then I know her! I’m sure.

SUSAN:

But it is interesting to me that these second acts were in large part facilitated by men.

BETTY:

Nancy Spero is another one that comes to mind. She was here in my studio when I was in my thirties or forties and she had just had a big three gallery show. Willard Gallery was the main gallery and I don’t remember what the other two were but she put up three solidly good shows. It was a major moment for her and she was almost sixty at the time and I said to Nancy, “Am I going to have to wait that long?” and she said, “You might.” And I did.

SUSAN:

There’s an expression about which I have ambivalent feelings, “Women win the only race that counts.” Because of course, women tend to outlive men by twenty years but it does seem that in the art world that’s almost mandatory for women if they want have a big career. Think of Louise Bourgeois. What would her career have been if she had died at sixty instead of ninety?

BETTY:

Well, she wouldn’t have one.

SUSAN:

And she was out there the whole time.

BETTY:

Of course this is not true for the younger generation.

SUSAN:

No, that has changed.

BETTY:

There are here a couple of generations that basically fell through the cracks. We all came to New York. Everybody told all of us that we had to wait at least ten years, which was a daunting prospect to start with and then all of a sudden it was only young painters, young artists that people were interested in and so now it’s a little bit more balanced across generations, which I prefer.

SUSAN:

That was an important and interesting aspect of the show I reviewed this summer for Hyperallergic curated by Sarvia Jasso at Joe Sheftel—that your work was included in and where we first met each other—that the artists ranged in age from 28 to 86.

BETTY:

That was one of the things that I had liked about being in the show.

SUSAN:

Yes, me too. But even now, even though artists are starting out younger, men and women both are starting out younger, when I walk around to galleries it seems to me that there is still a huge discrepancy between the number of women and the number of men represented by most of the galleries. There still seem to be way less women.

BETTY:

I have no doubt that that is true. The thing that’s interesting, of course—Bill and I have discussed this many times, is that art schools have more women students than they do men.

SUSAN:

Chrysanne and I talk about this all the time.

CHRYSANNE:

They always do.

BETTY:

And they always did. And still do.

CHRYSANNE:

I think the difference is that when you have an equal number of male to female professors….

BETTY:

My alma matter, Syracuse University—I went there a few years ago as a visiting artist. I gave a lecture and I visited any of the graduate students that wanted to meet with me. I went to their studios and I spent a day there. I wish I had done the studio visits before my lecture, it would have been different. It turned out that there was not one full-time female Fine Art faculty. Not one.

SUSAN:

I’m not even remotely surprised by that.

BETTY:

One of the students, actually, one of the most talented young women that I talked with—her work was just wonderful and she was telling me, this is how I found out, she was telling me which of her pieces her teachers had liked and which ones she liked and I said, “What gender are your teachers?” And she said they were all male. She was under so much stress she almost burst into tears. She was so relieved to be able to talk to a professional woman artist. And she had a lot of questions. I enjoyed very much spending the time with her but the stress she was under was unbelievable.

SUSAN:

I can understand that. Even at Cal Arts in the early ‘80s the females were all short-term visiting artists and there were no full-time female faculty.

BETTY:

When I was an undergraduate we only had one visiting artist at all, the whole four years and that was James Rosenquist. So it was never going to be a woman.

CHRYSANNE:

I went to two art schools. I started off at the Cleveland Institute of Art. The design and painting instructor said, “Oh, you women are here to get married?” It was the year of Kent State and then I went to Canada, which was a different experience.

BETTY:

Well, I had a teacher who just said to me: “I don’t know why I spend any time with you, you’re just going to have babies anyway.”

CHRYSANNE:

I do think that prejudice is lessening.

BETTY:

Well, there are more role models. Any time there is role model, the bar moves, the expectation changes. And it takes time. Someone recently posted on Facebook all the recent openings for painting professors. The tenure track positions had all gone to men except for one. A few untenured positions had been filled by women. So I think we would have to say that the bar is moving very slowly.

SUSAN:

I think part of the difficulty is that subjects like art history and studying art were once considered a form of finishing school for women. It was a way for you to become interesting and educated but non-threatening marriage material. You would be more than a housewife, somehow companionable or maybe be a professional with a marginal salary that assumed support from elsewhere.

BETTY:

You could be taken to places.

SUSAN:

And you would have good taste and be a good home decorator. It wasn’t considered a professional endeavor just because you were in art school.

BETTY:

I was raised with the expectation that I would be significant to the world by my parents. Both of my parents always worked. My father was in left wing politics. We were followed by the FBI to school when I was a kid, in the days of J. Edgar Hoover. I wasn’t raised to be a housewife. And if I wanted to get married, that was fine but I was still expected to do something professionally.

SUSAN:

But many, if not most women in those days were not raised that way. Advertising back then portrayed women gleefully vacuuming their homes in cocktail dresses.

CHRYSANNE:

That’s a wonderful gift your parents bestowed on you.

SUSAN:

What bothered me was that women in art school ended up effectively subsidizing the careers of the men. There were more women studying and those women were there because they were seriously pursuing art careers, while in fact, they were making it possible for the school to continue educating students because they were paying the tuition and the men were the ones that ended up going out and getting the careers, for the most part.

BETTY:

I never thought about it that way. You may well be right about this but I was on a scholarship all the way through. It was the only way I could have gone.

SUSAN:

It’s less true. But if the proportion of women succeeding in the art world was equivalent to the proportion in schools there would be more women than men. So there’s still something wrong with this picture.

Let’s go back a moment—you had these paintings, and they were rolled up under the pool table, you were working on other subject matter—was it with a sense of relief or happiness that you were able to come back to the pornographic subject matter and find it being embraced? How did that feel?

BETTY:

It was wonderful. When I first took them out and I put the first one up on the wall to start cleaning it up for the show, I was looking at it I thought, “What the fuck was I thinking?” And I started to work on it and I thought, “Oh yeah, right, that was what I was thinking.” And it just felt wonderful to see them again. It felt really good that they were not rejected that time around and that slowly one thing led to another. It’s incredibly validating. Actually, I can’t express enough how satisfying it has been.

When I first started to use the subject matter again after that show, I didn’t want to work with the air brush, because that’s what I had done. I thought, “I did that already.” I said to Bill: “I want to make a present for Bob (Nickas) to thank him for getting me into this show (the Lyon Bienniale),” and Bill said, “What will you do?” and I said: “Why don’t we get a stamp made that says Lyon and I’ll do something with that.” He got the stamp for me and I did three drawings with it and then the Lyon part fell off. So that was the end of the Lyon drawings. The guy who made the Lyon stamp refused to make the next group of words. While I was waiting for Bill to find me someone who would make them, I did some cunt stamp drawings. I had a stamp from the ‘70s that said “COW” and I used that. Perfect pejorative. Eventually, I did have a nice group of words so I did these stamp paintings and they’re all language like this is one here (points). I had started first using language with the censored drawings of the ‘70s, after my paintings were censored, in order to hold onto my sanity. I had a censored stamp. So when I started in with the sex images again, I started with language. I did it for a couple of years and then I had terrible tendonitis in both my arms from stamping, from the impact. It was pretty clear that I would never get over the tendonitis if I didn’t stop using them and I was simultaneously working on a painting—it was a stamp painting and I was having a lot of trouble with it and I kept thinking: “If I was spraying this, if I was using an airbrush, I wonder if I could solve this problem.” I had my original airbrush but it was in terrible shape. I gave myself a treat and I bought a new airbrush. I put it in my hand and my hand said, “Where have you been?” Like it knew and it turns out that I use it a little incorrectly according to the instruction booklet that came with the airbrush, but I do it the way I do it and my hand felt really comfortable.

I’m very happy with the stamp paintings but at the point I realized that I couldn’t do them anymore, I thought that the ones that remained should be really good. And they should be the best example of it. There was this one painting that used to be in the hallway and every day I’d walk past it for three years and I’d think, “It’s not very good.” So I took it with me to Pennsylvania and slightly sanded down the surface and I sprayed over it. I thought, “Oh, I like that. Who’s next?” So I converted some of the stamp paintings to airbrush paintings. I really like working with the airbrush. And the subject matter, I now approach in a broader fashion than I had originally.

SUSAN:

When you say that, what do you mean?

BETTY:

When I first started I only did penetrative heterosexual sex and now I’ve done girl on girl paintings, I’ve done kiss paintings, I’ve done masturbation paintings, I’ve done sexual imagery with no penetration visible. I think it’s a huge subject matter and I probably have only scratched the surface after this period of time.

SUSAN:

I thought those masturbation images were unbelievably beautiful.

BETTY:

Thank you. Thank you.

CHRYSANNE:

If you were going to give advice to a young woman artist coming to New York today, same age you were when you came here….

BETTY:

Oh, they would have it so much easier but the advice that I would give a young women artist is the same advice I would give a young man artist, which is simply, find your voice, believe in your own vision, stick to it, and don’t do it to make other people happy. Do it to make yourself happy. Because as soon as you do it to make someone else happy, there’s something false in the work and it will all fall down, whether you’re raking the money in for a minute or not. You have to do work that you believe in.

 

 

CHRYSANNE:

You describe your work as social practice. How is social practice related to social justice, especially with regard to pain, which is a deeply emotional and feard subject?

CATHY:

I started working with pain as a way of understanding my life. I was bridging a practice between being an artist and working in communication and media studies at Concordia.

CHRYSANNE:

You got a PhD?

CATHY:

Yes, I did. That process through the ‘90’s was one of trying to read my pain and look at it in a larger context. I was trying to use my own experience with pain as a guide but move away from that and move into what was going on in popular culture. What are the different understandings and generalizations and misunderstandings about pain and how can I make a contribution that might help to open up what I felt were pretty binary understandings of pain? For instance, we know that there is physical pain and there is emotional pain. I wanted to contribute to the line of thinking where one informs the other. I also wanted to contribute to the work that was moving away from expert understandings and in the ‘90’s a new field of experts was packaging pain particularly into self-help books—and it was becoming increasingly packaged and limited to the experts.

I felt that art had a lot to contribute, art and the way artists over decades, over centuries, but particularly artists in the ‘70’s and ‘80’s worked on putting forward different formulations of what pain is: What’s good pain, what’s bad pain?

CHRYSANNE:

Was there an event that triggered your interest in pain?

CATHY:

Around 1990, I had been moving in that direction and then I started working with Bill Burns and we shared that interest. Then I had this series of deaths in my family.  My brother died of AIDS related complications and within that year my father died in a plane crash, and the woman who had been my second mother died in between those two and there were several others. It really shook me to my core. I felt like I had to reformulate myself. So I was going through a pain event in a very immediate sense. But also, growing up, I, like so many of us, lived in a family that was being pulled in different directions. My mother struggled with mental illness and I ended up taking the responsibilities of someone older than my years because I had to. Then when you get older, these things haunt you and come back in ways. With the passing away of my father, my brother and my second mother, I was reformulating myself and my work.

CHRYSANNE:

Can you tell us how you ended up showing at the New Museum and about the construct and installation of the piece?

CATHY:

Bill Burns and I were working on a book called When Pain Strikes and Laura Trippi, who was a curator at the New Museum, heard about When Pain Strikes and she invited me. She knew I was working on self-help books and knew that I was writing about self-help culture and she was very interested in having the work in the project room during Bob Flanagan’s Visiting Hours, which was about very immediate pain. She was looking for a room to come down in after the intensity of Bob’s work. Bob was going to be there much of the time and he was very ill with cystic fibrosis and treating it through his (s/m) practice.

What I did was gather together several hundred self-help books and I called the work Self-Help Library. I asked that the shelving be integrated with the architecture, so they built a false wall with inset shelves so that the books would be flush with the wall. I organized them into thematic categories: a section on divorce, on headaches, another on backaches. You had perspectives from the ‘60’s, ‘70’s, and ‘80’s in self-help culture, and you could see that the language and the forms of self-diagnosis and the programs for recovery were always changing with the times.

SUSAN:

I am wondering if you were familiar with a book that was published in 1985 called The Body in Pain. In it Elaine Scarry says: “Whatever pain achieves, it achieves in part through this unshareability, through its resistance to language.” I think it is interesting that the nature of pain is its interiority and yet there is an unbelievable culture of speech that dances around it. At that exhibition at the New Museum you had your display of self-help literature confirming your understanding of its speech generating tendencies and then in the interior space there was an artist, Bob Flanagan, suffering before our eyes.

CATHY:

Bob liked the idea of Self-Help Library and eventually he contributed to the book, When Pain Strikes. He did a diary in the last days of his life. He was frustrated by that time with everything, frustrated that he was dying, frustrated with me because I kept saying I want you to keep going with this and that’s all in the book. I feel there was a really interesting dialogue that was brought about because I was doing something that was trying to deal with the fact that pain is incommensurable, that it is something that one has to continually explore and feel and move with and that it’s not as containable as medical science and conventional behavioral psychology would like it to be.

SUSAN:

Was Marica Tucker still at the New Museum at that time?

CATHY:

Yes, she was the director.

CHRYSANNE:

Do you consider this piece a seminal work for you?

CATHY:

Yes, it was the beginning of integrating an activist voice with a more subjective filter.

I had been very active in anti-nuclear campaigns, and in the women’s movement around International Women’s Day, and affordable housing for single moms in the ‘80’s, but I was moving into media studies and a deeper level of searching as an artist. The work at the New Museum helped me establish my orientation, which continues to inform my practice. Not at every moment, but it’s an important thread, a grounding thread—and I do see it being about social justice. I think the silencing of pain is a terrible thing and the incapacity to allow pain to be worked through is a big problem, although it is interesting how things have changed over the past 20 years because there are also examples of excess in representations of pain that are problematic and can be diminishing.

SUSAN:

In analyzing the category of pain, would you say that you are also interested in its uneven distribution? I am thinking of Judith Butler’s recent book Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? and the her discussion concerning whose lives we value. Is part of the question concerning social justice and pain about the fact that pain is unfairly and unevenly distributed?

CATHY:

Or recognized. And I suppose you are right and in terms of basic comforts certainly there is terrible unevenness in the world; but also in terms of the recognition of that—for example, the torture of women as they reach puberty in particular African countries. It isn’t a mainstream story even though there are millions of women who suffer this pain.

video ©2012 by MOMMY

CHRYSANNE:

What drew you to those self-help books and how would you see that journey from the works on pain to the public realm and a work like Sorry—which I would consider social sculpture. You moved from books to the sides of buildings.

CATHY:

It’s been a process—about a sense of confidence in filling a space. I had a major turning point in 2004, with an exhibition that I did called Totalled, where I was invited by Sandra Dyck at Carelton University Art Gallery (Ottawa) to work in conjunction with another artist, Ron Benner. He built cars and we were talking about the other space in that gallery being available and it was quite a large space with 20 foot ceilings. I had not worked in a space anywhere near that size before but I really wanted to do something with the advertising for cars that related to self-help culture. There was all this SUV advertising at the time like; “Take the road less traveled.” So I collected SUV advertising and filled the walls with promotional lines organized into categories like arrogance (“Heir to the planet”), strength, comfort, independence, and self-help.

I found a written-off 2001 Tahoe, which was a 16 foot long SUV, and I had it bisected. It had been in a rollover accident, which is the most common SUV accident. I had it cut two ways and then placed in the gallery, just its body—it had no wheels, it was just the skin of it. It had the presence of a very vulnerable container.

And you could see that it was only about this thick (gestures with thumb and forefinger)—less than a 1/4 of an inch. The idea of this vehicle that was going to protect was quite nicely dispelled.

I explain all of that because it was an important marker in my practice in terms of scaling up. And the next substantial scaling up was my Sorry work. I collected public apologies and I had a small book made which was a collection of all of these apologies and then I had the mouths of a number of apologizers produced as digital prints which were about 4’ x 5’, so they were quite large and I presented them as a grid.

I started a website of my work 5 years ago to have a public archive of these various projects. And I was keeping my ear to the ground for opportunities that would allow me to be able to speak boldly in my work and I heard about the Laneway Commissions project in Melbourne. I had been in Sydney presenting the Sorry prints and I had an invitation from Ocular Lab,  an artists’ co-op in Melbourne.

I did an extension of the project there in 2008, the same year that the apologies were made to Aboriginal Stolen Generations in Australia and to First Nations Residential School Survivors in Canada. That was the beginning of the We Are Sorry work, where I used the apology texts rather than the enlarged mouth imagery.

CHRYSANNE:

Who wrote the apologies?

CATHY:

The Aboriginal apology in Australia appears to have been written by pubic relations speech writers. That speech is rhetorical. There is a rhythm and this refrain: “ To the mothers and the fathers, to the brothers and the sisters…we say sorry.”

CHRYSANNE:

Because they took children away from their parents and put them in horrible situations.

CATHY:

In Canada between 1905 and the mid-1990’s children were taken from their homes and put into residential schools. First Nation’s children were forcibly assimilated through these schools which were jointly run by the churches and the government. They were poorly funded and often this meant that the food was terrible, that the employees were not the best people—they were very poorly paid. Beginning in 1999, there was a class action suit with 70,000 people signing on and the government decided to settle out of court. The settlement had three parts: a public apology, the payment of compensation and a Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

The Australian apology came through a different process. It was a popular movement over about 10 years including huge annual demonstrations. So there was popular support—it was a “Sorry” movement. In February of 2008, the incoming Kevin Rudd government apologized, keeping their election promise. The previous government had refused to make the apology. So this was all fueled through a popular movement.

In Canada, the apology was part of a negotiated settlement between the Assembly of First Nations and the government. They sat at the table together and agreed to the words of apology.

CHRYSANNE:

So you’ve done the project publicly in both countries? Has the reaction been different in the two countries?

CATHY:

In 2009, I did We Are Sorry as part of the Laneway Commissions in Melbourne. For that setting, I had to find the location and I was very fortunate to find a power substation. We were able to negotiate the loan of that space for up to 5 years. As a public artwork, it brought these words into the public eye and held them there. When these apologies were given, they were fleeting media moments. Each was a big spectacle and then it was gone. The version of We Are Sorry at the Winnipeg Art Gallery was in a very large hall at the entrance. It’s about 20 feet high and I had curtain-like fabric panels printed to fit around the two interior walls so it was actually about the same size as the Melbourne version. And I was very happy that they were up simultaneously.

During the same period, AA Bronson asked me if I would be interested in doing something in the pamphlet series Artists and Activists. I suggested making a souvenir pamphlet that would include both of the apologies, one starting on one side, then flip it over, and the other starts on the other side, to be silk-screened on a heavy paper so it would have this sense of something to keep. We were able to negotiate a co-publication with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and Printed Matter. For me this is an invigorating aspect of the work; to bring people together whose interests cross but whose worlds are very unlikely to meet.

In Australia there was a lot of emotion around We Are Sorry. Indigenous writer and activist John Harding, the person who wrote about Sorry for the publication and who really supported me in doing the work, performed his outrage at the treatment of Indigenous people at the opening event. He performed his text from the book and put his whole self into it. So I felt that my work became a backdrop for something very immediate and urgent to be seen, for the 150 people who were gathered for the event.

SUSAN:

The bulk of these apologies are being made by men, because men represent power. It is male spokespersons, Prime Ministers and Presidents, that are asked to deliver the apologies in the name of the governments they run. So I think it is interesting that your pieces are looking at men apologizing for their behavior or for their previous male counterparts.

CHRYSANNE:

And the taking away of children from their mothers!

CATHY:

Yes, in the case of the two apologies that we were just talking about. There’s an accountability that doing work about public apologies brings to the fore. At the same time, they are media spectacles that come and go.

CHRYSANNE:

How many apologies have you collected?

CATHY:

I have about 140. I stopped my regular collecting after about four years. I collected again for particular exhibitions. I had an exhibition at Platform Gallery last year in Winnipeg and I wanted to have some local content so I dug up about ten apologies online that were specific to Winnipeg and Manitoba.

CHRYSANNE:

Are they mostly government apologies?

CATHY:

When I started to collect public apologies in 2001, I noticed a trend starting. There were apologies coming every few days and it escalated so that you could almost have had an apology section in the paper at one point. They were CEOs, sports stars, other celebrities, and government officials. What I am trying to say is that I think apology is a very important thing in our culture and that there are some landmark public apologies that have been made and that there are more that need to be made. But they get all mixed up with marital infidelity apologies.

CHRYSANNE:

Especially from politicians.

CATHY:

Bill Clinton or Eliot Spitzer; there are many. To me, those are inconsequential in terms politics and justice. Whereas, the apologies to First Nations people for the residential schools debacle is so important and really matters.

SUSAN:

What I am not clear about is the other side of the equation, which is forgiving. It seems to me that what’s required to resolve certain situations in the world at the present moment is not simple forgiveness, but asking people to forgive that which is unforgivable. It’s asking, for example, in Rwanda, for someone to forgive the neighbor who machetied his or her parents or children—and similar obstacles exist in other places—in Bosnia, in Serbia, or between the Palestinians and the Israelis. So yes, there is an apology, but how does one deal with day-to-day life and getting past what is being apologized for, especially since as you observe, apology is being cheapened constantly by this spectacle of apology?

CATHY:

So you are asking: “How does forgiveness fit into this?”

SUSAN:

Yes, because if you are apologizing, aren’t you asking someone to forgive you? And the things people are asking forgiveness for in these political contexts are so serious that the apology always seems to me to be completely incommensurate with the transgression that took place. I just end up wondering if it has any meaning. The artist Boaz Arad created a video called Hebrew Lesson in which he cobbles together film clips of Hitler speaking in order to make the following words come out of his mouth, “Greetings, Jerusalem, I am deeply sorry.” This video implies to me a deep need to be apologized to and at the same time I question what it can mean against the scale of the tragedy that was perpetrated? It seems symbolically important and it is astonishingly difficult to get the apology in the first place, so something must be at stake, and yet it seems pretty easy relative to what was suffered. Which gets us back to the question of pain.

CATHY:

So if the apology functions to silence the….

SUSAN:

I don’t know how it functions. I don’t totally understand what it does.

CATHY:

Yes, of course, it’s a discourse. But I heard from First Nations people in Canada that it’s not like everyone was rejoicing about the apology. Some people felt that it was too little and way too late and I know this is true with a lot of major apologies for big things. People also felt like it was about the guilt of the oppressor and that it was about making themselves feel better; it wasn’t about resolving the inequities, the racism, and if the apology functioned as a smokescreen we’re letting them off the hook and saying, “Well now it’s all better.” Then clearly this is an inadequate thing.

SUSAN:

It is interesting that it has become a form of contemporary theater that we all feel very familiar with.

CATHY:

Yes, and also a crisis management method. What I want my work to contribute is a critical perspective. It’s not so easy to be either dismissive of the idea of the apology nor to be blindly embracing. I’m trying to keep that conversation open.

SUSAN:

I want to ask a completely unrelated question about your studies. Chrysanne and I have talked about this amongst ourselves. When I was a student in graduate school, 50% or more of the students studying were women but once school was over, it seemed to me that the opportunities went principally, though not entirely, to the men. And those opportunities went to the men with much greater ease even though they were less in number. I am wondering if your experience in Canada, which we tend to think of as our liberal neighbor to the north, was similar in this regard?

CATHY:

I think that I am a bit of an unusual case because I finished art school and I immediately started working, running the Anna Leonowens Gallery, at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, where I’d gone to school. While I was working there I kept a studio but I was developing this other professional capacity and I continued with my artwork but in a quiet way. I think this is very true for a lot of women. And then I left that job and I organized a film festival and workshops for women directors and writers and did fund raising and eventually I ended up deciding that I wanted to continue with my artist focus but I wanted to do media studies. I had a feeling that my interests in criticality were going to be better served in that setting. So in a way, I veered off into this other world. But the whole time I was doing art projects and curatorial projects—I was keeping it going but I was affiliated with this academic world. So that took me off the straight path in terms of how I might have streamed myself. I mean, I’m pleased in the long run. I really feel like I got what I needed. And it’s all there now, in my practice, in what I’m doing.

But in terms of looking at other people around me, I completely agree with you and I think it’s the same in Canada. I think it’s more like 80% women in our art schools, way more women than men, but the recognition rate, never mind what we call success, let’s just call it recognition and the pathways to recognition continue to be more open to men. However, there was a very interesting change in that pattern when Diana Nemiroff and Jessica Bradley were the curators of contemporary art at the National Gallery of Canada during the ‘80’s. They showed and purchased a lot of women’s work. The National Gallery actually does much better than a lot of other large museums and still continues to champion women artists and you can see that in the collection.

CHRYSANNE:

Do you think Joyce Wieland had an effect in terms of her position as a woman artist in Canada?

CATHY:

I’m not sure if she did at the time. I think she certainly did as time went on. She was the first woman to have a solo show at the National Gallery of Canada. I think many women are proud of that. I am. And such a great artist.

SUSAN:

I am thinking that we should close by talking a bit about where we are right now (at Union Theological Seminary) and the show that you did here and how you came to be at Union.

CATHY:

I was part of a group exhibition here at Union Theological Seminary that AA Bronson invited me to be a part of at the end of 2010 and I decided, even though it was a fairly small exhibition, that I would come and see this place. Also, my dad had done his M.A. here. It was so great to be able to come and see my work here and really feel like this place informed something of how my dad was. It’s something about an openness, a kind of Christianity that is really trying to be open and yet still holding onto a particular kind of God and Christ and my dad quietly wrestled with that, from the time I was quite young.

CHRYSANNE:

Were you surprised when you found out that AA Bronson was here and started a Institute for Art, Religion and Social Justice?

CATHY:

I was completely surprised; one of those great coincidences in life. You know how sometimes things just confound you? And that was one of those moments, when AA said he was here and would I like to be a part of this show and it was at Union Theological Seminary. And that turned out to be a meaningful connection in terms of understanding where I came from. After being here for a day or so, and having looked around and seen these portraits, I asked AA if the Institute would consider a proposal for an artist in residence. I proposed rehanging the portraits.

When I got here and actually got down to work in January (2012), I realized that I had to make an inventory of the work. They were scattered around and they were in various states of neglect and so I made that my primary task. I came to really care about these art objects and really wanted to account for them. I ended up deciding early on that I would make a book and that it would be an integral part of the show. It was very important to me to contextualize, write about, and present them. There are about thirty that were hanging throughout the campus. And then there were another thirty plus that I found; some in storage areas and some in odd places like closets and back rooms. For the exhibition itself, I removed the hanging portraits and painted silhouettes in their place.

SUSAN:

The paintings are all portraits?

CATHY:

Yes.

SUSAN:

Are there any women?

CATHY:

Yes. There are three women. The earliest one is from the ‘40’s and she was the founder of The School of Sacred Music and that portrait is hanging in the stairway. And then there are two in here in the refectory and they were both Chairs of the Board; one in the ‘80’s and one in the ‘90’s.

SUSAN:

Is this ongoing? Do they continue to be painted even now?

CATHY:

The latest one was painted in 2009. The earliest one is from 1826. Some of them are quite good paintings and some of them are almost like folk art. Sometimes it was the Board deciding that a particular Chair of the Board or President of the Faculty should have their portrait painted and they would raise the money. Other times it was a gift of a family member, so they’ve arrived by different means over the years. What I like about them is that they represent the Institution’s history. It’s not just the people who were painted in these very conventional ways; all sitting, all dressed in proper attire and framed—but they are almost all damaged and I find that very interesting because they hold the life of the Seminary in their skin, in their surfaces and their frames. I find the way that they have been handled and the residue of that, the tears and punctures, really interesting; more so than if they were in pristine condition. They seem to be about institutional forgetfulness.

SUSAN:

I wanted to begin by asking you about Marcia Tucker (founder and chief curator of the New Museum of Contemporary Art from 1977 to 1999) because she was such an important figure. It’s interesting that the head of a Museum would commit to a project that is seven years long. That is an extraordinary opportunity to offer. It’s an even more extraordinary to do that seven year work but you had a collaborator and supporter—so I wondered if you could talk a little bit about your memory of Marcia.

LINDA:

First, I would like to say that I am honored to be chosen by you, Susan and Chrysanne, and I am really honored to be included in MOMMY, your project honoring women artists. I feel raised to a dignity and respect that is somewhat difficult for women because of the myth of the suffering artist who is not supposed to be visible, who is not supposed to practice, know about or deal with spiritual issues, who is not supposed to have or know about how to make money from their work. A triple-decker!

SUSAN:

I first encountered the work of Ida Applebroog in graduate school thanks to Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe. I think it was during my first semester at Cal Arts and I can see Jeremy in one his standard dark-blue T-shirts pacing back and forth with an imaginary cigarette between his sleek fingers telling us about an art object he received through the mail. This was in 1981 and it is hard to reconstruct at this remove whether Jeremy told us that this woman artist, Ida Applebroog, was not represented by a gallery or whether I construed that (correctly or incorrectly) at the time based on what he was saying and how he said it. What I do remember is thinking a great deal about these small objects finding their audience through the mail. At that time, I had trouble deciphering whether this was a desperate “last resort” for women artists who couldn’t find representation in a male dominated art world or whether it was a form of empowerment. Certainly, just sitting around in one’s studio while one’s male peers were getting most of the attention didn’t seem very promising.

At about the same time, Sherrie Levine and Louise Lawler and few other women artists began to host one night exhibitions in non-traditional spaces. The exhibitions were similar to what we might now think of as “pop-up” galleries but also resembled turn of the century salons, inviting people for drink and conversation. These women were not exhibiting in established galleries either. They were also finding avenues to their audiences without the imprimatur of the sanctioned art world. And these activities made it clear that waiting to be anointed and legitimated by someone else could be crippling for women artists and that those who believed in their work struck out on their own and found a way to be as artists in the world. And if that more traditional form of acceptance came to these women eventually, it was because they were irrepressible and sure of their creative voices in the first place. I have always thought of Ida as an inspiration and every week for 6 months when I sat down to email an image from my series Pigeon Study, 2007-2008 to my mailing list, I thought of Ida.

CHRYSANNE RESPONDS:

My experience with the work of Ida Applebroog is much different, as I first saw her work at Ronald Feldman Galley in the mid 1980’s. I felt a connection to her portrayal of women and domestic spaces, and to her use of cartoon newspaper formats. One would discover narratives which were so open ended that they also invited one’s personal stories to infiltrate the painting while viewing them. At this time there were a lot of German and Italian expressionist paintings being shown in New York and none were by women. Applebroog’s works with their elegance were a wonderful inspiration to me and influenced an early book work of mine, Venus’ Psychic Fate. Thinking back maybe it is possible that her work influenced Keith Haring…… just a thought……

SUSAN AND CHRYSANNE:

Because both of us found Ida Applebroog inspirational early in our careers we decided to ask Ida if she would consider being the first person we interviewed for our blog. While she was not able to commit to a long interview and photo shoot she did write back to us and we are very pleased to share her letter with you. She also graciously allowed us to choose the images of her work that accompany this post.

IDA APPLEBROOG:

I am sending you some text on this subject that I think will be of interest you.

I am 20 yrs. old. I work at an ad agency. It isn’t quite the “Mad Men” version of the 60s.
It is 1950. Everyone is geared toward family.
The only degree that counts is “Mrs” (M.R.S. degrees meaning to get a husband)
I am the only woman in the bullpen.
I do layout and lettering.
I hate it. So I find a job at the NY Public Library’s Arts Division. I don’t tell them this.
I say I am leaving to get married. Everyone accepts this as a positive move.
And I assure myself of getting a good reference —should  I ever need one in the future.

By age 35 I have 4 children.
Motherhood and being an artist is not exactly a formulaic proposition.
Why it is still such a taboo is something that makes me crazy…Ida Applebroog

CHRYSANNE:

A number of years ago I kept seeing the words Daddy in various art publications, exhibitions and websites. The term imparted a favorable aura within a new gay art aesthetic, a departure from the usual big tough macho stance, resulting in an embrace of male identification which included sensitive mutual support—hence Daddy! Daddy takes care, Daddy can be big, old and sexy—one finds solace in looking for Daddy. Daddy is powerful and sweet—Daddy art—every time I saw or heard this phrase, I thought—what about Mommy?

Mommy however is a much more loaded term for us in the arts—whether one has children or not—that was the genesis—where is Mommy or what about Mommy—as there can not be a Daddy without a Mommy—ha! A new version of the question “where are the women artists?” For me that means looking at and appreciating the women artists of my generation.

That as I recall was the beginning of our conversation.

SUSAN RESPONDS:

My first thought about MOMMY as you presented it to me, was graduate school culture and the recollection that the permanent faculty were all men and the most interesting adjunct faculty, all visiting artists, were women. They were among the small handful of women whose careers were just about to explode, and none had children, then or now.

My second recollection was that during a serious challenge to the status quo by women students, the conceptual artist Douglas Huebler actually told us that of course there were women artists worthy of a permanent post in the art faculty at Cal Arts, but sadly, all of those stellar and deserving women artists were already dead. He pronounced this observation in all earnestness and looked mortified when it was met with gales of laughter. This was the early ‘80’s. And it was an indisputable fact that there were many more women studying for MFA’s in the arts than men and yet once out in the “real” world, there were very few women artists whom the system supported. They were simply subsidizing the professional aspirations of the male students by paying graduate school tuitions.

In reading Linda Nochlin’s article again today, I am struck by the ongoing difficulty of framing basic questions. And oddly, the Mommy question can thread its way into a more general question or problem. A Mommy has to devote an enormous amount of time to the demands of her child. As a consequence she has less time to devote to the single-minded pursuit of her career. But all women tend to share this problem because one of the key ways in which artists are able to devote all of their attention to their careers is patronage, and always has been.

In the contemporary art world, this means a collector base. And collectors are by and large rich men and divorced women and neither are inclined to favor granting that freedom to women. In general, they are more comfortable investing in the freeing of men from the social and cultural constraints and obligations that allow them to develop an artistic practice unhindered. So even if a woman is not a Mommy, she is still confronted with nearly the same problem, unless she has independent means.

CHRYSANNE RESPONDS:

Yes, all what you say is true.

I know of many examples of the young female art students being disempowered often through subtle actions, such as affairs with professors and not being taken seriously in 70’s–80’s. That said, my gay male friends were not taken seriously if they revealed or projected their energies in an unusual manner (exploring the feminine). As I lived in Canada, the climate was of artists creating new social structures—art families—and non–profit artist run spaces. It was a time with low rents and experimentation without any heed to market forces—which I feel lucky to have experienced.

My move to NYC became a turning point. A profound awakening of the problems faced by women artists was at the 1984 reopening exhibition, The International Survey of Recent Painting & Sculpture at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. This exhibition had so few woman included, 151 men versus only 14 women, that the agenda became palpably evident. This exhibition was the seminal eye opener—one could see the “glass walls”  in the museums/galleries mirroring the glass ceiling so many women faced. That opening was a breakthrough breakdown moment for me; seeing the “glass wall” for the first time. There were protests by many groups—however it took another generation before MOMA really started to change.

I see MOMMY as a reflection of my experiential DNA over the years that I share with so many women artists of my generation. Yes there are successful women artists, yes it is better, that said many of the same issues resonate today—but in a different more clouded blurred manner. MOMMY—a way to start a dialogue of appreciations of women. We live in a world—rampant with copying, forgetful of recent art history—lost lineages. This is why I commend how the gay artists/collectors/gallerists support each other with such a strong voice—art community shall we say. That so interests me.

SUSAN RESPONDS:

When you speak of a community working to empower itself—I respond to that. Empowerment for women is not going to be bestowed but rather wrested. But that is always the case with shifts in visibility. I think identity politics have been very important but I would like to see us thinking beyond those strategies at some point. What has irritated me in the recent past is seeing feminism appear on a long list of movements or minority groups looking for recognition and equality from the larger society. Feminism is neither an interest group nor an overlooked minority. It represents the rights and concerns of 50% (actually, I think it’s 51% statistically) of the world population. It is the most threatening of these movements to the status quo and it is lumped with many other movements representing the rights of smaller groups to diminish its claims on all of us. I have argued and would still argue that if women had equal rights and equal access the world would be so changed as to be unrecognizable to us. There was a sweet interview with Paula Cooper about her first exhibition in Soho and the invitation card flashed on the screen and the camera panned a list of all male names. While gallery access has changed a great deal since then there are still huge disparities in the levels of success achieved by men and women. Complaining about this becomes problematic because such complaints are always repackaged as “sour grapes,” which functions as a form of censorship, because no one wants to stake out the territory that automatically defines that observer as an unsuccessful and less meritorious shrew. Because money is such a huge part of the equation in the art world, and also a microcosm of larger cultural values, the market has an outsize influence on which artists will rise to the top and it is easy to forget that this was not always so.