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Title: Not For Sale: Feminism and Art in the USA during the 1970s
Author: Laura Cottingham, 1998
From the Apex Art brochure text produced for the video essay, Not For Sale
Not For Sale: Feminism and Art in the USA during the 1970s
From the Apex Art brochure text produced for the video essay, Not For Sale
Laura Cottingham, 1998
On the making of Not For Sale
lt was a desire for history - to know, to acknowledge, and to
actively produce history - that motivated me to begin the
work that has become, six years later, a 90-minute video tape
called Not For Sale: Feminism and Art in the USA during
the 1970s. Prior to this project, contemporary art had
been my primary focus. Although the basis of my work had been
established according to feminist concerns from the moment I
began writing art crticism while still in college during the
early eighties, it wasn't until 1992 that it first made sense
to me to go back to "the feminist decade." As I
witnessed an echo of the '70s reverberating in contemporary
works by Janine Antoni, Cheryl Dunye, Ava Gerber, Sue
Willams, Lynne Yamamoto and other artists, I became aware of
how little I knew about the Feminist Art Movement. Given that
the late sixties and early seventies marked the moment in
American history when women first identified themselves
consciously as a political group and organized for the right
to participate in cultural production as a visual artist, it
seemed imperative to me to attempt to locate this radical
departure, situate the terms of its emergence, and preserve
its outward appearance before it was to late to do so.
In addition to its relation to my professional practice as an
art critic, returning to the 1970s allowed me acces to my own
autobiographical history. As a teenager during the '70s, this
decade shaped my earliest self-adopted beliefs. Although too
young to have actively witnessed , I have vivid childhood
memories of the events circa '68 as the impact of the Women's
Liberation Movement and the mobilization for civil rights and
Black Power, anti-militarism and student rights, Gay Rights
and general challenge of the authority that errupted in the
United States during the sixties and seventies, one is left
to address the work left undone, the changes still to be
made, the political tensions as yet unresolved. Where and how
do we locate ourselves, individually and collectively, in
this process called history?
Politcs and art both share the foundational premise
consisting, ultimately, of a consideration of values; and of
being defined and played out according to what resources are
or are not available. In the intersection between politics
and art that occasioned the emergence of the Feminist Art
Movement, the multiple and often contradictory artistic
positions adopted by its particpants were quite diverse and
more united by their obvious departure from and against
Greenbergian formalism than they are by any other organizing
nomenclature.
Not For Sale introduces and reintroduces some of the
art, artists, and activities of the Feminist Art Movement.
Many contemporary artistic strategies and modes of production
that are taken for granted in the 1990s -including video and
performance works, activist-based practices, collective art
efforts, sculpture and painting that incorporate matter and
processes previously dismissed as craft, autobiography as
subject, archival-based installations and explorations in
identity politics were first introduced and championed within
the broad based aesthetics and practices that constituted the
Feminist Art Movement. Athough the most significant legacy of
the Feminist Art Movement - its construction of a
deliberately female subjectivity and its demand that women be
allowed to participate in cultural productions in the role of
the artist - was often naive, unstable, contradictory, and
partial, it nonetheless irrevocably transformed the terms of
cultural production, and the aesthetic of American Modernism.
Much of the research base for Not For Sale was drawn
from personal archives of the 1970s feminist artists had
assembled for themselves and their peers.Sharing slide
reproductions was one response of the Feminist Art Movement.
Although 35mm slides were the standard format for
researching, of art made in the1970s, in the United States,
this format was not well suited to the video-medium, and Not
For Sale would be a very different product if it were,
for instance, literary rather than a virtual exhibition. As
with any historical project, documentation - the literal
materiality of the documents, including their accessibility.
readabilty and reproduction quality - greatly influenced not
only the parameters of my own knowledge as a researcher, but
also the possibilities available for transferring this
information into the specific terms accepted by, in this case
video.
Because so few women had commercial support for their art
during the 1970s, a sizable amount of the art works I located
had been reproduced and preserved according to substandard
technical conditions. Even the works produced in the then-new
media of video and performance were often resistant to being
historicized in video in the 1990s, as many performances had
purposely not been documented (out of deference to an
aesthetics based in exclusively realtime experience) while
other - time-based vvorks that were documented were
reproduced in half-inch reel-to-reel had not been transferred
to a subsequent video format and were therefore literally
lost (first generation video tape is fugitive, much like
Polaroid photography) or only partially retrievable. Working
on Not For Sale has brought me closer to the reality
behind the myth of the possibilities available for
revisionist history, especially when undertalken to uncover
poitically marginalized cultural products and events. Athough
a revisionist reading of dominant cultural artifacts is
likely to least possible revisionist reclamation of
marginalized culural properties remain unlikely and
difficult. Despite different obstacles to historicization,
the art and artists featured in Not For Sale nonetheless
account for less than 5% of the archival imagery I have
assembled - itself only a small fraction of the social
activities, paintings, political organizing, sculptures,
panel discussions, performances, videos,
consciousness-raising sessions, postal mailings, activist
efforts, installions and other art activities that occured in
response to and contemporaneous with the Feminist Art
Movement that emerged during the 1970s throughout the United
States. While researching, I was conscious of not wanting to
repeat the terms of exclusion dictated according
to"majority politics". Although the majority of
women active in the feminist activist and art movements were
white and heterosexual, non-white women and lesbians actively
participated from the beginning of the Second Wave and I
wanted Not For Sale to reflect this.
Although the movement was national, Not For Sale is
based toward activities that occurred in and around New York
and Los Angeles. Even so, some events of obvious historical
relevance to the concerns of Not For Sale are notably
lacking due to my inability to locate either existing or
functionai visual documents. My own aesthetic and political
interests also guided the selection process. I chose works
that compelled me as well as those that seem to best
represent some of the movement's dominant aesthetic
tendencies and artistic investigations. The participants in
the Feminist Art Movement arrived from different artistic and
educational backgrounds. Some wanted to transform traditional
European-derived media, such as painting and sculpture, with
feminist awareness, others, most notably the African American
artists, sought to introduce non-European aesthetics and
values into the American visual vocabulary. Still others
eschewed object-making altogether in favor of performative
strategies, championed video as the new frontier of artistic
democracy, called for an elimination of the division between
craft and fine Art, united the aims of artistic freedom with
those of political activism, or set forth an aesthetics based
in an understanding of introducing female experience and
female-coded labor, the female body, women's history, and
individual autobiography as the foundations for a feminist
art. Although the parameters of the Ferninist Art Movement
can be charted according to specific historical determinants
such as exhibitions, and other documents, the Movement vvas
first and foremost and far from a unified front. The
disagreements between its participants -some of which are
overtly presented in Not For Sale, while others must
be inferred by the viewer - are as crucial to its definition
as the consensus that inspired and sustained it across
ideological ruptures, personal frustrations, and a general
lack of access to significant economic or institutional
resources. Participants in the Feminist Art Movement of the
1970s were motivated to transform the underlying tenets of
fine art including the production, critical evaluation,
exhibition, distribution, and historical maintenance of art
beyond terms dictated by sexism. The challenge they offered
has yet to be met.
Laura Cottingham, New York 1998