 Good morning and welcome to the Brooklyn Museum. My name is Lauren Ross. I'm the Interim Curator of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art. On behalf of curator Katherine Morris and myself, it is I want to welcome you. It's my honor to open today's symposium, Feminism Now, New Feminist Scholarship. This month marks the second anniversary of the opening of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art. And I urge everyone to visit the galleries of the Sackler Center on the fourth floor while you're here today. Currently on view are two exhibitions entitled, Burning Down the House, Building a Feminist Collection, and the Fertile Goddess. And of course, the center also features the long-term display of Judy Chicago's iconic, collaborative work, The Dinner Party. The student guide will be providing a brief tour of the galleries during today's lunch break and all are welcome to join. The Sackler Center acts not only as an exhibition space, but also as a forum for discourse. We maintain a robust schedule of public programs that explore feminist issues as they pertain to everything from art making and exhibitions to politics, law, and public policy. In fact, I'll take this chance to plug one upcoming event. Sunday, April 3rd at 2 p.m. Caroly Schneemann will be giving a lecture in the Sackler Center, exploring in her own words, unknown formal factors characterizing interior squirrel. So that should be, that promises to be really interesting. If you'd like to receive monthly email notices about such programs in the Sackler Center, please sign the mailing list on the table just outside of the auditorium. As we celebrate our two-year milestone, I want to take a moment to acknowledge and give heartfelt thanks to Dr. Elizabeth A. Sackler, whose unwavering vision, support, and dedication make all of the center's exhibitions and programs possible. She's with us today, so it's a special treat. One of the center's core goals is to examine not only feminism's remarkable impact and resonance in the 20th century, but how it is shifting and being redefined in the 21st. Today we will hear a sampling of new voices in feminist scholarship, examining a wide range of topics from readings of individual artworks to broader discussions of categorization and nomenclature. The response to our call for papers was tremendous, making the selection process extremely competitive. I want to thank the many writers who submitted papers for consideration, who unfortunately we were not able to include, and I hope that many of them have come today to participate in this conversation. And of course, our sincere thanks are due to all of today's speakers, including our keynote respondents and presenters. On the museum staff, there are great many people who contributed to this event, but I want to recognize in particular Sarah G. Venelo, Eleanor Whitney, and Lindsey Buten for spearheading and guiding this entire program from concept to completion. And now it is my pleasure to introduce today's keynote speaker, critic, curator, and playwright, Kerry Lovelace. For over two decades, Kerry has published in a wide range of publications, including Art Forum, Art in America, Flash Art, Mizz, The International Herald Tribune and The New York Times, often focusing on the topic of women's art and the political aspects of feminist art. She recently guest curated Making It Together, Women's Collaborative Art in Community at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, and co-curated the History Show retrospective at AIR Gallery in Brooklyn. For the Drawing Center New York, she is co-curating Yinakis Zinakis, I apologize if I mispronounce that, Composer Architect Visionary, which opens in January 2010. From 2003 to 2006, she was co-president of the U.S. Chapter of the International Association of Art Critics. She co-hosted with Linda Yablonsky the Yeh-Nay Show, an arts and culture program on WPS One, for which they won a 2006 AICA Award for Best Presentation of Art in a Broadcast Medium. She has organized panels in symposia at the Guggenheim Museum and the New York Public Library and participated in panels at PS One, MoMA, the Bronx Museum of the Arts, the Cairo Biennial, Columbia University, CAA, the Women's Caucus for Art, the National Critics Conference, and the American University Museum. As if that weren't enough. In addition, she has translated books from French for Harry and Abrams, and her award-winning plays have been produced at the New York-based Ensemble Studio Theater, the Samuel French One Act Festival, and Red Cat Theater in Los Angeles, among other locales. She is currently working on a book entitled, An Army of Lovers Cannot Fail. Her address today is entitled, Alternating Universes. Please welcome Carrie Lovelace. Hi, thanks, it's great to be here. So I have a PowerPoint presentation that's accompanying this and it has sort of a narrative thrust, and then I have a narrative thrust, and we're just gonna go on our separate narrative thrust and hopefully we will intersect at key moments, but it's gonna be kind of a pluralistic experience. Hope, I hope it will be good. It was only yesterday, it was an incredible event. Our first African-American president, and despite what one might have cynically predicted, he appointed a truly diverse cabinet. In response, even Republicans scrambled to foreground people of color and women. Hopeful signs abound. In our world, the magical realm of feminism, there is more art scholarship than ever before. In the last three years alone, slow years for publishing, 104 books have appeared on themes relating to women artists. At the College Art Association last month in Los Angeles, I think of the CA as sort of the industry car show for academics, no less than 21 different panels dealt with feminist topics. Even in sessions dealing with neutral subjects, participants were gender sensitive and often made reference to feminist ideas. Two complete separate cadres participated. The Women's Caucus for Art and the Feminist Art Project, each with their own awards, events, and programming. Considering that 30 years ago, Jansen's history of art, the authoritative text, included not a single female artist, this is a real achievement. With the election of Barack Obama, some were even musing that perhaps we had entered a post-racial era. As the candidate himself proposed, there's not a black America or a white America, but a United States of America. For a moment, we contemplated this possibility. What would a post-racial society be? Would coloring culture differences remain while their fiery significance dropped away, something like the way the once incendiary barriers between Irish, Italian, and German heritage today mean little? Would we all lovingly merge our genes and blend into a beautiful Tani beige with no difference? Or would it mean something else, something we can't even imagine? In 2001, the Harlem Museum mounted an exhibit called Freestyle. Curator Thelma Golden put forth the phrase post-black. In her catalog essay, she indicated that by this, she meant artists who acknowledged African-American identity, but did not advance it as a problematic or deal with it politically. But critics questioned whether post-blackness was merely an intellectually elegant avoidance, a reluctance to face up to and address a racism that still exists. Similarly yet dissimilarly, in the 1990s, the term post-feminist came into vogue. Again, despite what the term might imply, it did not indicate a maturation past or transcendence of sexual politics. Perhaps the term for that would be post-gender. Instead, it seemed to indicate a stance that was seemingly renegade, but in fact subversively aligned with the existing power structure. On occasion, it even seemed to be anti-feminist. For those like the gallery world or the mainstream media not too fond of the women's movement to begin with, it seemed a reassuring return to the fold. As the song put it, girls just wanna have fun. But nonetheless, it summons forth an intriguing vision, and one might speculate what would a post-gender world be like? Would it mean literally being de-gendered? A sliding scale of sexual identities? Or total equality with traditional differences, freedom to exercise any occupation or tendency? The history of race brings up shame and guilt. We are in such a hurry to get to a post-racial world. I don't see color, Stephen Colbert jokes in the guise of his fake right-wing pundit, meaning that he's in denial about acknowledging his own racism. We are unsettled, though, when it comes to a post-gender world, although this, too, might actually be in the process of change. Gender has been a kind of marker of truth. Is it a boy or a girl? A fear precipitated by a threatened change in the balance of power between the sexes not new. In the 19th century, Honoré Dormier penned cartoons making fun of the new woman. She had the nerve to dominate her male partner. We think of feminism as modern, as arising during the last 50 years, but the term was nearly 200 years back and sparked the same anxiety, often masked as feigned amusement. We often hear or read that young women of today are turning away from the strident politics of their mothers, that it's cool now to be more traditionally feminine, but the very same news story has appeared in 1973, in 1989, in 1999. The level of resistance remains relatively constant. What is it that's so difficult about the word feminist? Of course, it's been demonized by the right-wing, just like the benign term liberalism was so effectively. Certainly it's revolutionary, but other revolutionary groups aren't afraid to embrace their identity. Anti-Castro militants, black nationals, atheists. Does feminist cause uneasiness because it challenges those basic markers of gender? Are there psychological roots? A fear of the mother, of the devouring female. Does the very fact that it requests rights indicate that there are wrongs, grievances, and that somebody, therefore, is to blame? Feminist artist pioneer Miriam Shapiro once said, sex divisions cause anxiety, and perhaps it's as simple as that. Is it perennial? Will we ever be over it? It's understandable why society at large is not fond of feminism. More puzzling, and again, this is perennial, is why even those who benefit from it, who essentially embrace its principles, disown the designation. I don't like labels, or I'm a humanist, not a feminist. It's only when things in society get really bad that women briefly recognize the importance of embracing a moniker perceived as holding some risk. Then a new group of feminists is born, and some progress is made. Yet this phenomenon that has been stereotyped as kind of culture's crazy aunt in the attic, which has been vilified, condescended to, or disowned sometimes by its very best friends, has had immense impact, perhaps more than any other phenomenon in the last 50 years. It has changed the most fundamental aspects of our society, who is allowed to do what and where. It has ushered in a host of other ideas too, consciousness raising, or the notion that objectifying somebody removes their humanity, or the importance of recognizing the experience of those living on the margins. It has brought new attitudes, practices once winked at become unacceptable, such as wife beating, which was labeled as domestic violence. A willingness of victims to speak out brought awareness of the astounding and upsetting prevalence of incest. It has popularized academic terms, such as the other or difference, the notion of the body as the site of gender's subjecthood. These immense changes did not just arrive in the abstract. They came as the axis of individuals who raised consciousness and acted bravely. Society did not always react positively to these new ideas, yet it was changed by them. I observed firsthand these transformations taking place, including in myself. I changed from being somewhat in denial about being female at all, to accepting and embracing its power. Through this process, I saw how easy it is sometimes to change the world as long as you're moving in a fresh direction. The same immense impact has been felt inside visual culture. Feminist art has been regarded as a small, somewhat suspect subgenre outside legitimization by auction houses or major galleries. As a chronicler of this field, though, I have been aware of the huge impact of the ideas it has advanced, and how male artists, whether consciously or not, have absorbed and echoed the forms pioneered by the women who came before them. In the 1970s, the women's art movement ended the dominance of formalist minimalism with its gray tones and right angles. Most of all, it ended a modernist cliché that there could only be one reigning style overthrowing the previous, one after the next, like elephants, trunk to tail as critic Lucille LaParde once put it. Not only did a new generation of women artists commit the apostasy of indulging in color, decorative elements, engaging in storytelling, and deploying emotional expression, they worked in degraded modes such as domestic crafts. Now pluralism that once seemed so unsettling is taken for granted thanks for the diversity of styles ushered in by women artists. As women empowered began to enter the art world, not everyone's art was politically feminist, but all feminist art on some level was political. The first major feminist work, the 1972 Woman House, was put together by CalArt students and their teachers, Shapiro and Chicago. In 21 rooms in an abandoned Hollywood mansion, it explored issues relating to domesticity. In an approach that was to characterize the innovation of this movement, it had a slightly self-searching quality, therapeutic, and plumbing difficult regions. Most of all, it had the quality of theater. As it developed through the 1970s, feminist art began to cast its activist net wider, addressing issues of labor and class, incest, domestic violence, reproductive rights. Its modes were novel. Suzanne Lacy and Leslie Labowitz's massive Three Weeks in May, for example, which addressed violence against women took place in sites around Los Angeles combining self-defense classes, informational clinics, ritual performances. Curating an exhibit at the Bronx Museum last spring, making it together, women's collaborative art and community, I began to fully appreciate how innovative these activist arts were. But their complexity made them difficult to brand, which meant, despite the fact, they brought important issues to public attention. They often abated art history as well. The feminist movement at large was created by intellectuals, however, the focus in early days was pragmatic, seeking equal opportunity for women. There was no theory because virtually no information existed to build theory from. Aside from Simone de Beauvoir's Second Sex and a handful of 19th century essays, little had been written on female experience considered a trivial topic at best. Radical feminism's concepts took root in Marxism and left us thought. Its body of knowledge was constructed in an unusual way through the technique called consciousness raising. Here, women in a circle spoke round robin, uninterrupted on a topic. Chob, sex, child rearing. From these sessions, the first honest view of women's existence emerged. Anger, domestic drudgery, disparate sexual dissatisfaction. Most of these states of joy and despair had been experienced as isolated. The radical women of red stockings themselves participated in this process and began to develop theoretical essays, particularly about power inequities, the politics of housework, the myth of the female orgasm. They developed what they called a woman-centered point of view. That is, seeing things from the women's point of view rather than the neutral position, that of the white Anglo male. It was as if you could observe a new conception about women's condition emerging before your very eyes within a few years. Women in and around the world of artists where they were mostly in support positions were inspired by this. But after all, there were no artists to speak of. In 1969, young art historian Linda Nocklin was encouraged by a friend to read some of that red stockings literature. It rocked her world. In her Vassar class, she began the novel approach of having her students research women artists. And here was the first scholarly work done on the likes of Frida Kahlo, Artemisia Gentileschi. The Brooklyn Museum has an important link with these endeavors. As no doubt you know, the first scholarly historic survey of women's art appeared here. The landmark women artists 1550 to 1950 co-curated by Nocklin. Of the 84 artists she and Anne Sutherland-Harris included, many had been unearthed only a few years earlier. This project of investigation and restoration into the canon has been a mainstay of feminist art scholarship. Over time, this process of recuperation has moved away from history and towards geography as the archeology of the past has been plumbed. But significantly, in her 1971 essay Why Are There No Great Women Artists? Nocklin achieved perhaps the first effort at theory in tackling the troubling question. She proposed the solution was not to dig up forgotten flour painters as she put it, but to look at the conditions that create genius, the support system, the training from which women were pretty much excluded, the constellation of attitudes that built one upon the next. In short, Nocklin deconstructed the notion of greatness itself. This was in essence, this was the first feminist critique of institutional authority, a stratagem that would increasingly be employed to dismantle petty prejudices disguised as universal truths. This has now been acknowledged, feminism was very important in ushering in the skeptical view called postmodernism, which exploded some of the utopian myths of modern art. But the development of a theory in women's art per se has been an uneven one. Upstairs at the Sackler Center is Judy Chicago's Magnum Opus, the dinner party. And Chicago was the co-author of perhaps the first full feminist art theory, wildly controversial in its day. It was in 1970, shortly after the young sculptor had changed her name from Judy Garowitz, the way Malcolm X dropped his slave name, Malcolm Little. In California, she banded together with seasoned New York school painter, Miriam Shapiro. Even before the two founded the first feminist art program at California Institute of the Arts in 1971, looking at their own work, they conceived something they called the central core theory. They believed that they themselves and all women artists expressed through their bodily experience parallel to the phallic shapes that recur in men's artwork. Shapiro's painting ox, combining an O and an X, though seemingly abstract, she had to admit to herself she really intended as a vaginal opening. Indeed, both Shapiro and Chicago felt that that was what they had been doing all along without daring to admit it. And they believed that all other women were doing the same as well. To a degree, the dinner party, its color-mortif-volvic configurations is a culmination of this concept of reversal. But at the time, the idea provoked virulent reactions who did not, among female artists, who did not wish to view their work in the same way. Meanwhile, in Britain at the same time, in the early 1970s, there was a nascent women scene growing out of the socialist labor movement. A strong literary and politically grounded group of women, including figures later well-known like the artist Mary Kelly and the theorist Juliet Mitchell, formed a reading group on the subject of women and art. Again, there wasn't much. They read Simone de Beauvoir, Linda Nochlin, and the landmark critical essays by LePard about a new generation of New York women whose work she was helping find voice. But they also went back to Freud to his examination of psychic development to try to plumb the mystery of why sexism exists in the first place. Around the same time in France in the 1970s, Jacques Lacan, a renegade Freudian theorist, was using structuralism to employ the relationship between the psyche, language, and the body in complex theories that approached the level of poetry, sometimes convoluted intellectual amalgams. His notions based on castration anxiety and the preeminence of the phallus were wildly misogynistic. But female followers such as Monique Wittig and Helen Cissoux began taking his linguistically based insights about the origins of sexual identity, reversing them and applying them to women's experience, creating a powerful rhetoric of sexual difference. Often comprised of colon-like formulations like the sex that is not one, this provided a platform from which to newly project a web of ideas freed from the circular arguments of the past about the weaker sex, the eternal feminine, and other heretofore irrefutable cliches. From London and Paris came this bouquet of insights about the masculine gaze, the performative nature of femininity, socially constructed aspects of gender, ciphers of institutional power whose deconstruction can diffuse their potency. In the 1980s, theory entered into the academy and grew into an overwhelming force. At the same time, a disturbingly partisan aspect emerged. An intellectually sophisticated generation of scholars attacked 1970s pine efforts as essentialists. That is based on the concept that there is an unchanging essence of femaleness. Early pioneers protested that they embraced the paradox of femaleness that is the same time socially constructed yet with inherent characteristics. Somehow it all seemed to return to the misogyny of the past that women had internalized and wielded against each other before the arrival of sisterhood. By the late 1970s, women's studies programs had burgeoned in campuses around the country. 10 years later, these had transformed into gender studies. And of course, there were the concomitant studies of masculinity. Simone de Beauvoir's idea of the woman as other were applied to other sorts of otherness to race, to national identity, sexual identity, physical ableness. The 1990s elaborated on this meditation further of otherness versus the powerful center. An art of identity politics was born. A term originally meant as pejorative. However, it aptly described work fusing autobiography and demographics, aesthetic yet slyly political, a clear outgrowth of early explorative projects like Womanhouse. This foregrounding of experience on the margin, making its subject central instead of peripheral, became elaborated into forms such as critical race studies and other types of studies of asymmetrical power relationships such as queer theory, which was not just the examination of sexual choice but of the state of being an outsider. All of the offspring of feminism, as is post-colonial theory, although in an increasingly global society, no one wonders if that probably would have emerged anyway. It is the new millennium. Perhaps politics has consumed us for the past six years to the degree that it has distracted from new critical inquiries. But to a remarkable degree, and a striking degree, scholarship and theory have stayed within the confines of charnels carved by the burst of insights from Red Stockings, Lacan, the French feminists, and British theorists like Rizel de Pollock and Rosika Parker. As it's refreshing when curators and scholars open up new vistas, in 2002, I think it was 2002, when the exhibit Gloria appeared at white columns, it was wonderful and somewhat startling to see familiar works and artists presented as shaping the decorative, the constructive and performative stratagems that ushered in post-modernism. The co-curator, Catherine Morris, just became head of the Sackler Center, and I'm sure she'll make imaginative contributions here. It seems that there must be many more new directions to explore. That is one of the challenges of feminist scholarship now, not just to pursue the well-worn pathways in front of you, although it is important to do that too, but to impose entirely new questions, to develop new paradigms, to imagine new models. Can we turn our scholarly analytic tools to learn from images in new ways? Sometimes this demands imagination in addition to intellect. Feminist scholarship is still relatively speaking in its infancy. There is the academic, theoretical variety, but also the simpler practical American brand that advances and validates and sometimes complains. We should never be afraid of criticality though, or of rigorous standards. They won't be oppressive as long as we create our own. One way to locate new directions is to undertake a history of history, something like I just did above. It can generate ideas, help you learn from others' mistakes, and show you where the omissions are, which indicates where the openings are. It feels like so much has been written and accomplished, but sometimes we are blind to what is right before us. At the same CA conference a few weeks ago, a participant at one panel at the end of her presentation on a feminist project pointed out with all the discourse she was steeped in about the body, she suddenly became aware of her own teenage daughter's anorexia and realized that she was instilled with the same self-hatred young women have everywhere now. How can this be with a world and art world so aware of gender politics? According to a recent study, one in four women in college have an eating disorder. A 1984 study had shown that 40% of women had a negative body image. 25 years later the ratio is exactly the same, no change with all the feminist awareness. Every 17 seconds a woman is attacked by her boyfriend or husband. We talk about other cultures than in Chador, but there is still virulent hatred here too. Despite the advances in the workplace, the fact that 25% of women now earn more than their husbands, that many academic departments are now entirely female, this seething hatred of women is everywhere, promoted by hip hop culture, of hip hop culture when it's hesitant to criticize with its hose and bitches, its wusses, its super bad pimps. Is the solution to take up the placards and march again to find new ways to deconstruct and discuss? We no longer ask why are there no great women artists, but we're still asking other questions like why does young women have so few possibilities to see female actresses over the age of 30 in major roles? Double standards exist as never before. The earliest feminist art was involved in changing the world, so were the scholars and critics who helped shape and interpret it, who themselves marched and demonstrated, who wrote identified new movements, who gave their hearts and souls. How do we solve the problems in front of us now? How might we identify problems that we don't even recognize as such? We think of the pre-women's movement era as filled with oppression, but if you ask most women during the 1950s if they felt any inequities, most would have said no. Similarly, what issues are we seeing now? Meanwhile, events will conspire to create a world we cannot imagine, thanks to genetic engineering, digital technology, the internet, and medical advances. We are moving in directions to states that I at least get dizzy, even contemplating, where the questions I am posing here will seem absolutely quaint. Will we live in virtual worlds so we can change avatars at will? Will advances in surgery ensure that we have a gender blend hermaphroditic? A year ago, it seemed impossible that we would have an African-American president. Here we are, the world is so large. Consciousness raising is always possible. There is so much to be done. That's it. So I think we're doing questions now. Is that right? From the floor? You included some slides of artists like Nicole Eisenman and others. I'm just wondering where you situate their work today and what kind of regards would you see their practice? Can you be a little more specific? Do you see it as a continuation of what we've come from or something like Lisa Yuskovich, whose works are showing these kind of pin-up models, overly accentuated curves. Is that something of continuing a feminist artistic practice? Or do you see it as working against something else? Well, I mean, they're two different, I mean, those are two completely different artists, but I think Lisa Yuskovich, who I wrote about actually for Art in America, I see as being part of a kind of questioning of feminism, of the limitations of feminism, you know, and questioning can we be sort of self, you know, strong women and yet maybe also be able to be sexual in traditional ways. And so I sort of thought, saw it as partly as a positive thing, but then there was another aspect of it, which is that it also plays into the needs of the power, you know, the whole the needs of the same old kind of power structure. So I felt that there's also at the same time some collusion with that. So it was a very complicated issue. I think Nicole Eisenman is sort of part of, I see her more as the kind of part of a neo-feminist generation when feminism was sort of rediscovered in the 1990s after the kind of theory, like the theory period of the 1980s and where people were sort of returning to earlier, not necessarily activist per se, but earlier kind of modes. And so I do see her as continuing that and being involved and I think, you know, these collectives like ridiculous, she's a member of that and that's very much a feminist collective and is kind of, you know, the sort of bad girl sensibility, you know, kind of like, you know, what's the, what's the word, the sort of rock girls, you know, whatever that, you know, that thing. Grange, the Grange thing, you know, that she's really part of that, which I also think is a really interesting kind of phenomenon. We were sort of talking about performance and feminism and I was sort of interested in what you, in your opinion of modern feminism, especially particularly that of feminist performance, because in my opinion I feel like it's become very abstract and some performance artists become very abstract. Like who are you thinking of when you're... Well, we saw this clip of a woman by the name of Daya Manda. Daya Manda? Yes. Oh, yes. Yes, and I sort of think that it's become, it's like feminism has sort of lost its concise message in many respects and I just want to know like what your opinion is about feminism now. I mean, Daya Manda Gallus is like a singer, so I'm not sure. So she didn't really start as like a feminist artist, so I'm just curious about what the piece was. Well, we were analyzing her work from a feminist perspective, how her work can be interpreted as feminist. Right. So I just wanted to know like what your opinion is of modern feminism now, particularly... It's good. I like it. No, I mean, you mean where it stands as a sort of a genre. Yeah. You know, I think that what's interesting to me, you know, I did this exhibit at the Bronx Museum and what was sort of the most interesting to me about that, and that was about collaborative groups because in the 1970s there were a lot of groups that I was sort of like talking about like Suzanne Lacey in Three Weeks in May and these people, these sort of groups of women that did these very politically oriented works that were dealing with domestic violence and incest and things like that. And, you know, so my exhibit was dealing with those groups and how many interesting ways they dealt with politics. And in the course of that, I did a sort of modern day of performance with new groups, you know, so there were groups like the brainstormers who was a group of sort of kind of demographically mixed young women who were sort of using, I don't know if you know the Gorilla Girls, do you know the Gorilla Girls? Well, they're using sort of perform, like kind of fun performance ideas to protest, you know, gender inequities and galleries, ridiculous that I was just talking about. They built a big sculpture of a guy and then knocked it down and a collective called Plus Six that works with kind of Palestinian groups and, you know, young women in Palestinian groups. And so there's a lot of that kind of activism that's going on at the same, you know, that often is done in collectives. So I think that there is, you know, in some ways I think feminism is very healthy and I think also with these sort of, these surveys that were done in the past couple of years, which was the first time they were like major exhibits on the feminist art of the past and the future, I found that it stimulated a lot of women to deal in feminist forms and see their art and acknowledge their work as feminists. So I think it's in a good state. So I feel like I learned a lot. I took at least like a full page of notes, so that's good to walk away with. And I think both of the thrusts worked well for most of the time. Yes, I was like trying not to turn around because I thought if I turned around I'd really like lose the whole thing. I'd let it go. Yeah, I know, exactly, that's right. So I really liked the political cartoon where there was the two party icons just like painting the rainbow. And so that was really effective. But I was thinking as you spoke about where feminism stands on that same spectrum. And sort of being neither black nor white, being brown and Indian, so the child of immigrants, it's always been a part of my experience to take education of any kind with a grain of salt, right? Because you may be saying feminism, but definitely you're also saying like American feminism, or in your case you introduced some examples from Europe as well, so maybe Western feminism. And so one of my questions is how important is it, especially if there's like young people in the audience to say that, to make sure to say that, you know this is like, this is Western feminism. And then the other thing is you made mention of hip-hop at some point. Hip-hop? Hip-hop, sorry. And I think also on that spectrum, one of the reasons why I haven't always said that I'm a feminist is because I haven't always known, right, this is like the age-old discussion, if there's a place for me in feminism, as a hip-hop head, you know what I mean? Amongst other things, but what I don't want to do is enter a movement that easily juxtaposes itself against the other just like that similar, that quote, you know what I'm saying? Because it's not so... I don't know, there's just something about that that feels like... No, I completely agree. And I think that, you know, when I said one is hesitant to criticize hip-hop, I mean I actually like rap music a lot myself. But at the same time, when I see some of those images, they really freak me out. So I'm kind of in this, I don't know how to deal with that. I guess it's sort of in a way parallel to what you're talking about. Well, you're sort of part of it, but not really part of it. And I think feminism is a very charged area for a lot of people. So it's kind of, you know, it brings up a lot of feelings, you know, and whether you're in it or not. And I think even for, you know, people like white women, I think there's a lot of feelings, you know, about does one belong. So I think that that's natural. And I think, you know, I have so much to say on this. I mean, I think, though, that there's a lot of feminists of color that are, you know, doing really interesting work. Like, I don't know if you'd know Judy Baca did the Great Wall of Los Angeles, which is just this amazing project that she began in the late 70s that's like a wall in a kind of concrete wash in the valley. And she has worked with kind of kids from different communities to paint different episodes in the history of Los Angeles. And it's sort of, it's this amazing, it's, you know, kind of a project that, you know, kind of changes these kids' lives and yet it's this sort of beautiful artwork like it's a half a mile long at the same time. And she's like a Chicana gang from, you know, and she's like an amazing person. So there are lots of people like that who are really interesting in dealing with race and feminism at the same time. Ask me later, I'll tell you more. I actually have a question myself. Sort of piggybacking on that last question. What about artists like Betty Tsar and Adrian Piper, who are surprised there were no images of their work, about feminism, black feminism from the late 60s and early 70s and how they were against sort of that mainstreaming of Judy Chicago feminism. How do they fit into the history of feminism? Well, I mean it's, you know, like the thing is that there's so many different rivulets and I was really kind of interested in talking about theory, which is why I didn't really, but Betty Tsar was one of the pioneering, early, the first feminists and she was involved with groups in California and part of that the same, you know, sort of in a way Suzanne Lacey and all those people, she was part of that group but she was also at the time the only woman of color in that group and that was one of the things that plagued the women's movement in the 70s was just that there was not very much diversity but Betty Tsar was an important, you know, exception to that and her daughter Allison is, you know, continues to work in the LA scene. Adrienne Piper is sort of, you know, a New York based artist really coming more out of conceptual art and conceptual practice and was one of the first people that dealt with identity politics and I actually did consider sort of showing her in that, my identity politics section but I mean her work is very complex and actually in Catherine Morris' Gloria there was some very interesting treatment of her work as dealing with many of these issues that were precursors for post-modernism. I mean she's an immensely important artist and I think in a way the reason I was talking a lot about Judy Chicago was because she did help create the theory of feminism in a funny way even though it's, you know, it may not have been what a lot of people followed but it was really a kind of a pioneering gesture that she took, you know, whether or not a lot of people disagree with a lot of things about her art but she really was kind of doing this stuff when nobody was, so. Hi. Hi. I'm curious as to your opinion on men in feminist art and if there are any and what their role might be if we're rearticulating what the term means. There are male feminists so there are, you know, there are people who do that. I mean there were also, I think, there were also in the late 70s there were sort of movements that came up that combined men and women sort of working together like there was a movement called Pattern and Decoration which used some of these ideas about dealing with color and decorative elements and crafts in a way that was less just about feminist art than the art world as a whole. And, you know, right now actually one of the main curators of feminist art is a man whose name I can't remember but he's located in Bilbao in Spain and he's sort of in charge of a big feminist art program there and it curates many, many very kind of forward-looking exhibits about feminist art and I think he's putting together a magazine there and things like that. So there are, you know, people who don't participate or are part of it. I mean, yeah, so ask the critic. Hi. Hi. I feel that so many of the lay from the lay person's perspective they had a little bit of a problem with feminist because it seemed like the lesbian movement so actively embraced the art and the politics and I'm wondering if you think that this was a stumbling block for the movement and if so what the solution you might suggest would be? Well, I mean, luckily nowadays the whole thing about sexual choice and, you know, queer theory I mean that's become less and less of an issue either one way or another and I think that's like a really good thing. I think at the beginning, you know, Betty Friedan talked about something she called the lavender menace when feminism was first starting and she was trying to, you know, be really careful to separate feminism as a whole from, you know, kind of being associated with lesbianism because that was a way that, you know, people discredited the movement but, you know, I mean the thing was I think that, you know, I think the fear that lesbianism generates is the same fear that feminism generates which is that you're sort of changing the, you know, changing the power structure a little bit and it's sort of going into all these primal issues so I think that, you know, in a way the people that had a hard time with feminism had that, you know, had that kind of association but I think the problem was more with feminism and I think the kind of lesbian thing was more of a, like, you know, way of articulating kind of being ill at ease with the whole, you know, the whole thing because nowadays, I mean, you know, like people are getting married and all this stuff is going on so that whole topic, you know, people are changing their gender, you know, that whole topic isn't as powerful but I think at the time it was something that people, you know, exactly they would voice exactly what you said was that it was filled with lesbians it made them uncomfortable, you know, things like that so I think it was a problematic thing in the 1970s and I think now it's just kind of changed so much that it's not really as much of an issue. We have time for one more question. This is the ultimate truth. Whatever you ask. Hi. Hi. I'm really interested that you opened up with the Obama image and the idea that that actually sort of spurred a movement as well because feminism, both the art and the politics were really grounded in a movement that came together and then and then was sort of elided and now there are a bunch of women who are working in collectives and really doing sort of interesting feminist art but they're not necessarily aligned with the movement and nor is the movement that's here right now declaratively supportive of feminism, right? It doesn't, Obama actually didn't come out in favor of gay marriage it came out in front of people, right? Well neither did Hillary Clinton actually So there's a way in which to disconnect and I'm interested in the fact of where feminism itself separates out where you can actually see sort of some of it thriving within art or within performance or politics but it doesn't have that root in a movement and what the issues are between that disconnect. I'm sort of following you but I'm not totally but can you just read the screen? The fact that now there's a movement that you're talking about that isn't actually sort of declaratively supportive of feminism. Meaning Obama and that, okay. Right, so where, what kind of issues then are there for, I mean I have a whole class here of feminism in theater and they're all looking to figure out where, you know, where they fit in this and where there isn't necessarily politics that are fully supportive of where they're trying to actually figure themselves out as feminists. Well, I mean, I don't know what your experience is but I don't think you know feminism, I don't know what it was that ever embraced, I mean maybe Jimmy Carter or I don't know like, I mean I don't think there was ever like a president who embraced feminist ideas I mean I just, or mainstream anything that did and I think you know, like I think in a way that was what I was sort of addressing in the, in my talk was why is it that this is so like what's such, so much of a big deal about it? You're just like searching out a certain area of inquiry and you know it's exploring certain topics but I mean people really freak out. It's just like you know they're lesbians, they're like, they're aggressive they're mean, you know they're this or that blah blah blah. None of which is true you know it's just a way of perceiving things. So if you're a feminist in theater or in art, well particularly in theater you know, you have a chance to be brave and to kind of map out, you have to sort of be willing to operate on the margin because in a way you know it's not fully embraced even though it's a wonderful approach and so that's like, I think one of the things of maturing as an artist is to be able to embrace what you're doing even if everyone may not totally see it your way. So this is an opportunity to do that. But then in the 70s and 80s you know around the feminist movement there was a movement that was supportive of, I mean there was a way in which there was a movement that informed the art and an art that informed the movement which is no longer necessarily. But what I was trying to say in that was that that didn't, that's a myth about that everyone was like a feminist. I mean that's not my memory. No I understand that. You know so it was always, you always felt kind of embattled and on the margin. I mean there was kind of a community in the 70s but it was very you know it was also very much on the outs and people were saying I'm not a feminist and you know having a hard time with it. So I don't, my personal experience going, having gone through the whole thing is that I don't see it being you know that, I mean I think that different from. You don't see it that different from then. No. I think that's, I think there's this kind of you know myth of the golden age that everyone you know there are these moments when everyone suddenly becomes a feminist like that's you know I think in 1992 after Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas there was like this thing about you know there's this kind of like come to Jesus moment and everyone like suddenly saw things a different way and then they became a feminist but there are a couple of moments like that that happened but for the most part what you're experiencing now is kind of the way it is you know and then you know I think this last round of exhibits of women's art sort of created another moment where people were embracing feminism more in art but for the most part it's always I don't know what you know that's what I find it an enigma about what it is that's so difficult about you know embracing that for people. It was for me by the way I have to say it took me a long time I had to know somebody who was really cool I had this really cool journalism teacher she said she was a feminist and I thought oh well if Margot can do that I can do that so that's it