 Good evening everyone. Thank you for that calm response. Whoa applause ahead of time. That's great Welcome to the Brooklyn Museum and deconstructing the artist persona. My name is Alicia Boone And I'm the associate curator for public programs here at the Brooklyn Museum and on behalf of all of my colleagues I'm happy to welcome you here tonight We have had I've had the distinct honor of working with Former and present colleagues of mine such as Nancy Spector Sarah softness and Haley Graham to produce and curate tonight's program It's been a true honor to work with all of our panelists and also the moderator And I know that you're in your in store for something that's going to be really exciting today We're thrilled that you've decided to join us and thank you so much for continuing to support public programs at the Brooklyn Museum In our public programs here We provide thoughtful fresh and inclusive spaces where everyday people such as yourselves are Invited and encouraged to engage with art ideas in each other So we're really happy that you've decided to take the leap and join us tonight And tonight's program is an example of that mission and goal. Your support is really important I'd like to extend a special. Thank you to our members. How many members are in the house tonight? Okay, a good handful of you. So thank you your support means so much to all of us and Helps makes programs like these possible if you're interested in becoming a member here at the Brooklyn Museum to enjoy perks such as free tickets to Georgia O'Keeffe and other upcoming exhibitions as well as discounted tickets and Invitations to come for free member mornings Please see one of the staff members here tonight or you can check in with somebody at the membership desk at the lobby At this time, I am honored to introduce you to our brilliant discussion moderator Her name is Jennifer blessing and she's a senior curator photography at the Guggenheim She curated the exhibition rows as a rose as a rose gender performance in photography 1997 which traveled to the Andy Warhol Museum She has also published widely on female identified artists who explore the performance of identity in photographic self-portraiture Such as Carrie Mae Weems who's in an upcoming exhibition We have at the Brooklyn Museum here in a cup opening in a couple weeks called we wanted revolution radical black women 1965 to 1985 along with Mickley and Thomas Catherine opium many others. So if you'll please help me welcome Jennifer blessing to the stage I want to thank the Brooklyn Museum for inviting me to moderate this panel Deconstructing the artist persona the topic that is near to my heart I also want to say thank Alicia Boone that kind introduction and Haley Graham both of them for their organizational magic and Wanda corn and Lisa small from the Brooklyn Museum for the Amazing exhibition Georgia O'Keeffe living modern which provides the pretext for this panel Director and Pasternak and senior curator Catherine Morris and the Elizabeth a Sackler Center for feminist art need to be Thanks for the all of the programs in this year of yes so I'm Delighted to moderate this panel on the occasion of Wanda corn's groundbreaking exhibition Georgia O'Keeffe living modern which is Upstairs in the fourth floor. I hope you've all had an opportunity to see the show But if not and even so it will be on view until 10 p.m. Tonight Professor corn offers us an innovative approach to O'Keeffe's production Featuring her clothing and home decor her presentation of self as a performative Moment or element of her artistic practice viewed on par with her paintings This evening. We are lucky to have a dream team lineup of scholars to present a dream team lineup of artists case studies Each providing different ways of thinking about the model of the artist persona the professor corn had posits in her exhibition and catalog on O'Keeffe Since we have such rich Talks and conversation ahead of us. I'm going to quickly introduce each speaker in the order They will appear for the take the sake of time I direct you to their biographies on their institution's websites for more information But I assure you that each has written widely and deeply about these artists and issues at hand and all are Among the phone foremost experts in their fields So to give you a sense of what's going to happen the timeline for this evening Each of the speakers will present a brief ten minute talk on one of five artists whose careers span The 20th century to the present The presentations are ordered according to the birth date of the artist from the oldest to the youngest Since Georgia O'Keeffe was born in 1887 and it's thus the oldest and because she's the subject of the exhibition on view will begin with Wanda corn Professor emerita of art history at Stanford University Next Tersa true Latimer Associate professor and chair of the visual and critical studies graduate program at the California College of the Arts Will speak about Claude Cohn who was born in 1894 Then Adriana Zavala Associate professor of art and art history at Tufts University will present her paper on Frida Kahlo who was born in 1907 Followed by Richard Meyer Robert and Ruth Halperin professor in art history at Stanford University on Andy Warhol who was born in 1928 and died in 1987 and Finally on Cindy Sherman who was born in 1954 and is 63 years old Joanna Burton director and curator of education and public engagement at the new museum After these presentations will have a roundtable discussion to tease out some of the ideas explored in each speaker's talk I'd like us all to Consider some of the following questions and of course others When thinking about these artists persona I'm specifically interested in the way that they trouble gender normativity. How do they present their gender identity? Do they refuse a binary notion of gender? Another set of questions concerns how we understand an individual's an individual artist's use of appropriation in terms of the culture of dress What did this mean then compared to what it means now? There are many other questions that I'm sure that you will have after You hear the the presentations and see the Images that accompany them after these talks will have Approximately 30 minutes of a roundtable discussion and then we'll open the floor to your questions At which point I believe there will be there are microphones here and it would be helpful if you would Come to the microphone because I we are recording For a future podcast Well, we are going to stop when we are planning to stop by 9 o'clock tonight to allow time for you to see the exhibition Exhibition before the museum closes so please join me in Welcoming to the podium professor corn Thank You Jenny and welcome everyone Delighted to kick off this round table and to say a few words Harder for me probably than anybody in that I've written about 400 pages on this subject, so I'll give it the college try I Looked up the word persona in thinking about my remarks tonight And Actually, I before I even looked up the word I first thought that this was the kind of image I was going to focus on because it's my impression From talking with friends That when I say something about Georgia O'Keeffe and dress I get two responses One is isn't she always in black? What else could there be and the other one is isn't she always sort of sitting down and looking glum or? With a serious mean of some particular sort so it's this image that I want to decode a little bit tonight with you and Show you just a few of the steps that I think led to many photographers posing O'Keeffe in this way the word persona In the dictionary Suggests that the way we're going to use it tonight is really Original to the early 20th century that in itself is interesting because this is what we're talking about with O'Keeffe Is modernism as it was born in the early 20th century and it first came to mean mask or a role that a Character an actor might take or a movie star might take so it's a role or a character or a mask in those theatrical terms And then in today's modern times Persona dictionary says has this definition It's that aspect of someone's character that is presented to or perceived by others In other words, it is one particular kind of person Persona which is so heightened and so repeatable that it's done at the expense you could say of other possible interpretations or public faces When life magazine did a cover story on O'Keeffe in 1968 this is the image and then a variant of the image that was put on on the cover And I would argue tonight that really this is one of several possible persona images But it's the one that if you will kind of wins the day It's the one that wears the best and the longest in her Career and I would also argue that it's one She was happy with and was willing to perform and willing for you the audience to see her in this particular Fashion we might describe it as a solitary figure Seated withdrawn from the everyday world in a desert setting usually with big skies Or adobe behind her and the fact here. She's on a rooftop Against a chimney and adobe chimney and sometimes there's a bone or two lying around or she has it in her hand Or sometimes it's a rock and that she also collected rocks as well as bones Bleach bones of animals and almost invariably a black dress or sometimes black with a bit of white It's a trope We would say a convention that came to stand for her that came to be the persona. She wanted most To persuade people of it's also I would say without being able to demonstrate it because of time It's a convention that draws upon Christian iconography of saints and hermits who live in the desert such as st. Francis It also evokes the dress that we associate with monks priests and nuns but it also in its Generality draws from eastern religions perhaps those of Buddhas or in some quasi manner Zen figures in meditation And I would also say given the number of times in which O'Keeffe is Rendered this way some of them come very close to being parodic Because they quote from that very well known painting in art that of Whistler's painting of his mother Now one of the through lines of my exhibition upstairs and certainly of the book is to try to track and Explore the evolution of this Zen like person persona I argue that it began in Stieglitz large portrait project of O'Keeffe And that it continues then to grow and be elaborated upon when O'Keeffe sat for post Stieglitz photographers of which there were many I Try to tell the history of in other words the growth of this particular Persona and also the degree to which I Give some weight to this in the object labels the degree to which O'Keeffe participated in the making What we could ask was her agency in this industry of persona building By the time she had posed for this life image Which was in the in the 60s She knew how to take this pose and in fact I had the great privilege of talking with the photographer Joan John Lone guard and Asking him how this picture came about and he told me that he had been out there earlier to take a whole series of pictures of Her sort of lifestyle living in her homes doing ordinary things brushing the dogs and being in the garden and so on but not life was not happy once they decided this was Going to be a cover story with the image for the cover so he went back to New Mexico from New York one more time Just to get one image and asked her what her thinking might be and she said well We haven't done anything on the roof So they went up the ladder which you can see in the exhibition and got to the roof and then she They looked around for a place to sit and you see what resulted Obviously, she could sit very beautifully then with this compact strange brand goosey shape behind her of the chimney And she took her familiar pose Lone guard told me that she was a natural model very easy to photograph She needed no coaching and could easily fall into this kind of gravitas Po pose One way that surely O'Keeffe participated in the making of her own persona was through her dress and Personal style which is another story that's being told upstairs Her choice of dress and I love to show these pictures because I bet not one of you is going to be Confused as to which one is O'Keeffe? I don't even know exactly what's going on here But I think in both cases these are prize winners women who are getting certificates of one sort or another for the other and you Can see so clearly the way O'Keeffe's choice of urban dress in New York City is so pared down and Unornamented totally different from the dress of her peers And I can show you one other picture that makes that comparison even clearer In this art opening picture where the two of them are there because it's a stuben glass Exhibition and miss O'Keeffe had made a particular glass piece For it so her severity of dress if we can call it her plainness of dress the the Manishness as many people would comment on her dress Clearly became part of the vocabulary the visual vocabulary that O'Keeffe brought to the partnership She had with individual Photographers I mentioned the Stieglitz was her first photographer I'll just quickly say if you don't know he made a 20-year project out of what he called a continuous portrait of her So 20 years that's from about 1917 to 37 which is when he stopped making Pictures it was from him that she learned how well her already well-established Favorite palette of dress black and white how well this black and white Wardrobe worked for a master photographer who was also working in black and white film Stieglitz was the first to render O'Keeffe as a remote and withdrawn Figure here. I should be putting these two in play here. This is in the early 1920s And he had several O'Keeffe's I in the book in particular I point out sort of five or six tropes that develop under him But the one that really goes on to have a long history is the one represented by these two with her head in capes and hoods her eyes Her eyes looking somewhere other than outward and this very strong sense of contact with the inner world rather than contact with The outer world It's also very much the case that he was the first to render O'Keeffe not only as remote But also using her black capes her black Headdresses to make her Evoke that iconography of ecclesiastical or mystical figures by the time Arnold Newman came to photograph the two of them. This is in 1944 it's quite clear that this idea this trope of a deceited O'Keeffe particularly to the standing Stieglitz as you have here in this wonderful photograph that this shows that there was a real Newman like to express The reputation of his artists in the way he posed them and obviously he's posed them here as sort of one compact figure Stieglitz himself some looking with in his cape something like a cleric with a Bible The fact is it's a book about him homages to Alfred Stieglitz and O'Keeffe The more meditative person in the back kind of anchoring the partnership, but in that gaze that We've already I've already characterized for you O'Keeffe Could have gone forward and in a number of the other guys is that Stieglitz Inaugurated but in fact they began to fall by the wayside I learned as I began to discuss this and it's really these ecclesiastical these kind of secular figures these artist figures But in a ecclesiastical guard that sticks to her and continues to energize photographers post Stieglitz after he dies in 46 that come and portray her So I switch now be without making little small leaps. This is a large leap all the way to the 1980s Well, excuse me. Lowengard is not the 80s That's to be the carryover from what we just looked at at Life Magazine And you can see the degree to which you have a very similar pose and a very similar figure with Bruce Weber in the 1980s these are the kinds of images that circulated widely About O'Keeffe. They're images that she herself we know cared for so she would if not She could easily if prompted fall into them And in fact as she became older There's a sort of reality level if you will here too because she had macular degeneration and could no longer read thus closed eyes perhaps Was a very natural way to be in space listening as caretakers read to her and one last of these might be this image where again, I was able to talk to the photographer George Mobley or at least e-talk That he made this image in 1980 and I said to him How did you get her to look like that and and and I also always asked any photographer I got to talk to whether they had anything to do with the way she was dressed and variably they always said to me They took pictures of what she was wearing when they arrived and she clearly Has put herself together for that particular occasion in any case you see again this pose. She's very She's in deep into her 90s at this particular time And she clearly takes it easily and all he did he said was tell her where to sit and pull Pulled her into a relationship with one of her paintings Lastly, let me just show you that it's not only photographers that understood this This persona that had emerged over 30 or 40 years of posing this particular way but also a painter a painter or two, but this one is one of my favorites a American artist I shouldn't say American a native American artist from Santa Fe called David Bradley And here he very clearly reworks whistler's mother. That's supposed to be part of the charm I think of the image. He literally puts her in a nun's dress She seated painting with a desert setting her red hills the mountains in the background bones Scattered around at her feet Now O'Keeffe did not pose for this portrait as she obviously had to pose for portraits done by photographers she's still alive In 1989, but it's very clear that by this moment in time that persona was solidly based in the American Imagination and and American and when Bradley took her on This became a very easy way a kind of pop image of her to show that mask That we were talking about the character and her character in this same Seated solitary and meditative pose. So in conclusion, I'd say that O'Keeffe was a active Participant in creating her own persona. I think it's fair to call her a partner To those of her many camera men and women It was a slow process over time to create this persona It didn't all pop out in the first few years of her relationship with Stieglitz And it took over two more generations of photographers to solidify it Into the O'Keeffe that we often all evoke in our minds when we think of what she looks like Clothes were an essential tool for her in shaping her persona But it was also her ability to fall into a contemplative pose to say to young photographers You can shoot me but never shoot anything that shows my teeth or a smile on my face She wanted always to be looking as if she was connected to an inner self But not with the world outside. It's St. Georgia that we get as the persona Something quite different from the other persona the other Georgia's that people knew the tough-minded independent somewhat controlling sometimes very gruff woman That she could be in her everyday life. It's an image where she never seems to work very hard She never works up a sweat But she's solving the problems of the world as she sits and thinks about them and that indeed is exactly what a persona is It's a mask. It's a character. It's not the whole self. It's not the whole private self It's really a public one a public self And it is the birth and the evolution of her persona that is one of the major stories I hope my exhibition tells upstairs. Thanks very much Good evening. Always a hard act to follow, but I'll do my best I'm I was invited here to explore Claude Kaz constructed public persona And to participate in a broader conversation about the artist's presentation of self and I'll address this directive by focusing primarily on one image One of Claude Kaz many personae this one is Camp posing in travesty for a photograph taken by her partner Marcel Moore in the early 1920s, and I just want to say parenthetically that here we are in Brooklyn in 2017 and maybe it doesn't look particularly striking To walk around the streets with your head and eyebrows Shaven off if you're a woman but Imagine Claude Kaz in 1920 walking around in Paris because she could take the costume off But it took a while for the hair to grow back so I I just want to say from the beginning that this was a very courageous performance and Indeed made her persona non grata in polite company and in fact within the milieu of Surrealist she was hanging out with on occasion as well. So a lot of conviction here And that's perhaps what attracts me to the image. I want to Backtrack a bit to provide you with a little background in case you're not familiar with Claude Kaz the daughter of a French bourgeois family half Jewish a lesbian and one of the rare Female surrealists not coupled with a male member of the milieu Kya understood that her cultural authority depended on acts of dissimulation and even impersonation as An adolescent she adopted a masculine voice and signed the article she published in her father's newspaper and literary journal with gender ambiguous pseudonyms one of them was Claude Kya Later Kya allied herself closely with surrealism in the early 1930s But took a critical stance in response to the sexist and heterocentric thrust of male surrealist rhetoric and practice contra by a biologically determined notions of Femininity fetishistically preserved in surrealism's iconography Such as this image by man Ray of Lee Miller his studio assistant and lover Kaz work as an author and artist emphasizes the cultural coding of gendered bodies This photograph has been exhibited and reproduced widely in the contemporary era and You can make out perhaps that her leotard bears the inscription. I am in training. Don't kiss me Using voice costume gesture and staging Kya and her accomplice Marcel Moore challenged conventions securing both Femininity and masculinity as natural essences The photograph that's the focus of my thinking this evening Makes a less humorous statement than I am in training. Don't kiss me here Assumes a confrontational Stance right arm a Kimbo hip sprung her left arm hangs a bit tensely at her side hand clenched into a fist The pose incorporates in this way both a dandy's blaze insouciance and can's readiness to fight for it Her eyes all the more prominent for the eradicated eyebrows and shaven scalp Glare daringly out at the viewer The frontal lighting sets her pale face and hands off starkly against the dark costume and backdrop backdrop pinned to the wall behind her The absence of furnishings or architectural features within the photographic frame and the portraits Three-quarters cropping make it hard to gauge cans physical stature. She was quite small The image calls attention to both the conventionality of gender identities signifiers hair costume Stance stature and the faints of photographic image-making cropping lighting backdrop Caz attire dark Mantellered trousers and jacket handkerchief peeking out of the breast pocket silk ascot Contributes to the gender ambiguity of this photo performance Since male surrealists played with gender conventions and incorporated the dandy along with its French analog the Baudelaire and flanneur Into their dissident mythology Caz performance here clearly carries on a conversation with and within surrealism Caz closest surrealist interlocutors André Breton, Jacques Vio, René Crevel, Robert Desnauss, Henri Michaud adopted dandy garb and mannerisms In so doing they summoned up an historical persona the 19th century dandy personified here in this painting of Beau Brummel who by exhibiting Feminine vanity about his appearance flouted bourgeois norms of masculinity The sartorial and gestural codes Caz adopts in her Photo performance may point back even more specifically to one of her declared role models the decadent poet and dandy esthete Oscar Wilde a Generation earlier Caz uncle the symbolist author Marcel Schwab a dandy himself Had introduced Wilde's writings to French readers Supported the esthete during his trials in England for acts of gross indecency and cared for him during his final exile in Paris Caz dandy drag Arguably marks her family connection to wild One of the most visible and targeted gay men of the older generation By the 1920s Wilde and styles had already been widely appropriated by Lesbians the painter Romaine Brooks for example to signify gender dissidents and body forth a new kind of artistic persona On the streets of Paris and other cultural capitals during the interwar years La mode Garcon participated in a more widespread and popular gender crisis Caz homage to the dandy then Declare her sexual sympathies with both male and female cultural rebels Compared to Romaine Brooks paintings, which were publicly displayed as were works by Marcel Duchamp Man Ray and other male artists of their generation who famously exploited the radical potential of drag Caz photo performances received very little public exposure during her lifetime They were exhibited in the Paris apartment. She shared with Moore viewed by the overlapping artistic Political and theatrical circles. They hosted there Sometimes the photographs were displayed in bookstores that published or carried Caz writings a few images circulated in limited edition publications and enlargements passed hand-to-hand among Caz and Moore's friends For this reason alone few would consider Duchamp's high profile alter ego Arrows say la vie preening in this photograph taken by man Ray around the same time Can more created that dandy portrait? Few would consider the two analogous The historical conditions in which the two images originally were produced and viewed inflect them very differently Surrealists by trespassing into the social and cultural margins that women involuntarily occupied Open spaces where women artists could exercise cultural agency yet while European male Surrealists experimented with and some would say colonized Alternate states of being in their efforts to place the very notion of subjectivity under pressure European women had not yet achieved full subject status They exercised the right to vote in France for the first time and were recognized as full citizens only after the Second World War and Even then I always gasp when I I mean mentally when I when I say that So I'm a little surprised that I didn't hear any gasps It may be the Second World War just seems like so long ago to most of you That's how old I am. I still gasp Even then they remained subordinate in Traditionally male dominated professional arenas including art and literature Arguably for these reasons Women had little to lose if the existing structures of social and sexual Subjectivity were to erode under the pressure of critical re-examination in the 1930s Yet, how could women claim the right to exist the right to speak the right to self representation without occupying a legitimate subject position as a woman Thus a central axis of radical experimentation within surrealism Gender indeterminacy posed an unresolvable conundrum for feminist constituents Can for one Faced that conundrum head-on by performing at the very limits of subjective legibility as Woman as man as non-normative human she stripped representation down to the bone to expose the Existential problems of her gender and queerness No matter how many acts of impersonation she performed given this historical context With its gender and sexual biases she would never achieve personhood and Duchamp despite his expeditions into the guy in the guise of arrows say la vie would never lose it Thank you. It appears I'm next so I'll dispense with thank-you's, but thank you to everyone who organized this extraordinary symposium, so I'll begin So Frida Kahlo is today one of the world's most celebrated women and recognized artists biographies monographs and retrospective exhibitions abound and the market for trade publications on Kahlo is evidently insatiable Within the literature Biographical approaches predominate with attention focused more on Kahlo's dramatic life story than on her intellect authors who suggest that Kahlo's painting was quote autobiography in paint and Interpret herself portraits as illustrations of her life's events in chronological order or Claimed that her life was more interesting than her art are short-sighted For most of her adult life Kahlo was known first as Diego Rivera's wife Yet Kahlo was exceptionally intelligent creative and well educated. She read or spoke English French and German in 1922 she enrolled at Mexico City's prestigious National Preparatory School where she was one of only 35 women in a class of 2000 students her aim was to study medicine however an infamous accident in 1925 brought her formal studies to an end and she turned to painting as An artist Kahlo was as intensely in dialogue With cultural currents coming out of Europe and the United States as with the cultural politics of her milieu in post-revolutionary, Mexico Like the Mexican muralists not least her husband Diego Rivera Kahlo considered painting a social and political act central to the creation of a revolutionary nation in a 1943 essay Rivera praised Kahlo as the paragon of Mexican revolutionary art yet. She produced fewer than 200 paintings While her formal academic training was relatively minimal her proximity to Rivera provided access to intellectual and political circles in Mexico and abroad and This influenced both the style and conceptual basis of her painting as well as her self-fashioning and public persona Kahlo was astute in combining deliberately naive a deliberately naive style of painting in vogue and post-revolutionary Mexico an example of which You see here That drew inspiration from Mexican folk art and provincial and non-academic painting with avant-garde experimentation Her works demonstrated dialogue with Italian Renaissance and Manorist painting in the Indian miniatures Social realism German new objectivity Italian pittura metaphysics and of course surrealism and so very briefly This is an early Kahlo self-portrait erroneously titled Pancho via and Adelita When in fact what she's really depicting is herself as a young modern and the sketch for this painting suggests that Kahlo is very much in dialogue with Cubism at the time Over here is a self-portrait from 1729 and we might look at it and think that she's very much styling herself as tradition which she is partially because she's wearing a Pre-Columbian necklace But she's also very clearly to me in dialogue with German new objectivity and so I'm illustrating this portrait by Christian Shad To this she added a healthy dose of narcissism and charm Creating a body of work that was highly original culturally and politically resonant and transgressive and transcultural Of course Kahlo excelled at self-portraiture and she was also a master of the still life and she painted complex figural compositions No doubt inspired by the muralists approach to history painting While she may have used the personal as a springboard her painting always mediates and challenges conventional understandings of history politics culture beauty and gender and sexual norms Her approach to depicting physical pain and emotional complexity was ahead of its time Her frankness on topics such as female reproduction and patriarchally prescribed gender norms Speaks to viewers as much today as it did to those who rediscovered her in the 1970s including feminists and young Chicana and Chicano artists in the United States and here I'm showing you the Miriam Shapiro Agony in the Garden from 1991 that's here in the Brooklands collection And then I'm juxtaposing it with the Chicana muralist Judy Baca Who here in a work that's less known of Baca's? She creates a triptych called the Three Marys and what you're looking at is two panels Where Baca adopts the guise of two tropes of Chicana femininity and in the center is a mirror So I'm also showing you the photograph where Baca the artist positions herself And so she's very much exploring female identity identity as Kahlo did not as a given but as a discursive Process and that's what interests me about Kahlo At the same time however Admirations for Kahlo's creativity and her perseverance have also fueled the mythologizing phenomena known as freedom mania She's adored by many Visitors to exhibitions of her work will inevitably encounter fans rendering homage. So Beyonce. Whoops. Sorry Here Here I'm showing you the reprint of Hayden Herrera's Biography of Kahlo not with Kahlo on the cover but with Salma Hayek. I don't think I need to say more about that Descendants of Kahlo have they own copyright to her image and they're marketing it for things like converse high tops Fake Kahlo fingernails a proliferation of fake paintings Etc. And so forth So visitors to exhibitions of her work will inevitably encounter fans rendering homage by sporting colorful clothing flowers in their hair Etc. And so forth to the issue of Kahlo's construction of her artistic persona It's illuminating to consider her use of photography both in staging the self and as a source of inspiration for her painting She was intimately familiar with the medium as a result of her close relationship with her father Wilhelm later Kahlo a successful photographer with a prestigious studio in downtown Mexico City who specialized in photographing architectural landmarks But he also excelled at portraiture. And so you're seeing a detail of his portrait of Frida in February of 19 26 And I'm juxtaposing it with an image that appeared in vogue In as part of an article called Senoras of Mexico So Frida was as photogenic as they come dark piercing expressive eyes framed by her unibrow full lips Her almost mustache her evident pension for photographic portraiture was crucial to her cultivation of a larger than life persona And there's no question that she mastered the art of the pose as The daughter closest to her father. Oh, and I've labeled these becoming I haven't oh yes becoming modern becoming tradition So what I'm arguing here is that not unlike Claude Kohn Kahlo was styling herself a la wild a la garçon and this is something that some young women in Mexico City Were doing in 1925. She also has short hair in this image. She hasn't just pulled it back It's actually cut and a decade later. You see that she's adopted the guise of the traditional woman So it's an inversion of the usual trajectory As the daughter closest to her father Frida became adept at photography as well Here I'm showing you sorry more images Of her as a garçon. I think I might be missing a slide. No here they are So So as the daughter closest to her father, she became adept at photography And I have found letters where they actually talk about photographic technology So that suggests that he writing to her implies that she understands what he's talking about f-stops and that kind of thing And these recently discovered photographs taken by Kahlo herself a test to her talent for the medium Kahlo sat for a veritable who's who of 20th century photographers But it's imperative to consider these portraits in relation to her staging of the self her authorial intention Which resides as much with her as with the photographers Today these portraits feed the insatiable hunger for all things Frida because they appear to bring us closer to the truth But she made sure of that in an unpublished letter. She told a friend quote I believe that after my death, I'm going to become the biggest gaca in the world close quote The prescience of that quip speaks volumes when she wrote the letter from Detroit in 1932 Kahlo had only been painting with seriousness for five years and she was happily it seems in the shadow of Rivera She could not yet have foreseen that as a painter She would make a unique and important contribution to the history not just of 20th century Mexican art, but of modern art Could she have foreseen her status as a fashion icon? That seems more certain in another letter written in 1932 this time from New York to her friend Isabel Campos in Mexico City She wrote without irony with irony New York is very pretty. It's no here for the first time yesterday and very soon It's going to be as cold as the devil, but there's nothing to do but put on your woollies At least with my famous famous long skirts. The cold gets to me less. I'm still as crazy as ever And I've gotten used to these antiquated dresses Some of the gringachas even imitate me and want to dress like Mexicanas, but the poor things look like turnips That doesn't mean I look much better But at least I pass and passing here is crucial And so here you see a beautiful portrait by Imogen Cunningham from 1931 of Kahlo in San Francisco And then down below her friend Lucian Block in a more intimate photograph shows Kahlo with a lampshade on her head So as noted in the letter by the 1930s Kahlo favored not contemporary fashions anymore But rather the hairstyles jewelry and attire of indigenous women Especially Zapotec women from the Isthmus of Tehuantepec in southern Mexico These women known as Tehuanas became symbols of Mexican femininity in the post-revolutionary period They're the originators of the distinctive dress the Kahlo adopted and is best known for Including a square shaped embroidered tunic, long skirts of velvet and lace with flounces Gold filigree earrings and necklaces adorned with coins and a voluminous lace headdress resembling a petticoat Framing the face or thrown over the shoulders and worn down the back Although described as matriarchs in nationalist period sources and point of fact these women's lives were and remain circumscribed by male-dominated social structures Kahlo's practice of wearing indigenous and peasant clothing declared her allegiance to the political and cultural ideals of revolutionary Mexico by Prioritizing the country's indigenous culture particularly its women of course It must nevertheless be acknowledged as a form of cultural appropriation and yet in adopting indigenous clothing Kahlo was no ethnographic purist either She collected from different ethnic groups had garments made to order and mixed and matched to her own discretion And so I suggest that we consider how her collecting and use of dress Expressed a commitment to acknowledging the trans-cultural complexity Not just of Mexico of the Mexican nation, but also the diversity of its indigenous communities in a sense it walks the line between Neocolonial appropriation and anti-colonial gesture and it is a form of cultural authority That Kahlo was striving for here Kahlo was not alone in adopting indigenous costume, but whereas other women intellectuals. Oh, sorry I'm a slide behind so I just want to point out that she didn't only dress as a Tehuana so you see several photographs and articles of her clothing the The cloak on the bottom left is from Guatemala. The one in the middle is a different indigenous group from Oaxaca and then she's wearing a pair of Chinese pajamas and a pair of custom-made shoes made from Chinese fabric Okay So Kahlo was not alone of course in adopting indigenous costume But costume but whereas other women intellectuals wore it occasionally as a marker of their indigenous to nationalism Kahlo made costuming a daily practice and Period commentators described her elaborate process of self-adornment especially when photographers were going to pay a call So in effect this costuming became her brand As noted photographic portraits played a central role both in Kahlo's staging of the self and now in the micro industry That is the Kahlo cult Among the most popular are the photographic portraits taken by her one-time lover the Hungarian-born photographer Nicholas Murray Murray built a successful career working for magazines such as Vanity Fair, Ladies Home Journal and McCalls He was a master of the three-color Carbureau printing process a pioneer of that process His vivid portraits of Kahlo show off her beautiful clothes her perfect hair Adorned with flowers and ribbons her soft red lips and striking brow In 1939 Kahlo wrote to Mariah thanking him for sending her a copy of a portrait taken in his studio in New York earlier that year And it's the portrait that you see in the upper left She shared that Rivera considered it quote as marvelous as a pierrot de la Francesca But then as if to remind Murray of the intimacy they had shared she added quote you will always be inside the magenta reboso While enjoying these photographs we must consider two important facts Mirai understood well the commercial appeal of color and how to style his subjects whether women or food at the same time However, Kahlo was a master of striking the pose She'd been posing for her father and for other photographers since childhood So here again Kahlo and then chocolate pie for McCalls by Mariah It seems evident to me the color drew inspiration from Mariah's portraits for some of her most iconic works for example her self-portrait with Thorne necklace and dead hummingbird and Here you see that painting which Mariah eventually purchased from Kahlo You see the photograph that I believe she's working from and you see this much more intimate portrait that Mariah took of her Where she's holding up one of her folk art frames in front of her face so it seems evident to me that she drew inspiration and I'm interested not just in her use of photography as source material and Not just in its denotational function and its descriptive function But as a source of creativity as part of her thinking process in This array of portraits by different photographers We see Kahlo striking a pose at her beautifully appointed home the Casa Azul and outside of Mexico City and her Elaborate attire she fits in beautifully with her collection of folk art toys provincial paintings an Unusual menagerie of pets and her elaborate cactus garden that is a testament to her and Rivera's pioneering role in promoting Mexico's botanical heritage So to conclude Kahlo's work her painting is best understood in light of her knowledge of art history avant-garde innovation and her sociopolitical and cultural context Similarly her artistic persona as a discursive practice that included painted self portraits an elaborate Costuming practice a beautiful home and garden as a kind of mise en scene It seems clear that Kahlo intervened in the conception and execution of the countless photographic portraits taken of her as Kahlo's grand niece Christina Kahlo has observed quote photography contributed decisively to shaping the myths surrounding the uniqueness of Frida Kahlo It's clear that Kahlo aimed to captivate Her painting will sustain her art historical legacy But it's her photographic image that sustains the legend and the icon that is Frida Kahlo as Mexico's most astute cultural commentator Carlos Monsi vice once observed quote no myth is ever created without its own consent Thank you My work as a historian of modern American art and the broader scholarly field of which it is part Would not exist without Wanda corn a scholar whose boldness of vision Generosity of intellect and flair for innovation are everywhere on display in the exhibition that provides the occasion For our discussion this evening So that's my way of saying thank you to Wanda and now on to a very different person and persona all together I'm gonna start with a quote From Andy Warhol I never understood why when you died you didn't just vanish and Everything could just be going on the way it was before only you just wouldn't be there I always thought I'd like my own tombstone to be blank no epitaph and no name Well, actually I'd like it to say figment This these remarks are titled figment Andy Warhol isn't there Andy Warhol's withdrawal of individual agency was often commented upon during his lifetime the artist's passivity indifference and flatness of affect became the most salient characteristic of his public persona To this day Warhol critics and scholars duly cite his desire to be a machine or to have someone else do all his work for him To demonstrate how the artist challenged modernist concepts of originality and self-expression All but ignored in these accounts. However is the insistence of Warhol's performance of passivity and his careful crafting of an artistic persona that That asserted itself through its apparent effacement Warhol famously exasperated his interviewers by answering I don't know or otherwise evasive responses to virtually every question posed in Casually acknowledging his own ignorance. I don't know Or his lack of discrimination. I like everything Warhol undermined the professional aim of the interview and of the interviewer, which of course Was and remains in such context to reveal something unusually compelling or previously unknown or unexpected At the end of reading or watching a Warhol interview an audience learned absolutely nothing new about his art and That in a sense was precisely what they learned Even as Warhol was physically present for the interview. He was not there as a source of information Far from a genuine an act of genuine self-erasure, however Warhol's public persona was unique even unforgettable and I would say remained so it engaged the audience in a new way compelling to compelling them to furnish answers in the absence created by the artist's withdrawal from the scene and now I'm just going to very quickly These are just four different person I that Warhol presented this sort of swish window decorator and commercial illustrator of the 1950s the sort of mod Experimental pop artists and experimental filmmaker this time wearing a cowboy hat which was unusual for Warhol But he's filming lonesome cowboys in Arizona of the 60s the sort of World-wide celebrity and studio 54 partier of the 70s and then the multimillionaire business artist and unlikely male model of the 1980s None of these personas however, and so I'm sort of showing you the way in which throughout his career Warhol used clothing was very aware Not unlike Georgia O'Keefe or Frida Kahlo The clock go and I would say is a different instance, but Because the way those anyway for those photographs are crafted with her with her lover But Warhol was extremely aware of of the camera's attentions and also of the possibilities of fashion and also Wigs and nose jobs and other things that he used to to alter and he hoped improved his appearance He was also someone who famously throughout his life was very unhappy with his physical appearance But but I want to say that none of these Warhol's could be stabilized in part because of the way in which he never follows through on the Identities that any of these and many other Warhol if you will impersonations of Warhol seem to promise This in a way for me is more Warholian as a image this Presentation of the self he is being photographed by a friend and and professional photographer Dwayne Michaels even as he is also Refusing a certain kind of visibility a certain kind of exchange with the camera And here a famous wonderful Richard Avedon That's entitled Andy Warhol and the members of the factory. I don't have time to go into it But if you notice Andy Warhol is on the very margin of the visual field looking away, and you have all these other very charismatic In some cases transgenders naked sometimes quite physically charismatic figures and Warhol Literally marginalized by the world that he himself the social world and that he has created And then just I've got to talk about two interviews as I mentioned I think that Warhol's effacement of his own persona comes out most strongly and also for the professional interview or most frustratingly in the context of filmed or or You know newspaper interviews here I'm showing you stills from a documentary called painters painting a well-known documentary about the New York art world of abstract expressionism and also pop and minimalist art a number of talking head interviews with artists and dealers including de Kooning Frank Stella Robert Rauschenberg and Leo Castelli When the film gets to Warhol the entire setup of the filming changes Warhol insisted that the he be filmed in a mirror And that the filmmaker in meal day Antonio who was also his friend You see him on the right there and on the right of the be shown and that Bridget Berlin who is a member of Warhol's One of Warhol superstars answer the questions. So one of the things that's fascinating to me about this Documentary the moment that Warhol Comes on the screen He shatters The convention of the talking head and you suddenly realize just how conventional that is you realize Okay, there's someone asking questions a meal day Antonio just off screen There's a camera person just off screen in all of those other talking heads Which at the time of particularly were taken to be the very the very stuff of documentary truth in film The voice of authority and Warhol refuses that voice on so many different levels Not only be by having another voice and I think importantly a woman's voice Take over and literally answer the questions that are being directed not to Bridget Berlin But to Warhol the film itself the filmmakers had no interest in Bridget Berlin But Warhol insisted that she be filmed and she speak for him But all and you could see here He's actually holding the microphone Warhol for Bridget Berlin to answer the question that had been directed to him And I want to show you another interview less well known than this one and This is an interview That is actually on the Merve Griffin show from 1966 and Merve It has invited Andy Warhol, but Andy insists that Edie Sedgwick come with him and eat and he Instructs Edie to instruct Merve that whatever questions are asked by Merve to Andy Andy will whisper the answers In Edie Sedgwick's ear and then Edie will speak the answers to Merve. However, what happens which is quite fascinating I hope this is going to work the video is that Edie begins to just answer the questions in her own She doesn't wait for for for Warhol and the answers. She gives are quite compelling An artist carries a certain amount of emotion into a painting Can you do that in pop art? Is that any kind of an emotional thing for you? None at all No, I'm being serious because there are what kind of emotion can you put into a Campbell soup can? You know but then why my question is why would you pay to Campbell soup? Because it's a part of the culture It is I agree. I agree. I think a lot of Advertising is something that we recognize. It's probably the yeah, but the effect of it. You might not realize that's Art has something to do with the reflection of it. Are there a few begin seeing it on canvases you start thinking about it What do we have around us all the time? What do you see the most of what do you notice advertising? It's true. It is true in a sense And that's where a lot of but this doesn't something of the artist go into his painting No, no and here. Yes a lot of work for one. It's not even the masters. There was no emotional involvement with you You could stop it the Rembrandt's So one of the things that's amazing about this About this clip is that actually at a certain point in answering Merv's question Which she does in a he sort of directs it to Andy But then he directs it to Edie because Edie's the one giving responses that are more than one word is that Edie starts asking Merv questions what is art what you know and She says to Merv what is it that we see around us all the time? And he says advertisements and then she kind of makes this incredible sort of smirk or grimace But it is Edie who provides the interpretation of pop art which Warhol would never have done Which is that it is a way to critically think about the commodity culture which constantly surrounds us But that we don't actually see or we see it, but we don't look at it or really consider it as a condition of and a constraint on everyday life and It's because Warhol withdraws first of all he refuses to go even on to the show without Edie But also he withdraws into either no response or these one word responses It is in that space of refusal as I say that this other voice and again a woman's voice Very glamorous woman's woman and her voice come into Audibility So to finish up If I just could have the next slide although maybe I don't need the next slide Whenever if it should happen that would be great Warhol has taken me so I'm just returning Anyway for a moment to myself Warhol has taken me quite literally around the world to speak at conferences and exhibitions in Venues ranging from Sydney to Shanghai to College Station, Texas It's a good thing as my former partner has often said to me you work on Warhol or you'd never get an invitation to go anywhere As such a global itinerary suggests Warhol continues to attract the attention of museums and curators throughout the world Each of whom present the artist's work and public persona for their own purposes and audiences Warhol's practice of self-effacement may however be most useful to scholars critics and other cognizantie of the art world in The way it demonstrates the value of admitting one's own lack of authority the value of saying right out loud as Often as necessary the three words. I Don't know Thank you. Thank you guys for being here and just another thank you to The organizers to Alicia and Haley to Wanda and Jenny also for for this wonderful context, so I Actually do need my But I'll get started and they'll appear I'm sure of it I'm aware that I am speaking on the only living artist, which I actually think is of note And maybe we'll be interesting to discuss on the panel I'm addressing Cindy Sherman People are often amazed that someone as nice as Cindy Sherman could be a major artist by nice I mean friendly modest warm considerate even tempered Qualities that we do not usually associate with artistic ego and which might seem antithetical to the disturbing and phenomenally influential work this artist has produced over the last 23 years End quote These are the opening sentences for a text written nearly 20 years ago Calvin Tompkins 2000 New Yorker profile of the artist Tompkins impulse to categorize Sherman as unthreatening even slightly docile is not unique Indeed if there is a prevailing through line to much of the popular coverage of the artist It is an attempt to reconcile the seemingly benign woman taking the pictures with the strikingly uncontrollable people and non-people whose characters and characteristics she assumes in front of her own lens the amount of Literature that talks about what a nice gal she is is truly astounding. There's a lot of it out there While more overtly theoretical texts would on the face of it veer away from such one-to-one Correspondence there to the nature of the relationship between author and image is raised repeatedly Indeed while bucking up against the very notion that one should find an artwork's meaning at the site of the artist No less a critic than Rosalind Krauss pointed in her epic text on Sherman written in 1993 To the continual desire by many to do so Discussing in particular the discomfort produced by Sherman's persistent unwillingness to narrate her intentions Krauss pointed specifically to ongoing confusion and discomfort around the status of the artist's feminist politics So this was a moment In feminist discourse where an unwillingness to state that the meaning behind the work was overtly feminist Raised a lot of questions. It still raises questions And I think it's an interesting question to debate whether work can be feminist whether or not the intention of the artist is for it to be In refusing by the way, she didn't say she wasn't feminist She refused though to align herself in either direction and Refusing to overtly align her work with feminism i.e. to name it as feminist many worried her images operated with dangerous ambiguity Teetering on the edge of reinscribing the real and symbolic violence one could alternately argue they worked to undo So it was equally possible for people to argue that she was reinscribing Violence symbolic violence or that she was deconstructing it and this is actually quite I think important to a lot of the work that was being done in the 80s and 90s And maybe we can talk a bit about that as well In this scenario it was less the stark incompatibility between Sherman herself and the work She was making and instead the possibility that without a stated purpose for her photographs They might have lives of their own Krauss famously found the notion of intentionality deeply problematic Most controversially in her 1981 text in the name of Picasso Which argued strenuously for the decoupling of biography from any analysis of artwork In fact, there were there have been lots of debates about the role of Biography in the reading of work and I think again that's something that Is happening today in various ways as well and it would be interesting to talk with Wanda about that of Sherman and expectations that she state her own feminist leaning she wrote This is Krauss quote the idea that an artist has a responsibility to come forward with an explicit reading of her or his work Seems just as peculiar as the idea that the only way to produce such a reading should the art visual artists wish to do So would be through words it is far more usual for artists to construct the interpretive frames within which they are Producing and understanding their work by situating themselves in relation to what the critic Mikkel Bakhtin called a discursive horizon I bring together. Oh great I bring together these two very different examples of how an artist like Sherman is asked to account for herself or is Otherwise accounted for as a way to gesture towards the spectrum of what we might call persona and for the purposes of this panel To think about personas function today when I'll argue that it's it is not a stable term either Indeed the question of artistic persona as we know has long been posed But I think the texture of that question has varied tremendously in resonance and application When for instance Krauss following Bakhtin pointed to Sherman's discursive horizon She was thinking of course of Sherman's peers those figures now famously known as the pictures artists and including Louise Lawler Sherry Levine Robert Longo Troy Braun talk and so on but she was also pointing to a legacy of surrealism that a number of artists were Reconsidering and repurposing with regard to a cultural landscape in which the AIDS crisis among other contemporary traumas Were impacting representation both in and outside of art. This was the moment of abject art You can think about various ways in which Surrealism was being invoked and brought back and in fact Sherman herself was looking very directly at those legacies photographic way So what does I didn't mean for that was to be a surprise Well, you'll see in a minute. What does today's discursive horizon look like what current context do artists situate themselves within and Does their work react to and what histories rise up with renewed relevance? This is also really interesting in the case of an artist like Sherman That's worked for over four four decades that context continues to shift. So does the discursive horizon Oddly perhaps I would speculate that this new discursive horizon today's is where the two pressures placed on Sherman the first to reveal who she is or To reveal what she believes to advance Sorry, the first is to reveal who she is and the second is to relieve which to reveal what she believes to advance a position Or a persona or both converge the discursive horizon of today looks like a Google Google search Here's a screenshot of what happens when you plug in Cindy Sherman I'm struck by the categories that have been determined by the many acts of searching for her So if you see herself is linked to images of the artist in which she is arguably playing no role Or a role that can only be defined outside Photography even while it still clearly resides within that medium Self-portrait on the other hand is linked to artworks and to value What is the semantic shift? Within the rapidly changing realm of online information distribution and more particularly social media the very notion of persona Necessarily morphs in preparing this talk I couldn't help but reflect on the ways in which Sherman's work in so many ways presaged many of today's conversations about Self-presentation self-determination to say nothing of about debates With about what happens to images when they enter a media stream with new capacities for manipulating and instrumentalizing Meaning the lack of control around meaning The Sherman was always aware of these sometimes competing capacities with regard to imagery even before the internet and use them as part of her Work is evident from the start Indeed it is not for nothing that the consistent quest to find Sherman in her work has gone on for decades in large part because she so Consistently refuses to satisfy it. I wonder looking over the decades of her work and just a taste here Where and how persona is located within the images themselves? So it's interesting showing Sherman images because I always feel like everybody thinks they already know them so well From the film stills in the early early to mid 1970s to the centerfolds to the horror and object photographs the history portraits the sex dolls and Then to lesser-known early works from the 1970s that have newly engaged and enraged viewers Who within the contemporary climate are going back to early work? This is from the bus riders series Where she was engaging all kinds of folks that she saw around her and is now actually being called to task for cultural Appropriation in a pretty intense way So it's also interesting to think about going back and looking at images within the case of a new context So is persona in the case of Sherman? Located solely in the concept of herself Which is in this which is to say in some idea of her authentic self as a leaf as elusive as that is It's almost too obvious to state but still Persona is a gendered concept to say nothing of a raced sexed classed and abled Concept Etymologically, we know it refers to exteriority to the ability to put on or play social types And again, I think this image is quite interesting and thinking about the evolution of Discourse around these topics yet a fundamental distinction. I think persists when it comes to plumbing Or as the prompt for tonight has it deconstructing persona My question then is whether this putting on ironically for Sherman whose ove consists of just that Happens mostly or even exclusively when she is not putting it on in other words is the persona That the thing that folks are looking for the most most present when it looks least present This of course is the gendered dimension to which I elude. I Think it's interesting to engage Richard and his comments on Warhol on this point as Sherman and Warhol are often Productively discussed in terms of their mutual commitment if differently enacted to refusing to give it up in terms of intention Or even interiority But it is this latter term I think that evidences the crucial distinction Warhol's brilliance and his legacy was to some degree understood as predicated on and sustained to some degree Today by the idea that his subjectivity had no interiority That fantasy allowed for and allows still for one kind of idea of persona yet in Sherman's case the hunt for interiority However thwarted indicates a belief it is still there and perhaps more importantly key to the work To this point and to close I want to turn to yet another profile This on the occasion of Sherman's most recent exhibition at Metro Pictures an amazing grouping of works that have broadly Been described as depicting aging movie stars Yet in his text for the New York Times titled ready for her close-up not an accidental nor uncomplicated nod to sunset boulevard Critic Blake Gopnik argues that Sherman is finally ready to be seen These images he says evidence a quote tenderness Unquote that has not been in her work for decades specifically since the film stills It could even be he writes that her mature leading ladies should be thought of as the aspiring Starlets of those film stills 40 years on after they've achieved success and come out the other side quote There's much to say about that assessment But I'll end with this quote also from Gopnik quote thanks to years of therapy said miss Sherman She's now willing to see aspects of herself even in her early photos Unquote the piece in arguing that Sherman has finally been found been accounted for and held accountable Has been shown to have an interior Also, leads to the fact that she will stop making photographs the project that is to say is complete. Thank you Thank you To all of our speakers tonight for amazing and very rich talks As you probably noticed, it's 835 So I think we're gonna just try to jump right in and if people have questions start maybe thinking about them And if you would walk up to the mics that will signal to me that You're here to ask a question Where to start okay, so I Guess I wanted to Talk about this idea of gender performance about the representation of gender and to start with Wanda and To ask you about how you've linked this notion of Her audacious Georgia O'Keeffe's audacious Modern persona To ask you if that if the very modernity has something to do with Masculinity or the that rigorousness or like words like audacious and and the reference to her it's to me kind of signal that a Kind of Rejection of the feminine perhaps Well, I don't know if this we'll see where this goes but it seems to me that part of What modernity meant to her and we do have to remember because we did do these in chronological order so my my subject here is somebody who's Developing her own sense of self and what the modern is at the turn of the 19th into the 20th century and Her Politics at that time were aligned with what we might call suffrage ideals and Suffrage Manifestations one of which perhaps the one that she was most interested in was to not dress like her mother but rather to count you know in a reformed dress is what I'm talking about in general and It's one of the ways she expressed her audaciousness. Yes, but also her modernity was that she that she could in fact Create clothes that matched if you will the suffrage message of Women shouldn't wear clothes that restrain them women should wear clothes that they can work easily in women should wear clothes That they can dress in the morning and they still be In the same costume for the next 12 hours because we have to remember for her mother's generation Women often change clothes three or four times a day particularly if they were of the middle class or or better or particularly in an urban environment So some of what I was in hearing and thinking of my project against the projects of the other Speakers was that that there's a sort of There's a One could historicize the modernity that she practiced and and it was slipping into Terza's wonderful image of Claude Cahun because it is part of that modernity is Coming up with Non-restrictive clothes and clothes that are don't require undergarments like corsets and so on but also part of that Modernity is to kind of erase the clarity of what is female dress and what is male dress and To and that I think she's very good at and does it in a variety of ways some of which we might quickly label Androgynous But other times we might just say It's the blackness of the outfit and we so associate a total black outfit with what men were wearing rather than women It may be a dress however, and it's not a suit, but she she took codes that were male and female in dress and Blurred them so that they no longer had the security of being a female costume versus a male costume And I think she did that for the rest of her life in a rather consistent fashion. She The robe keeps showing up in her dress the Color cord of course is is constant black and white at least when she is posing for photographers sometimes she is More man-ish you can say than at other times But it's always kind of in play that she's she's gonna crisscross that line and not try to wear it out But rather it's a bad pun, but She's gonna crisscross that line almost enjoying the crisscrossing and That came up to me who one of you was it Marlena Dietrich that you showed that image you'd never see O'Keeffe looking like that That's a kind of bold. I am I've crossed that line in a way that I know will shock people I don't think she did it in quite the same way. There was a little bit more subtle play In what she did in terms of wearing a suit Wearing this three-piece suit with a tie and what's her shoes? She probably had flat two-toned shoes on or something wingtips. Yes Collos wearing a suit in that picture of her for her father. What was the rationale? I don't think we know I Mean I think I think there's a cultural rationale It's sort of the rationale in the moment There's there's a print of that photograph in the Kahlo archive that says Frida wearing Papa's suit So it does appear to be her father's suit But she does have short hair there. I'm confident of that based on some other images from that same sitting and very nearby and and to cut your hair in Mexico in that period was a really pretty radical thing to do and and You know, there's evidence in other ways that she was very aware of the Garcon and and everything that that implied And so I think to sort of follow on that. I think you know for Kahlo costuming Where it came from? I mean there's a an image that was found in the archive of her mother dressed like a bumblebee and Her father, you know Kahlo's biographer claimed that her father hated to take portraits because something like quote-unquote He refused to make beautiful what God had made ugly But in fact, he was a very gifted portraitist not just of his family But there's some portraits he did of sort of government functionaries and they're really extraordinary Photographs, but he also had a pension for self-portraiture, which is quite interesting and we didn't know this until the Opening of of a formerly hidden part of Kahlo's archive and there's actually self-portraits of her father nude, which is rather unusual so, you know all of this probably feeds into Kahlo's penchant for presenting the self and You know, I think when she couples up with Rivera He also has an extraordinary penchant for presenting the self, but we tend to see it less because he's a man But it's very evident there. I mean he wore workers overalls when he wasn't wearing a suit And I think you know Diego Rivera's grandson said in an interview that Kahlo's mode of dress was actually a form of aggression We don't read it that way, but it is quite aggressive In its relentlessness and it's unusual, you know That's not the way that women of her social class dressed And so I was really struck tears up by your comment about cultural authority The cultural context is different the time is even slightly different by about a decade by the time Kahlo's really doing this I think it's her own form of striving for cultural authority in a In a patriarchal context that has its own contours I'm not gonna say France was less patriarchal, but the Mexican revolutionary context of patriarchy is very patriarchal and yet Ironically revolutionary, you know, this is why I have argued that women became modern first and then became tradition They became tradition under the revolution like that's messed up, right? So, I mean in a really sort of colloquial way of putting it so then we think about Kahlo in that context Yes, actually on the tip of my tongue really was something to go back to George O'Keefe and Wanda's work on George O'Keefe in the larger arc of its evolution and hearing you talk about The fluidity and ambiguity and the sort of blurring of her Sartorial repertoire I I'm I'm struck by the way that that echoes things you've said about her painting And and about these these genres like flower painting and and the still life And you know, she'll do a flower painting. That's like six feet by four feet And totally in your face and not at all feminine in the diminutive sense that a flower painting can sometimes be Typically kind of Referred to and and and the still life also with the with the bones and the harshness The starkness of it rather than the kind of Demest domesticated still life that women That are associated with the sort of history of women in painting. So I'm struck by the The parallel there and in her dressing and her and her painting and for count. I think I've probably Said enough Already for now unless you have a specific It might be helpful for you to Expand a little bit on this your conclusion about how Come can't really establish personhood in the way that Duchamp can and he for me he's To me that the eros a la vie gesture over the years has come to be quite one that seems quite Kind of critique of a certain kind of feminine Ninity as commodity and it's a joke. It looks very much like It's not an empowering gesture he's secure in his masculinity at all Yeah, I don't know whether I quite agree with that because it's his privilege to occupy that position if he decides to Because the he the eel Is and still is in our English language even the universal subject? Yeah, therefore Access to to every subject position At least that's the privileged male Kind of mentality and I think that when Can does it she she's trespassing Into into a Site of privilege that She will never be welcomed into or never will she's passing, but she's also passing it includes that Yeah, yeah, I I'm not I'm I'm not really that word actually to me doesn't quite Describe what she's doing Because they're they're There's too much wrong with the performance and its failure is what interests me and I think Possibly I'm projecting, but I think that that those failures Interested her and I think that before the 1990s when theories of gender performativity made those photographs Stand out to us and made people like how fosters say ah and Cindy Sherman of all the letter You know this thing became legible in a post-modern way That is flawed Horribly flawed, but but nevertheless kind of does raise the question of failure In our minds and the failure to convincingly perform one's gender or even someone else's gender, right? And I I thought when I first saw her her photographs that if I'd seen them in the 1980s Early 1980s, I probably would have thought they were bad photographs and Then in the 1990s they seemed brilliant to me So that failure is there. It's in the image It's in all of the images and that hokey backdrop and and and some of the other tropes that are are mobilized Kind of embellish the the motif of failure and the failure of of gender to adequately describe a Subject generally, but certainly Everyone's failure to ever perform those ideals First of all, thank you for the incredible Deconstructing of each artist. I think it was a great sort of lesson for all of us who are big fans of each individual artist, but my question is for Adriana on Frida one of the things that I've Kind of grown up. I'm a student learning art history one of the things that I value about Frida is her sort of outlandish color just Sort of outlandish portrayal of herself and I sort of always understood her pictures as being the very first selfie Constructed and that's why I've always really loved how she portrayed herself and saw herself as they one of the Most important subjects of her own paintings So I know that a lot of one of her a lot of sort of her paintings started after she met with her accident and due to that She couldn't have children Do you think that a part of the reason that she almost Full-frontedly embraced her femininity in those portraits was due to the fact that she couldn't physically perform a certain part of Being a woman after that accident That's a good question There's kind of a couple parts in that I you know That's kind of the the standard interpretation that her creativity was an outlet for her inability to perform What women are supposed to do or fulfill that role, right? You know, I'll be honest. I don't know I'll do the Andy Warhol. I Don't know that. I mean, I think there's a lot of contradictory evidence there Maybe partially, but I'm not sure that really explains her painting to us That's that's my point always is that yeah, it could be I mean in in a patriarchal context You know, that is what women were supposed to do even after the revolution They were supposed to repopulate the nation where a million people died during the revolution So yeah, probably but I'm not sure that really explains her painting That's the point I'm trying to make and so I'm trying to pull back from those Biographical narratives because I want to look at the discursive horizon Which has not been addressed frankly from my perspective in terms of Frida Kahlo, you know starting I mean, this is why when you have just a couple minutes to sort of signal things We need to look at her relationship to German new objectivity and and any Number of other points on the discursive field. I think that the discursive horizon I think that You know interestingly the the whole phenomena of the selfie is is curiously kind of useful because About a decade ago if we talked about Frida Kahlo it was all so natural and Now at least the selfie allows us to see the artifice So I think about what she's doing whether she's painting about her life or whether she's depicting the self as Artifice first and that's what I want my students to see because a decade ago when I entered the field It was like oh, she's a Mexican woman when she says she passes she passes in New York because New Yorkers in 1932 Don't know what a Mexicana looks like in Mexico City. She's not gonna pass Anybody's gonna look at that woman and say what is that intellectual doing dressed like a Tehuana, right? It's true So what's interesting about now and and social media is that now it's all about artifice I mean yesterday Kim Kardashian posted on Instagram a self-portrait is Frida Kahlo I mean vomit emoji, right? So So I would like my students who approach Kahlo to look at the discursive horizon and To back away from thinking that her creativity is her way of expressing her biological function Could be a part of it, but that's actually Been written about and I think we need to move on Thank you. Hi. Good evening. Thank you for your scholarship I'd like to see if you have any thoughts on the idea of persona as protection and distraction so that these incredibly focused and Intellectually rigorous people that we've seen talked about this evening can get on with it While over here, they're doing what magicians do and like giving you something to look at or experience While they can get on and think Is this I don't know can't tell if it's on I just have one small thing to say which is actually to reiterate what E.D. Sedgwick says in the One thing she says in the interview with Merv which is Merv Griffin who keeps asking and it goes on He asks about what about Rembrandt and Michelangelo and they all put so much emotion in their art and she and what she says about What pop art what Warhol's work art take put what he puts into the art is not Emotion but work that what the pop artist is doing is work and I so this I think is interesting in terms of your question about To a certain extent I think Warhol Was curious and as to what could be produced if you if this Expectation that the artist was gonna offer a persona Was frustrated in other words So if he brought all these other people on on stage with him literally to kind of answer the questions about What was the biographical meaning? What is what was this you know spiritual meaning of art? What was the profundity? I think he thought that he could get the work done He also thought he could get other people to do the work for him But I mean to some extent, but I I do think there's something to that. I mean Perhaps also with Cindy Sherman it seems to me by producing so many different Feminine persona. She's she's actually in a sense Vacating the space of her own. I mean I'm sort of telling you I'm not that's not on offer here Maybe that's what allows her to sort of so brilliantly produce all of these surrogates that are actually not for her The one thing I did want to say though is that I do think it's interesting like when you talked about if you looked at the Photograph in the 80s it would have looked like bad art and in the 90s it looked like brilliant, you know gender performativity or Or as a response to a rose la vie or something It does seem to be important that for example Cindy Sherman who in a certain she didn't start out caring about photography She started out caring about Shopping and dress up and making these as I think that we wouldn't have this O'Keeffe show I don't know that it would be possible had we not actually had an Artist of the you know or had we not actually had a sort of just an artist like Cindy Sherman But also a sense that there's more to artists to art history than art the art itself that there's all of these other things That artists produce and I think that that's partially come out of this Historical moment rather than O'Keeffe So it's interesting to think about the exhibition as a product of its moment Not only about returning to the truth of like what it meant to be modern for O'Keeffe Because I think what it maybe what it means to be modern for us today in the museum as a museum goers Is that we're actually willing to consider the self-fashioning of the artist along you know in terms of dress as Just as serious or as compelling a pursuit as their self-fashioning in paint Can I maybe also just add on to say? Yeah, I mean and my comments were meant to say If Cindy Sherman like Frida Kahlo had real-life experiences and she wants to speak about those that's great And in fact, it's really interesting and I want to know about them But it doesn't have anything necessarily to do with what the work itself does However, that said the protection comments really interesting that again lore is that Cindy Sherman started dressing up when she was a really shy Student in Buffalo, New York in order to be social to go out socially and feel as though she could actually interact with other people She was the first receptionist at artists space, which is a famous Alternative space and to go to work every day. She dressed up as the secretary to be the secretary So, you know, I think that there's something really interesting about what it means to Understand the thin distinction between what the self is and how the self gets distance from itself So probably to everybody else she just looked like the secretary, but because she was playing the secretary She felt she could exist But I I think what worries me a little bit about this endless desire to find her is and this piece that I brought up With Gopnik in which she's very vulnerable and raw and actually it's it's very moving is that it's as though now the pictures And she are indiscernible and to me that's a great Disservice to the work because the infra thinness to use a Dishampion term between the self and the persona Needs to persist before or else it just becomes the consumption of of another being I think and so, you know I think the protection question is an interesting one, but it's also one around aesthetics and what art actually does too And I did want to make one comment to Richard and we're old friends. I think the The thing that's interesting to me about the distinction between Warhol Seemingly not having a persona is that's the greatest persona of all the one who speaks the least holds the most power But in Sherman's case that holding of power is constantly being attacked I feel like she's constantly being told that she can be read and I find that fascinating so That's the gender distinction say it would it would be impossible to think of a woman artist Who would be permitted to be as silent as Warhol is permitted to be or who would have all the sir It would be allowed to have all the surrogates. I mean she's close. She's as close as they get the surrogates Though are like doll parts usually Hi Thank you all I was particularly struck by Thinking about like the artist's relationship to their own interiority Specifically with what Wanda was saying and what Richard was saying because kind of what y'all are just talking about just now Warhol's like interiority exists as like and is present because of a lack like He presents like a lack of in touchness like within his himself and his own intentions whereas like Georgia O'Keefe you're saying is like so present with herself and in the photographs. It's like so clear That she's really engaging With her own interior and I was just wondering if y'all could speak more to that I've got so many things twirling around because of we're we've got so many interesting questions. So I May be slightly taking this in a different direction, but I am struck listening to my my peers here about how stable O'Keefe's persona is and so I was struck when you said for instance about Warhol Well, you know, he had so many personas It was sort of the persona of the year or of the decade and so on and I was trying to argue that in fact She had to have she did have several in her early years with Stieglitz but the one that survived it survived partially from some kind of intentionality and I don't think it was to put people off to Speak to the last questioner I think it was rather to say that that's what she thought the artistic Sensibility ought to look like at least her notion of what the artistic sensibility was that artistic essence Let's say which is it is about interiority. It is about the the It's it's about the artist expressing self She often said I never I don't trust words. I only trust colors and lines So when she says something like that she's saying that she's her medium Her real true medium is not that of words But it is that which she can tell you in in her paintings and I think there's a kind of Consistency once she learns who she wants to be as a modern artist She's constantly trying to convince people of that particular definition And I don't know how my peers would would think about that But I I see her as having something the rest of them don't have Which is a kind of stability and doggedness of keeping that form of what an artist should be Despite all the other possibilities coming up around her including Warhol I mean he was of they they crossed over with one another for a bit I'm sure they had little to say to one well We know they said quite a bit actually on a couple of instances But he didn't understand her one bit as an artist and I'm sure she didn't even try to understand him as an artist Because it was so far away from She couldn't really be superficial as a woman. I mean she couldn't invest in surface and you know evacuating all Inner depth right because that's what women were sort of expected to do anyway to be superficial and not have depth So she couldn't go in that direction. She could kind of only go deep Right. Yeah. Well, and I think that's part of her if you will special this yeah, I Think one thing that I've learned and it's all over the exhibition and even more so in the book is her consistency from youth when she had made a lot of decisions about how she was going to control her world how she was going to be a Independent human being making her own decisions From that point on she course she stumbles and she sometimes goes awry, but Basically, she comes out at the end with a lot of herself still intact that I discover or uncover in her 20s and 30s Yeah, I think about the exhibition. It's really fast It's not like we start out with all these frilly dresses or like Georgia in pink and lavender and then you know I mean, it's almost as though that Palette that very restricted palette that's sort of Modern yet mantellered. I mean the whole sensibility seems almost there fun since the beginning Would you would you say that's true? Maybe the sartorial Self maybe that reiterates the ways in which the art also for so long seems to be Coherent no, I think her DNA When it comes to design and dress in relationship to who she thinks she is and wants the world to think What she is? Is is already there even as a teenager and we have her sisters saying should never do whatever we told her to do with Dress we have her classmates saying we all wanted to Redress her because she was so Unfeminine and then we learned that that wasn't going to go anywhere because she was going to do it her way or no way So it's it's we have lots of evidence Not just the visual evidence, but we have that good old-fashioned people reporting on her mannerisms and her habits and her bad Being a bad girl and so on We have that in to supplement what the visual evidence is all about But all you need to do is look at the very first pictures upstairs in the first gallery and you'll see she's wearing a white costume much like Her peers but hers is less frilly tighter sleeves No big black bows one big pigtail pulling the hair back rather than a pompadour and so on so she's already manifesting that kind of Assuredness as to who she was or is but I guess my question then is persona is being defined by us as both Authenticity and as the opposite of authenticity on this panel. Do you know yes? I think and that's okay, isn't it? Yeah, it's okay with me, but I just think it's notable. It's notable. Yeah I mean, I guess my point bigger point was that you know all kinds of okifes are there in her But she doesn't choose to explore those for the camera. I just I actually think that incompatibility is is nice Yeah, it's it. It's nice. I Understand we have time for one last question Thank you Thank you guys for you know introducing the artists to a lot of us I haven't heard of actually two of them And just for talking in general what I kept thinking of when you guys were talking about personas was Walter Benjamin And his idea of like the aura and how that really contributes to the artists kind of success What do you guys think about the topic of like did they have to portray this sort of larger than life? Persona of all their things like Warhol had to be Absolutely nothing. He couldn't be the Edie of he couldn't talk like Edie did or Cindy Sherman really portraying like a Wide array of different personalities would they have been as successful as they were if you know They took a step back if they only you know, I guess went halfway. They didn't commit all the way It's to everyone those were just the two that I kind of thought of Well, honestly, I think The trope I was tracing and thinking about today has lots of aura on purpose It is meant to be a spiritual being who is the artist that we're looking at and that is in some ways Produced by lots of well, there are lots of images that as I was suggesting that are If you will composite it or come together in that particular Iconic image that O'Keeffe let herself be seen as and really liked and and perpetuated That's it's a stable aura at that Also, it's not it's something that she's totally comfortable with the fact that the artist is not an ordinary Everyday human being but rather the artist is to deliver certain kinds of truths And that means that that that the artist is also a person with special gifts and a special Calling to do what they do. That's a very early 20th century modernist idea, and it is filled with aura It seems like with Warhol It's like a site gag of the clown walking across the stage and not stepping in the bucket You know that that aura thing that he's not doing is still there very strongly Because it's of its refusal. I think that's right I mean one of the things we didn't get to talk about that much is the relationship between these persona and the actual Logic of the work itself include and so I think for example that kind of deadpan of Warhol's persona has everything to do With the deadpan of of his pop art and also in a different way of films and but The images that actually went missing. I'm realizing how ironic this is in my talk We're actually the images of Warhol's grave site Because he said he just wanted it to say figment and actually it says Andy Warhol only and his birth and death dates right behind Is are the Warhol are the grave sons of his mother and father their birth their real name was Warhol? And it actually says Andres and Julia, but it says mother and father So they get his says nothing but Andy Warhol and the date so he gets no noun like son or artist or Below, you know or even an adjective like beloved, but I found I was hard for me to find the photograph I wanted to show because all of the photographs on the internet almost all of them have the grave grow Almost groaning beneath all of these Campbell soup cans actual Campbell soup cans that people and coca-cola bottles that people have put On top of the grave as well as flowers beneath as an honorific and I was thinking about It's odd though because it's also a vulgar in a way. It's a kind of vulgarization If this is in Bethel, Mount Bethel, Pennsylvania, but I was thinking about persona. It's relational You know, this is something that it's not just that that it's created by the artist. There's a photographer there There's a readership for Warhol, you know, he was the cameras were rolling, you know Edie I mean there was a whole staging of this non-self and I think of that idea of having figment on his gravestone It sort of is what's happened. This figment has become so like kind of Irresistible to so many people that they have to pile on all these soup cans, you know on this grave And I think with Freedemania also or with Cajun on the other side of post-modernism It's just interesting the moment at which and the ways in which the persona of artists gets Kind of taken up as part of a popular culture. Yeah, I mean I was gonna say that in the case of color I mean there's there's clearly Authorial intention on her part, but we have to also bear in mind that Kahlo Another Kahlo persona and the one that persists so much and the one that I want to push back on is Produced by her biographer in the 80s very much in the moment of someone like Warhol and and and you know Kahlo in interviews There's only like two interviews maybe three where she talks about her work and she's I just painted myself You know and and yet her art In some ways, it's like, you know, it's it's it's it's shocking and not shocking to us But trust me it was shocking to Mexicans in the 30s and 40s. I mean not so much the still lives I mean those are odd as well, but you know my birth in 1932 That was very shocking and then she counters this with a hyper femininity That is as much a persona as the young modern in in her father's suit And so we have a hard time seeing all of that and and so I think it's very important to think about the fact that I don't doubt that she's producing a persona in her moment But we have to cut through the Kahlo that gets produced for us by the biography in 83 And then the publication of all of her personal letters, which actually it seems were supposed to be destroyed So imagine what we would think we knew about Kahlo if those 400 pages of private letters and yet more Still being revealed and sold at auction for you know a hundred thousand dollars weren't available to us and maybe I'll just add about Sherman that I think it's the opposite actually of everyone on this panel She's consistently talked about as somebody who fades away in a room who you wouldn't notice if she was standing there How she's just kind of a as I started out a really nice lovely unobtrusive Human being who can transform in all these radical ways So her persona in a funny way I think is and it's it's an interesting again comparison with Warhol She is not aggressively Unpresent she's literally Narrativized as the nice girl next door Over and over and over and what is fascinating to people is that there must be this internal roiling completely sublimated Kind of mode of of intellectual emotional life that's producing this thing which again in line with Surrealism and other narratives that work this way was largely male But I think that the persona question is fascinating when it comes to her because it's not locatable around the person It's locatable around the again the mismatch that is perceived between You know there's there's so much writing about the untitled film stills because people thought oh It's this young pretty girl making pictures of herself as a young pretty girl and when it became clear That's what not what she was doing People got freaked out So there was a long time where there wasn't actually a lot of writing about her a lot at least not very good writing and then when she started to really kind of manifest I think Variations on themes that that kind of pushed and pulled at that the idea of persona again could be located only in this Discursive horizon and I think that's why even today there are these pieces that can that want to kind of now She's gone to therapy So it's okay, and she's dredged up every awful thing that's happened to her and she's come to peace with it And you know what I hope that's true, but it doesn't matter to me exactly because the work has been good all along And where and how her own personal Now miss I'm like kumbaya her personal journey has taken her is Fantastic and wonderful, but I don't think that it has much bearing upon the real nature of the work So the aura around her in a funny way has to be maintained Despite all of the evidence to the contrary that she has none So I mean that I guess that's my answer at aura, and I think that's the place to stop Thank you