Reviews

Otherworlds: The Art of Nancy Spero and Kiki Smith by Jon Bird

gaybf's review against another edition

3.0

fav quotes 

interview with jo anna isaak

• isaak: just like caliban, the first thing you do when you start to speak is to curse. it is an appropriate response to being forced to speak in a language not your own. but also i was thinking lately that you are not such an angry young woman anymore (laughter)
  
  spero: yes, i shifted and changed. i think that the anger in the war series and the Artaud paintings came from feeling that i didn't have a voice, an arena in which to conduct a dialogue; that i didn't have an identity. i felt like a non-artist, a non-person. i was furious, furious that my voice as an artist wasn't recognized. that is what artaud is all about. that's exactly why i chose to use artaud's writings, because he screams and yells and rants and raves about his tongue being cut off, castrated. he has no voice. he's silenced in a bourgeois society. 
     then, when we came back from paris, i really reacted to the vietnam war and to the media coverage of it. i wanted to do something immediately. 

•  spero: once you and i were talking about the printing process i use in which the same figure appears and reappears in an extended narrative format. you mentioned gertrude stein's use of repetition and her term, the 'continuous present'. that is a good term for what i'm doing. the history of women i envision is neither linear nor sequential. i try, in everything i do - from using the ancient texts, to the mythological goddesses, to h.d.'s poem on Helen of Egypt - to show that it all has reverberations for us today. and then it makes sense. 
  
  
• spero: (i think on Notes in Time on Women) someone called this a wailing wall, like the vietnam memorial in washington with the names of all those who died in the war. there are so many of them, and their imprisonment, torture and murder takes place in so many countries. they are unknown women, but we cannot pretend we have never heard of them or of the fate of women like them. 

• isaak: in the work which follows notes in time there is no text at all, yet ironically you call it the first language. 
  spero: i finished notes in time in '79. i had to use so much text, i decided at this point, no text. it is about body gesture, the language is composed entirely of the female body set in motion. i decided the figures themselves were like hieroglyphs. i worked on the first language for two years. it starts with images i cannibalized from my earlier works. there is war and rape, brutality, but also dionysian sexuality, athletic women running, young African women ritualistically dancing, a contemporary woman roller-skating, the whole thing just rolls along. 
   - goes on to detail the process w her assistants
  
  

From "Dancing to a Different Tune" by Jon Bird

• Interpretation always starts with a question. Freud would have us believe that the question of origin is always the repressed in any enquiry into meaning, that knowledge and art are the culture's response to loss and the trauma of separation. There is also a violence to interpretation, a desire to possess the object that is always just beyond reach, which can be as mild as scratching an itch, or as extreme as the unleashing of our most murderous intentions. (Mythology interprets this as a matricidal fantasy an history confirms the awful truth of this impulse.)
• Besides her consistent interest in myths of the Goddess across cultures, the texts of the Judeo-Christian scriptures also hover at the margins of Spero's work as evidence of a dialogue between body and voice, flesh and word. The repetitive interplay between the historical and the contemporary attests to a belief in the archaic as the mythic structure through which the most fundamental experiences are coded. The Hebraic scriptures construct the body as the locus for belief in the relation to a metaphysical referent. God is written on and in the body, forcefully present in moments of extreme physicality when the boundaries between interior and exterior are blurred. These are the sacral moments - transgressive or transcendent - when the semiotic body is most intensely present and most profoundly the substantiation of another reality: of childbirth, wounding, sexual pleasure, menstruation, excretion, death. These phrases of acute embodiment, of the dominion of the body, evidence an incontestable reality. Extreme sentience denies the symbolic order; language is reduced to its most basic and indexical function, a pure existential expression of 'abjection' or 'jouissance.' 
• In Spero's 'interplay of forms,' the woman's body is the unbearable evidence of a loss which has to be denied - either through a reinvestment in another erotic object, or in the very real expression of a matricidal fantasy: the torture or obliteration of the maternal body. 
• jon bird: what about technique, did you feel that this was changing and developing? 
  spero: maybe, between notes in time and the first language
  jon bird: how would you characterize these changes?
  spero: i was beginning to work with an expansive concept of space. not merely spreading out in space so that the viewer couldn't see everything at once, but the possibilies of peripheral vision as a disruption of a way of looking at art. i was very interested in doing something wild and different... figures that couldn't be caught by the male gaze. 
  'to perceive is first of all to perceive a figure against a ground.' yve-alain bois
• panel VI bears one of spero's most familiar images, her adaptation of a fifth century BC greek dildo dancer, above a running figure. (another autobiographical reference is suggested in spero's recollection of how, in the period when she was first exhibiting the scrolls unframed - simply push-pinned to the gallery walls - she used to take her work to exhibition rolled up and carried under her arm, an image that metonymically connects with the dildo dancers' action and the figure in notes on time on women, briskly walking along with a gigantic phallus tucked under her arm.) 
• The scrolls and installations are the result of a collaborative process, a working out and working through, enacted either in the studio or on-site. The debilitating effect of her arthritis makes the physical activity - the labour of work - almost impossible for spero. however, her openness to dialogue and assistance during most of the stages of the work's realization is process not simply born of necessity, but also the expression of a politics of engagement and community. 

From "Focus" by Sylvere Lotringer

• Nancy Spero always makes sure that her victims are never presented as objects of pity or fear (the pathos of power) but shown on their own terms, recast in a mould impervious to the facile display of feelings. how can one make the 'victims' disappear, but not their victimage?
     One way is to foreground everything: building a tight case as a journalist does or historicizing the violence, bringing out the specifics of an event instead of the broad (and always revocable) humanistic concerns. Making everything explicit is a strategy nancy spero adopted from a medieval 'book of the apocalypse' where every chapter ended with an 'explicit explanation', or an 'explicit storia'. except that it was sinners then who used to find themselves in hell. in our time torture is for the innocents. 
• In a recent controversy about 'victim art', a reviewer wondered if indeed it was art, putting newspaper clippings on the wall, as nancy spero does. (how is it that people always wonder if it is art every time an artpiece has any overt political content, or *any* content for that matter?) 
• half a century later, this unsettling document was finally delivered at the front door of Viennese suburban homes in a full page of Der Standard with the title EXPLICIT repeated twice over, first foregrounded in huge, black letterheads, then in small grey letters pushed in the background. the picture itself simply bears the caption: 'Document trouve sur un membre de La Gestapo'. One can assume that it was found on a German officer just after the war. he must have carried it around, probably saw the woman die. the thought of this man from the Gestapo being aroused by the dead woman's picture is deeply disquieting.     This is ultimate porn, sex, bondage and death in a single image, a powerful hieroglyph whose elements ha to be carefully 'explicated' (developed). ... In effect, spero keeps pushing the woman's picture under the readers' eyes, superposing it or replicating it in various shades of grey that suggest continuous motion and presence, travelling cinematically around this puzzling artifact, this highly eroticized body, looking for traces of the men's response, patterns of arousal in the face of torture and oppression. She emphasizes further the brutality of the gaze by bringing it back and forth, pulling the body back or abruptly closing-up on the torso, on the bare breasts, on the crotch and legs. (p 109; more great analysis)

From "Gynesis: Configurations of Woman and Modernity (extracts) 1985, by Alice Jardine

• While proceeding from a 'belief' (in women's oppression), we are nevertheless, necessarily, caught up in a permanent whirlwind of reading practices within a universe of fiction and theory written, but for a few official exceptions, by men. Not believing in 'Truth', we continue to be fascinated by (elaborate) fictions. This is the profound paradox of the feminist speaking in our contemporary culture: she proceeds from a belief in a world from which - even the philosophers admit - Truth has disappeared. This paradox, it seems to me, can lead to (at least) three possible scenarios: a renewed silence, a form of religion (from mysticism to political orthodoxy), or a continual attention - historical, ideological, and affective - to the place from which we speak [...]
  
  These new ways have not surfaced in a void. Over the past century, those master (European) narratives - history, philosophy, religion - which have determined our sense of legitimacy in the West have undergone a series of crises in legitimation. It is widely recognized that legitimacy is part of that judicial domain which, historically, has determined the right to govern, the succession of kings, the link between father and son, the necessary paternal fiction, the ability to decide who is the father - in patriarchal culture. The crises experienced by the major Western narratives have not, therefore, been gender-neutral. They are crises in the narratives invented by men [...]
  
  [...] From the arts, especially modernist and post-modernist fiction, to the philosophies, a deep dissatisfaction with science has led to a radical re-evaluation of the relationships between what Walter Benjamin called 'direct, lived experience' (Erlebnis, 'shock') as opposed to retrospective, 'privileged, inward experience' (Erfahrung, 'aura'). That the relationship between the two is no longer obvious; that, in any case, it can no longer be seen as reflective, natural, or unmediated, is now certain. As Gilles Deleuze has explained, we are talking about an era of generalized anti-Platonism, where it is no longer only models and their copies that are put into play, privileged; but also the simulacrum, traditionally seen as false, bad and ugly because it does not resemble enough the Original *or* its copies. [...] for example, media and computer technology are no longer so limited in scope: most of us can at least begin to glimpse the ways in which the components of 'our lives' have already been imagined, repeated, erased, spliced to other 'lives'; ways which are not only out of our own control, but under no-One's control at all, except perhaps that of technology itself [...]

From Spero's writing "Creation and Pro-creation," 1992

• in 1964 we returned to the united states - to new york. the vietnam war was raging, and i was upset at the US involvement and actions in the conflict. also i was intensely rethinking my position as an artist. did i want to reiterate timeless subjects, employing an extended, length process, or did i want to address the excesses of the war - its potential for total destruction? perhaps motherhood was part of a political, personal choice in my changing mediums and content. i started working rapidly on paper, angry works, often scatological - manifestoes against a senseless obscene war, a war that my sons (too young then) could have been called up for. those works were exorcisms to keep the war away.

From Spero's "On Feminism," 1971 

• the work of successful make artists is coveted, esteemed - prestigious property. the work of a successful woman artist is usually less esteemed. her achievements do not inspire the same confidence as a man's would - she is viewed with suspicion and the utmost caution. the woman artist's work would be judged of lower value, as the artworld upholds its traditionally masculine control of aesthetics and market values. women tend to become isolated - solitary, away from the area of action, non-challenging. this is the compliance of female history, the woman forced into supplicating roles. 

From Spero's "Viewpoint," 1972

• In order to view it one has to change position, to move close or further away according to the size of the images (some are extremely small), to move along as in reading a manuscript, or to move further away to view it in its entirety. My ideas on using collage technique are related to the fleeting gesture, moments (indelible impressions) caught in motion. The rhythm of the whole, seemingly discordant and incomplete, relates to fractured time - as well as the immediate external realities that impose themselves on my consciousness [...] 

From Spero's "Images of Women," 1985

• These works are distanced from the Westernized notion of the personal subjective portrayal of individuality. The work deals with rhythm, stylization, contrast of body types, the juxtaposition of images past and present, varied historical references from disparate cultures, political information, etc.
• The repetition de-individualizes Western 'subjectivity' in a non-hierarchical continuous presence.