Reading around Nancy Spero

I am going to try taking notes using quotations, as recommended my previous tutor, Linden Reilly.  (I am still somewhat hacked off that my university, London Met, have made her redundant, while her course, MA By Project, is still running!).

Otherworlds, The art of Nancy Spero and Kiki Smith edited by Jon Bird.  Reaktion Books, London 2003.

Essay - Imagining Otherworlds: Connection and Difference in the Art of Nancy Spero and Kiki Smith, Jon Bird p13-45

"Otherworlds .. with all the connotations of the relations between self and other, the difference that is gender, the feminisation of the body that is the (m)other, and the contradictory promise of the redemptive aesthetic  … for our sense of embodiment.

"Feminist critics and art historians have been asking … how the social and historical circumstances of gender might be integral to deciphering the patterns of meaning of subjectivity and art making. … Art is made out of the narratives of individual histories and experiences formed from and against the cross currents of culture.

"Spero's experiences as a 'first generation' post war Americal feminist artist … were the visible and public expressions of the exclusion and alienation experienced by most women artists during the 19602 and 70s.  Spero developed a power metaphorical visual language combining word and image.

"The body is symbolically and psychically invested with lived experience, significant beyond our everyday engagement with the world of things.  … Bodies, specifically the female body, are the semantic units of the visual language of Nancy Spero … a language whose grammar is drawn from the characters of mythology, scripture, history and the contemporary world. … Her works include the carfnivalesque inversion of the codes and regulations of social normality … and encounters with alterity as a reframing of the self.  … Spero's mapping of the figure, from an emphasis upon the odd in pain (victimage) to the dance as a symbolic image of freedom and choice.

"There is a shifting aesthetic value of the decorative and the unstable boundaries of high and low art.  The ideologically binding aesthetic values to issues of gender is traced in Andrewas Huyssen's mapping of the gendering of mass culture as feminine since the late 19th century:

the political, psychological, and aesthetic discourse around the turn of the century consistently and obsessively genders mass culture and the masses as feminine, while high culture, whether traditional or modern, clearly remains the privileged realm of male activities.

"Even, into the late 1970s, the decorative could still be judged an interference or distraction in the critical artwork of some feminist artists.

"There are two rival aesthetic models - the engineer the machine, the functional and the reductive and which is implicitly coded as masculine; the other stresses the body, fashion, and the dance, all of which carry the cultural connotations of the feminine.  The initial tendency of critics and historians was to recognise the equal validity of craft-based and decorative forms and practices, recognised as feminine. … Now the decorative is seen as always intruding a subversive presence within the modern, unravelling its myths of progress, autonomy, masculinity and order.

"Colour has consistently been placed on the side of the decorative, subordinated to the power of line to define structure and form.

Nancy Spero, Marduk, 1986.  I like her use of script and line drawings.