Editorial Group: Martha Edelheit, Valerie Jaudon, Joyce Kozloff, Melissa Meyer, Carrie Rickey, Elizabeth Sacre, Miriam Schapiro, Elizabeth Weatherford, Sally Webster. Design Group: Francesca de Majo, Jean Feinberg, Paula Greif, Melissa Meyer and Janet Froelich, Julie Gross, Amy Kalina, Barbara Knight, Joyce Kozloff, Barbara Kruger, Miriam Schapiro. Photography Group: Deborah Jones-Domingiiez, Judy Henry, Kunie', Dee Shapiro. Production Group: Cynthia Eardley, Su Friedrich, Margo Herr, Gail Lineback, Margot Norton, Carrie Rickey, Gail Schneider, Elizabeth Weatherford. Our thanks to those who helped to get out this issue: Patsy Beckert, Cynthia Beerbower, Paula Ben-Amos, Marina Cappelletto, Constance DuHamel, Denise Green, Gini Hamilton, Valerie Hollister, Beth Jaker, Jennifer Kotter, Virginia Maksymowicz, Sandra Matthews, Suzanne Noguere, Sophie Rivera, Steven Seklir, Muriel Shapiro, Jean Wardle, Betty Wilde, Elizabeth Riley, Mary Zenner, Committee on the Visual Arts, Experimental Intermedia Foundation; our lawyer, Eleanor Fox; our accountant, Miriam Maharrey; our copy editor, Sue Heinemann; our photographers, eeva-inkeri and Kunie; and our special consultant, Tony deLuna. HERESIES 4 The Editorial Group of Heresies 4 will hold an open meeting on Wednesday, April 26, 8 P.M., at the Women's Coffee House, 54 7th Avenue South, New York City. HERESIES is an idea-oriented journal devoted to the examination of art and politics from a feminist perspective. We believe that what is commonly called art can have a political impact, and that in the making of art and of all cultural artifacts our identities as women play a distinct role. We hope that HERESIES will stimulate dialogue around radical political and aesthetic theory, encourage the writing of the history of femina sapiens, and generate new creative energies among women. It will be a place where diversity can be articulated. We are com- mitted to the broadening of the definition and function of art. HERESIES is structured as a collective of feminists, some of whom are also socialists, marxists. lesbian feminists or anarchists; our fields include painting, sculpture, writing, anthropology, literature, performance, art history, architecture and filmmaking. While the themes of the individual issues will be determined by the collective, each issue will have a different editorial staff made up of women who want to work on that issue as well as members of the collective. Proposals for issues may be conceived and presented to the HERESIES Collective by groups of women not associated with the collective. Each issue will take a different visual form, chosen by the group responsible. HERE- SIES will try to be accountable to and in touch with the international feminist community. An open evaluation meeting will be held after the appearance of each issue. Topics for issues will be announced well in advance in order to collect material from many sources. Possibly satellite pamphlets and broadsides will be produced continuing the discussion of each central theme. In addition HERESIES provides training for people who work editorially, in design and in production, both on-the-job and through workshops. As part of its commitment to the public, HERESIES houses and maintains the Women Artists' Slide Registry. As women, we are aware that historically the connections between our lives, our arts and our ideas have been suppressed. Once these con- nections are clarified they can function as a means to dissolve the alienation between artist and audience, and to understand the relationship between art and politics, work and workers. As a step toward a demystification of art, we reject the standard relationship of criticism to art within the present system, which has often become the relationship of advertiser to product. We will not advertise a new set of genius-products just because they are made by women. We are not committed to any particular style of aesthetic, nor to the competitive mentality that per- vades the art world. Our view of feminism is one of process and change, and we feel that in the process of this dialogue we can foster a change in the meaning of art. THE COLLECTIVE: Ida Applebroog, Patsy Beckert, Joan Braderman, Mary Beth Edelson, Su Friedrich, Janet Froelich, Harmony Hammond, Sue Heinemann, Elizabeth Hess, Joyce Kozloff, Arlene Ladden, Lucy Lippard, Marty Pottenger, Miriam Schapiro, Amy Sillman, Joan Snyder, Elke Solomon, Pat Steir, May Stevens, Elizabeth Weatherford, Sally Webster. The Women's Slide Registry, located in the Indexed by the Alternative Press Centre, HERESIES office, includes women artists P.O. Box 7229, Baltimore, Maryland, 21218. from all over the U.S. Send 3 slides, name, address and other information plus $5 to MEMBER Women's Slide Registry, Box 539, Canal Street Station, NY, NY 10013. HERESIES: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics is published Winter, Spring, Summer and Fall by Heresies Collective, Inc. at 225 Lafayette Street, New York, New York 10012. Subscription rates: $11 for four issues; S18 for institutions. Outside the U.S. and Canada add S2 postage. Single copy: S3 plus 50c handling charge. Address all correspondence to HERESIES, P.O. Box 766, Canal Street Station, New York, New York 10013. HERESIES, ISSN 0146-3411. Vol. 1, No. 4, Winter 1977-78. ©1978 Heresies Collective. All rights reserved. On publication, all rights revert to authors. Cover: Wallpaper motif by Anna Lee, Columbian World Exposition, 1893. This issue of HERESIES was typeset in Bodoni Book by Talbot Typographies, Inc. Thanks to K.J.Mars. Printed by the Capital City Press, Montpelier, Vermont. 181111 i/# * / ... : j^5^ ''lj&:i ^^^^Jj *«"' : : #t:»S ..:-"J*, &S^ ^^^a • 1SS« j - . - *«StC|^^^^P "'* ' ' : s ''^"HBBHHt : This woman is making pottery in Chiapas, Mexico. The techniques for coiling and shap- ing a single lump of clay predate the Spanish Conquest of the sixteenth century; the wares of women of Chiapas and of the state of Oaxaca to the north are famous throughout Mexico for their utility and distinctive style. Assertive and confident, articulate and skilled, the traditional potters in Oaxaca and Chiapas bear little resemblance to the Mediterranean idea of women widely held in Mex- ico—as passive and acquiescent. The potters pass on manufacturing and decorating tech- niques to younger women who are apprenticed at about six or seven years. Recent studies of Mayan art and numerous Aztec figurines and stone sculptures (includ- ing the monumental and monstrous Coatlicue, Mother of the Gods, now in the Mexican Na- tional Museum) show that women occupied a prominent place in Indian society and thought, not only as wives and mothers but as goddesses, politicians and priestesses. A deg- radation of the role of women was one consequence of the Spanish Conquest. Traditional potters in Mexico reflect this past prominence: they demonstrate their skill and author- ity over the clay that has made their pottery famous, though they themselves remain anonymous. Flora Kaplan Arts and Science and an Assistant Professor of Anthropology- at New York Flora Kaplan is Director of the Museum Studies Program of the Graduate School of University. She was the Acting Curator of Primitive Art at the Brooklyn Museum in an earlier life. lz : "-' :: ! '- '.'.'-'• '.". 3Ik*' - "'" '" ,tt::t- % '-'i -- ::::- ;—• : i **»»>-»*" !•*»>,»*,*« £,"» • »-** _•£«*« m *»»-SS «?£r««. »*»»» .«** '"-*:;;": , «i«" -»I-J_ *«*-*»* ^;**** -» » t**' r omen's Traditional Arts? Initially we met anticipating discussions of quilts, pottery and weaving rugs. But discussions of quillwork, poetry and weaving narratives came up too. It became clear that basic to our concerns was the politics of aesthetics. And in these dis- cussions we couldn't examine either the artifacts or their politics without a constant awareness that our process was collective. We found that collectivity and deadlines make strange bedpersons. Like any revolution, any revelation, collectivity was the best of times, it was the worst of times. As a self-selected group of women we all shared a commitment to our topic and a commitment to the Heresies Collective, the 21 women who are the magazine's originators and publishers. Nearly half the editorial group which produced this issue are Heresies Collective members too. The others of us responded to the Heresies invitation which offers feminists the space and the means to explore and analyze women's issues in depth. Our editorial responsibility ranged from discussing issues, soliciting articles, reading and responding to submissions and working editorially with _ writers, to the technical production of the magazine. This lengthy process required willingness to put aside learned notions of efficiency. Criticism and self-criticism were the feedback structures that allowed us continually to re-examine our process and our ideas. We had to respond to different levels of experience and tried to avoid their expression in conscious or unconscious hierarchies. Our concern about structure had its emotional edge. We began as eleven. We are now nine. Our fledgling process was as full of pain and anxiety as it was of intelligence and optimism. We needed to weigh the comparative values of professional writing versus amateur investigation and set our own standards which emphasized the communication of issues rather than just cherished notions of good writing. Each editor had a sense of an insider/outsider tension. On the one hand, there was an unspoken set of assumptions shared by some members of the group, vocabulary and gestures which grew out of a common history, a common consciousness. On the other, there was a fear that this set of assump- tions implied a clique. What kind of process did we create? We felt we were constantly tripping over ourselves. We were frustrated and embarrassed at all the doubling back and overlap in our discussions, especially when we were met with questions like. "If she's a pain in the ass, why don't you kick her out?" "Why do you waste so much time with democracy?" "Hierarchies are inevitable. Why don't you face it?" "Isn't a collective a camel designed by a committee?" What we created was awkward, was exhilarating.