Issue 118, Winter 2006 - Cork - Cooling out-on the paradox of feminism - Lewis Glucksman Gallery - September, November 2006.
Circa 118: Review  | | Úna Quigley: Larissa , 2006, DVD still ;courtesy the artist/ Lewis Glucksman Gallery | Is ‘cooling out’ a euphemism for dying out? Is feminism dead? Is postfeminism dead, too? The curatorial aim of the Cooling out exhibition at the Lewis Glucksman Gallery was very explicit and based itself on the premise that feminism is fading away. It’s dying because it has achieved its main aims, the struggle is over and therefore success = death. However, as we all know, feminism has not been ‘achieved’. Although there is better equality legislation now and more participation in public life and the workplace, these benefits are mostly enjoyed by white middle class women of the ‘Western’ world. Even there, cultural feminism and equality still have a long way to go. So, the question is: is the momentum slowing down? And, if so, why is society bored of feminism?  | Sharon Hayes and Andrea Geyer: Cambio de lugar , video stills ;courtesy Lewis Glucksman Gallery | In the weeks prior to the show, my interest was piqued by the Cooling out title. Are contemporary artists apathetic to, or reactive against, feminism? How would an artwork overtly convey the phenomenon of the dilution of the feminist ‘debate’ from the current generation, ie, are its inheritors biting the nipple that fed them? In a show with such a specific curatorial framing, it is the viewer that brings the agenda to the works rather than the other way around. In fact, if I had not read the curators’ statement or title, I would have thought it was a show reflecting on femininity or even “Female Imagery in the 21st Century” rather than on political and cultural feminism. Remarkably, all the works portrayed the female figure. So, one thing this exhibition has established is that we are still ‘gazing’ – albeit gazing on each other. Our gaze now is more voyeuristic than objectifying, it seems, as many of the works took the form of a documentary or social project. The video Boygirl by Aurora Reinhard, of teenage girls who identify as boys, depicts them speaking about their day-to-day social experience: “I stand for nothing and a little bit of everything.” This video contrasts with the teenage girls of Elodie Pong’s Pretty pretty , who are also fascinating in their cute-sexy-bored girliness which, in this context, can be read as another constructed identity. Other documentary-style videos, like Esra Ersen’s Which one do you choose? , looked at the caricatured identities of ‘sweet’ and ‘cool’ as being the only two options available according to Japanese contemporary women’s magazines. P-star , an interview with a nine year-old rap singer, is overshadowed as her father’s dominance becomes apparent through Dani Gal’s inclusion of the footage in between takes. It may have been included in the exhibition to illustrate how this ‘woman’s’ independence and confidence are really controlled by the patriarch. However, I got the feeling that this piece, while entertaining, is more about the music industry and egos than about feminism, and would have been as effective if the protagonist had been a nine-year-old boy. Úna Quigley’s Larissa is a deceptively simple work that straddles the boundaries between documentary, fantasy and portraiture. In the video, we see Larissa dancing. In the accompanying voiceover, she speaks about her job as a stripdancer. The setting of the dance in a domestic sitting-room and the ordinary attire of the dancer depletes the expected frame of exoticism and emphasises the sensuality of her dance and her obvious revelry in it; the pleasure the viewer experiences watching her is one of empathy rather than voyeurism and prompts us to examine our own prejudices. The paradox of this piece is that the sex worker has become a hero, rather than a victim. There is a complicitness here with sexism, and of course one must ask, how am I implicated as a viewer/ voyeur? Josephine Meckseeper’s Pyromaniac – a blonde blue-eyed woman with a lit match in her mouth gazing out in a larger-than-life poster-size glossy photograph – seemed to be another devil’s advocate in the exhibition. At first, I read this as a postfeminist work saying “it’s ok to be sexy.” But I was perplexed by the fact that it was paired with an image of smoke from a Berlin demonstration. The only correlation I could make was that the pyromaniac started the fire! Or that feminism and activism can be packaged as objects of desire/ fashion. According to Susan J. Douglas, postfeminism is a myth that has been manufactured by the right and the corporate media and sold to us through advertising to keep us consuming. Similarly, activism and counter-culture are eventually mainstreamed and sold back to society. It also occurred to me that the Berlin smoke photo is the only artwork in this exhibition (and is only half of one artwork) that does not depict a female figure; woman is the object of all these pieces; she is invented and re-invented in every image. Another documentative work, and one that was very relevant to the overall concept of the exhibition as a literal survey of feminism today, was Cambio de lugar_Change of place_Ortswechsel . These videos, by Andrea Geyer and Sharon Hayes, are documents of 52 people who were interviewed in New York, Mexico and Germany “who identify as, have identified as or are/ have been identified (from an external perspective) as a woman.” The artists asked them what the terms ‘woman’ and ‘feminist’ means to them, about transgendered culture, history of the women’s movement, the relation of queer theory to feminist theory, and other questions relating to their experience of society and feminist culture today. The same set of questions that the interviewers asked each interviewee are printed next to the video screen for viewers to question themselves. The individual interviews were engaging and thought-provoking, and so were the comparisons and contrasts between speakers. What separates this work from mere social census was the fact that we never see the speaker, as it is only the translator between the interviewer and the interviewee that is visually filmed; we hear the other two parties and see the translator look from one to the other as she speaks. The translator relayed everything in the first person, having to play the role of the other two when delivering her speech, highlighting the social roles that interviewer/ artist and interviewee/ woman were playing or indeed living through. Although this made the interviews double the length, it also meant that discrepancies in language and culture were highlighted, and the translator was an active agent in the exchange, at times changing the conversation through editing, estimating the translation and sometimes explicitly adding to the conversation. This process demonstrated the impossibility of pure translation and symbolised the notion of the translator or mediator as involved, partial and never neutral. The metaphor of the noninnocence of the mediator can be extended to curatorship, where the curator is the translator. Each artwork is changed by inclusion in this framed exhibition. As well as documentary of ‘real’ people, there were also some pieces that examined the woman as actress or role-player – Casting: James Dean. Rebel without a cause by Ana Carceller and Helena Cabello was boring to me, and Actress by Jaki Irvine was elusive. However, they were well placed among the explicitly documentative pieces, challenging the supposed ‘reality’ and ‘fiction’ of these film works so that the ‘truth’ of role-playing could be examined rather than the ‘fact’. Michaela Meise had three separate pieces in the exhibition; each work was very much about itself, although the source material of women’s image through the media linked them. Frauen und Tiere [women and animals], one of the few works of the show that was not lens-based, outlined the shapes of the women (white) and the animals/ pets (black) taken from magazines. These series of drawings are exquisitely made and seem to highlight a similarity between the two subjects – that of the domesticated or tamed and also that of the instinctual and unintelligent, both clichéd. However, I do feel that I may be imposing this political interpretation on them, as the drawings themselves are really so visceral that it seems inadequate to talk about them only in terms of their symbolism. It was no accident that the exhibition Gendering the Irish landscape was also on show at the same time, so that visitors wandered from a contemporary art show surveying feminism today into a room of paintings and Virgin Mary ‘artefacts’ with a heavy hand of didactic curating – however, the Gendering show really felt like illustrations to accompany ideas, which while lots of fun for a curator and indeed for the viewer, can be dangerous in rendering an artwork readable one-dimensionally, only as literal illustrations of another’s idea (the paintings were chosen as illustrations for the essay Landscape, space and gender: their role in the construction of female identity in newly independent Ireland by Síghle Bhreathnach-Lynch, curator for Irish Art in the National Gallery of Ireland) . The aim of Cooling out was to survey this generation’s relationship to feminist issues, as epitomised by contemporary artists, with the premise that feminism has dissipated, or cooled out (paraphrased from the curatorial statement by Sabine Schaschl-Cooper, Bettina Steinbrügge and René Zechlin). This is an ambiguous ‘statement’ to base the show around, but it becomes more intriguing when one starts to read it as a conclusion, a question (cooling out?) or even a devil’s advocate title. However, although most of the individual works were engaging in their own right, the overall feel of the exhibition was lukewarm (in the Glucksman show at least; it had two other parts with different works in Basel and Lüneberg). As such, I find it difficult to declare the overall exhibition a success or not, because the whole idea seems to be that there is a dumbing down of feminism as a theme. Is the title Cooling out , in fact, a judgment on this generation? For me, the paradox is not that feminism has “positive changes and … negative connotations” (from the curators’ statement), but that if you think that artists are ‘cooling out’ or don’t really care about feminism anymore, how do you show work by them about it? How does (or why would) an artist make work about something she didn’t feel strongly about? Overall, I felt in some way left out of the exhibition, invalid or looked over. I had expected to feel more empathy and understanding, or even revolt against it. The inclusion of artefacts from Attic Press of posters from the women’s movement in Ireland brought the recentness of events in Ireland into focus; we seem to have moved on to postfeminist culture without ever having experienced feminism in the mainstream. But forward we go – please, oh please, when can postpostfeminism start heating up?  | Michaela Meise: from Frauen und Tiere , [women and animals], 2001, ink, watercolour on paper, series of 7, each 46 x 34 cm, collection G. F.; courtesy Lewis Glucksman, Gallery | Treasa O’Brien is a writer and artist, and is currently programme manager of the National Sculpture Factory. Cork - Cooling out-on the paradox of feminism - Lewis Glucksman Gallery -
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