Feminist Social Practice: A Manifesto | Review by W. Perry Epes
poet and writer, W. Perry Epes, uncle of the author
I have the tremendous good fortune of coming from a family of artists, readers, teachers, thinkers, and debaters who informed my youth, and ultimately, my choice of vocation and practice. My mother’s brother, W. Perry Epes is among them. A poet who taught English for decades at the Episcopal High School in Alexandria, Virginia, Perry and I recently reignited a conversation about both of our practices. I sent a copy of my forthcoming, Feminist Social Practice: A Manifesto co-authored with Neysa Page-Lieberman, appearing in the Summer ASAP Journal.
What follows is an intensely generous and illuminating review of our Manifesto by Perry. It is a humbling reminder to read, think, and engage more. I designed a version of our Manifesto, which will be available for distribution shortly.
Appreciation for “Feminist Social Practice: A Manifesto”
23 July 2018
Dear Melissa,
Thank you so much for sending me both your Feminist Social Practice Manifesto and your “Mergerug” for your Serbian project, with timelines for you, Mother, and Zejna S. The latter is particularly beautiful and interesting, and I’d like to ask you many more questions about it in due course, but for the present I want to concentrate on your Manifesto, which I have read with great interest and pleasure.
I was struck with the theoretical clarity and consequential weight of the first section defining terms of Feminist Social Practice, and then quite moved by the emotional force of the particular examples you explicated from the Revolution at Point Zero exhibition that you and Neysa Page-Lieberman co-curated in Chicago in the spring of 2017.
For me, your opening Declaration accomplishes two big theoretical steps simultaneously: 1) to liberate socially relevant art from the old “aesthetic” bias against whatever is didactic (the bias I was raised on in literary study, whether the New Criticism or Chicago Aristotelian Criticism, both of which try to elevate the “autonomous” work of “great art” to some notion of “universal” human relevance rather than any particular “real world” social or political realm—the catch being, as I learned best from Judith Fetterly’s feminist literary criticism, that we were all supposed to assume that white male European cultural standards were universal for everyone, not noticing that they might be meaningless to the invisible “other,” whether gendered or colonized); and 2) to recover and highlight the centrality of feminist social practice from the 1970s on as a source of examples and principles for all contemporary socially active art. I will quote with renewed pleasure two key sentences from your Declaration: “We reject the prevailing art world’s bias toward revolutionary feminist tactics as didactic, narcissistic, irrelevant, anti-aesthetic, or otherwise lesser than ‘great art.’ We believe this narrative of trivialization, however subtle or obvious in its deployment, directly contributes to the erasure of the feminist legacy from the past, present, and future of socially engaged art.” You go on to call on “curators, artists, art workers, scholars, and audiences to locate the legacy of feminism in all contemporary artworks, especially community and socially engaged practices.”
In your statement of Criteria for feminist social practice, I appreciated your call for an ending of emphasis on single, authoritative authorship (an “ideal” so perfectly expressive of male ego) and an end to privileging the finished, “perfected” object over process (bedrock of earlier aestheticist theories) in order to recognize how the process of collaboration and shared authorship so enhances the impact of socially engaged art, marked by inclusivity and outreach. So much kinder and more respectful of the audience!
I especially relished your criterion “Resists white, male, cis-dominant narratives.” I’ve not encountered the term “cis-dominant” in my own critical reading, but I associated it in my mind with a phrase from reading Caesar’s Gallic Wars in 10th-grade Latin, when he refers to the region of the Northern Italy as “cis-Alpine Gaul,” on this side of the Alps, the near side from the perspective of Rome. What an epitome Rome is of white male colonializing domination! And so “cis-dominant” is on this side of liberation of the feminist other, this side of the revolution releasing the human spirit, “this side of Paradise,” to borrow Fitzgerald’s title. (And a biography of him is titled The Far Side of Paradise, so maybe that’s where we’re headed. The Far Side! Or maybe waiting for such a reach of enlightenment that the far side becomes the next near side. Anyway, I just loved the play of ideas that your writing sparked in my mind.)
Continuing in the section on the history of Feminist Social Practice, I really chimed to the concept of Judy Chicago’s attacking the pernicious modernist fallacy that “alienation is the natural human condition”; she exposes the existentialist premise that “real human contact is unattainable” as a fallacy to be obviated by collective and engaged artistic endeavor. You quote Brodsky and Olin: “Feminist artists challenged the romantic constructions of the artist qua solitary genius, emphasizing collective dimensions of artistic production” (p. 337 in your text). You go on to say that “The ‘power of feminist art,’ literally, was its ability to transform a society” (p. 338), and then quote Rita May Brown’s 1972 manifesto: “our art must be more than personal narrative; it must contain a vision for the future where no group rapes another, where force is not the heart of politics and egotism is not the mind of art.” In the next key sentence for me, you outline the broadening link of feminism with all classes of social activism as “Women of color responded with intersectional approaches to what had first been a predominantly white feminist movement, demanding that the structural oppressions of class division, institutional racism, and compulsory heterosexuality be acknowledged even within the feminist movement itself.” What an emulatable example of self-criticism, of privilege coming to recognize itself and the necessity of “[shifting] feminism’s trajectory to embrace a more inclusive spectrum of identities” (p. 338).
And so to the central thesis of your manifesto: “Given these strides of 1970s (and subsequent feminisms), and their irreversible impact on the art world, it is all the more unacceptable that feminism is regularly purged from art historical and philosophical accounts of aesthetic radicalism” (p. 338). After giving clear and commensurate credit for background inspiration to Silvia Federici’s influential text Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle, a series of Marxist feminist essays by the leader of the Wages for Housework movement in the 1970s (p. 339), the rest of your manifesto goes on to illustrate this thesis with specific examples from the exhibition you co-curated in Chicago in the spring of 2017, Revolution at Point Zero. “The exhibition was the first of its kind to claim feminism as a primary influence on socially engaged art. Revolution at Point Zero was developed as a test-drive for the Feminist Social Practice Manifesto, an example of putting theory into practice” (p. 340).
And it is in this practical side, the topically specific and emotionally-powerful imagery of the five individual exhibits, that your manifesto builds to its most vivid and memorable moments of supporting evidence. We are truly moved to persuasion and conviction by the quality of the art. The first exhibit, Laura Henderson Barbata’s Julia Pastrana, A Homecoming, grips us with the shock of this 19th-century Mexican Indigenous woman’s exploitation at the hands of her manager-husband, who exhibited her around the world and billed her as “The Ugliest Woman in the World” (p. 341). Beyond the shock of outrage, the artist’s truly extraordinary efforts to locate Pastrana’s remains in Norway and repatriate them for burial in Mexico is inspirational.
Marisa Moran Jahn’s suite of works, The CareForce, including public performance, videos and animation, and works on paper, transfigures the invisible care-giving and domestic labor produced by women into an upbeat, collectively choreographed Disco dance. The setting of the exhibit, at Jane Addams Hull House, emphasized its social relevance with post-performance networking, while the beauty of the choreography lived even more widely in the audience participation (p. 342).
Megan Young’s performance-based series, The Longest Walk, “entails a group motion of walking forward and backward, and it enacts the slow pace of sustained progress” (p. 343). The doing/undoing of the movement gives an emotional urgency bordering on anger and despair, but the works on paper carried during the walk, inviting participants to finish the sentence “We Hold This Space For . . . ,” complemented the action of walking with support through thought as much as vice versa.
The Puerto Rico-based Las Nietas de Nono’s Ilustraciones de la Mecanica shocks with enactments of medical research as experiments torturing vulnerable female bodies yet preserves the image of traditional curative remedies such as SCOBY, the symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast that is the basis of kombucha. Your final sentence captures the power of this work: “Las Nietas brilliantly wove together themes of revelation and resistance by honoring women who have endured violence and humiliation at the hands of powerful entities while at the same time promoting the marginalized narratives of traditional healers of Puerto Rico” (p. 345).
It is fitting to conclude your explication of the exhibition with Mierle Laderman Ukeles’ Work Ballets, since “her work engages feminism and socially engaged art equally and seamlessly in an unwavering long-term engagement with the politics of women’s work, the environment, and invisible labor” (p. 345). The seamlessness of beauty in both work and art is inherent to the very title of her piece, and the video of her final ballet, Snow Workers’ Ballet, dramatically culminates the way her “complicated and stirring performances transform skilled labor into interpretive art for public audiences, and reveal the inherent complexities and artistry of everyday necessary actions” (p. 346). In my retirement I am amazed at seeing how hard everyone works, and now I might add, how beautifully, too.
And so your manifesto ends by inviting us in to participate in the great work on the long road ahead. “The very foundation of the feminist movement teaches us that only collective action across intersecting determinations of race, class, and sexuality can transform our history and culture” (p. 347). I can’t overstate how stirring and welcoming I have found this invitation, with its clear theoretical basis and strong purpose which far transcends any whiff or limitation of dogmatism. Thank you for this focused beam on a key turning point in the past of art history and the resulting broad insight into the future of art.