Helen Molesworth, Cleaning up in the 1970s: The Work of Judy Chicago, Mary Kelly, and Mierle Laderman Ukeles, in Rewriting Conceptual Art 1999, chapter 6.
Second wave feminism in the 1970s tried to reclaim women's history. Essentialism offered a positive image of women by focussing on biological processes and female sexuality, using domesticity and handicrafts, and presumed equality to men, by claiming medical and juridicial inequities. However much of the feminist writing at the time presumed woman to be white and ignored other differences.
1980s feminists used linguistic based theories and argued against reality a priori and said 'reality' is a construction. Thus reconstructed woman and the idea of sexual difference. Focus on how pictorial and linguistic representation constructs meaning. Sexual difference through representation, not representations of sexual difference. The vision and the gaze were debated. Essentialism was rejected.
Mary Kelly created the theory-based, psychoanalytic description of feminist practice, Post Partum Document. " The Mother ... is never imaged pictorially, only textually, a strategy meant to mitigate against the prevailing problematic of woman as object of gaze" (a gaze presumed male). (Mary Kelly Imaging Desire, Cambridge MA, 1996) "Posits femininity as a position in language".
"Articulate the figure of Mother as one who possesses desire; the mother as denaturalised and sexualised subject". Stages the production of sexual difference in representation as opposed to a difference based on a biological body.
Tate.org Mary Kelly Post Partum Document, Analysed Marking. "It suggests an interplay of voices - the mother's experience, feminist analysis; academic discussion, political debate". Kelly 1983. p xviii (My work has a different interplay of voices - me as artist, the subject(s), family members, not sure about the analysis or academic discussion)
Gatens, in Feminism & Philosophy, says the idea of equality is skewed because equality in the public sphere is dependent on and evolved by a male subject who acts in public but is maintained in private, traditionally by a woman. A system structured by inequality cannot grant equality to women, merely the chance to become men. Gatens says the body is "an effect of socially and historically specific practices".
Ukeles Maintenance Art brings in the issue of labour.
Judy Chicago Mary Kelly
Essentialist ________________ Theory based, psychoanalytic
Dinner Party \ Private Aspects / Post Partum Document
Bodily \ of Women's / Mental
\ Lives /
\ /
\. /
\./
Mierle Laderman Ukeles
Labour
Maintenance Art
Political economy
Ukeles saye human labour can be divided into Development, and Maintenance. Development is largely modernist, about progress and individuality; Maintenance is largely human, continuous, ongoing - cooking, cleaning, shopping, children etc. She reconfigured value upon unobtrusive maintenance operations - and the ramifications of making maintenance visible in public.
The commonality between these three is writing. Chicago has names written on the table runners and the tiled floor; Kelly the writing of her and her son on the slates; Ukeles has writing on posters, charts and the Maintenance Art stamp. They are also all objects designed to be viewed in a museum/gallery environment.
Ukeles makes a typically private, domestic labour, cleaning action into an activity in the public sphere, thus making it a debate about what is legitimate and what is not "Opens public space to the pressure of what it traditionally excludes". Rosalind Deutsche, Evictions: Art & Spatial Politics. Queries the traditional publicness of art's reliance on the public sphere for its legibility and value. Ukeles underscores the public sphere's structural reliance on private/domestic labour.
Carole Pateman (The Sexual Contract, p144) contends that the public sphere is always assumed to throw light on the private rather than vice versa.
Ukeles Transfer. The exposure of maintenance (as an artwork) added a stage to normal museum procedures, and created extra work. Thus privileging maintenance work over other art shows (Carole Pateman) demonstrated how structural to patriarchy and capitalism it is, that the labour of maintenance should be invisible. When visible, maintenance arrests or stymies the labour it is designed to maintain.
Each of these 3 works embodies how the world might be differently organised.
Ideal dinner party - convivial conversation and the pleasures of the flesh.
Equal value on mothering and being an artist.
Maintenance has value equal to art, by reorganising public and private spheres.
Each of these pushes towards art as a legitimate public discourse.
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