Who Was That Woman?

WHO WAS THAT WOMAN?

by Helena Reckitt

C104 Winter 2009 31 32 Who Was That Woman?

C104 Winter 2009 recise, sculptural and strikingly hand-pleated, Le Klint lamp- barring a monthly stipend worth 100 Euros. Eventually, though, Pshades are classics of mid-century modernism. But a perverse she countered her family’s attempts to erase her from history by plan meant that, until recently, these furnishings were far more returning to making lamps, publishing her designs in a diy craft famous than the woman whose name they bear. In 1938, at the magazine, and writing her memoirs, Erindringstrade (Memory age of 18, Klint signed a contract drawn up by her lamp-manufac- Threads). The 1998 book’s account of identity crises and the pri- turing family that forced her to stop making or advertising lamps vatization of the artist’s name caught the attention of the young under her own name. However, her family continued to market Danish artist Pia Rönicke who, in 2004, devised an exhibition the successful Le Klint line while Klint lost contact with them, about Klint called Without a Name.

Presenting a fragmented portrait of the borrows crime writing’s depiction of intrigue now elderly designer, this show incorporat- shared between detective and detected, it also ed videos, slide projections, printed ephem- introduces a spirit of mutual affirmation be- era and lamps in the Le Klint style. The latter tween the women not usually found in de- were fabricated by Rönicke following Klint’s tective fiction. Just as the life of this creative published directions, their folded paper con- survivor fascinates Rönicke, the artist becomes struction echoing the loops and folds in Klint’s a mirror for Klint’s questions about female cre- story and introducing a surprisingly domes- ative autonomy. Describing her exchanges with tic note to the otherwise spare installation. Klint, Rönicke recalls in her slide projected Rönicke’s decision to make the lamps by hand texts: “she was very curious about my life./If it stages a gesture of empathy with the older de- was possible for me to do the things I was/ signer, suggesting a desire to understand her Interested in, and if anyone was interested in/ creative processes on an intimate, tactile level. What I was doing.” “The physical act of copying is a phenomeno- Without a Name exemplifies a biographical logical process,” comments the American artist turn in contemporary art that, in important Andrea Bowers about the hand-written letters ways, has a precursor in theatre director Neil she transcribed for her 2005 show Letters to an Bartlett’s 1988 book Who Was That Man? A Army of Three. “It’s a way of learning and un- Present for Mr. Oscar Wilde. Seeking traces derstanding that goes beyond just reading or of the Victorian writer and convicted peder- listening, and I think it is very powerful.”1 This ast a century after his death, Bartlett presents 1 Eungie Joo, “diy school: Andrea embodied homage also links to other key art his hunt in sexual terms that draw out biogra- Bowers and Eungie Joo in Conversation,” projects by feminists, including Judy Chicago’s phy’s erotic undercurrents. Bartlett experienc- in Nothing is Neutral: Andrea Bowers (Los Angeles: RedCat, 2006), 55. channelling of Georgia O’Keeffe in her flower- es Wilde as a tangible presence who haunts inspired paintings and drawings and her Wom- his everyday activities in London and perme- 2 Neil Bartlett, Who Was That Man? A anhouse cohort Miriam Schapiro’s practice of ates his manuscript-in-progress. “His words Present for Mr. Oscar Wilde (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1988), 26. collaging reproductions of Mary Cassatt paint- began to ghost my writing.”2 This understand- ings into works she called “collaborations.” ing of how one writer’s work influences anoth- 3 Isla Leaver-Yap, “Paulina Olowska: Evoking the flow of conversation and mem- er’s—and the play between Bartlett and Wilde And It Is Time,” Map Magazine 16 (Winter 2008). ory, Klint’s story emerges phrase-by-phrase in their shifting roles as seeker and sought, in slide-projected images of white plastic possessor and possessed—counters the idea of letters—fittingly, the kind that announce homosexuality as non-reproductive. Instead, the residents in old-fashioned apartment the sense of a shared history that Wilde repre- buildings—against a dark background. “A real sents influences Bartlett and his contemporar- fiction—a story about Klint and the lamp,” ies productively as they struggle against aids as one slide terms it, the narrative darts from and homophobia. Klint’s family business to her relationship with Just as Bartlett drew from Wilde, Polish art- the writer Peter Weiss, and evokes the trou- ist Paulina Olowska looks to earlier female bled sense of self that prompted Klint’s various artists as enabling presences and kindred spir- abrupt changes of residence and occupation its. Claiming that “it is always sweeter to work and a seven-year psychoanalytic consultation with a friend, or a ghost,”3 Olowska summons to help her reconstruct her identity. Folding up female figures in her paintings, collages, in- pages 31 & 32 back on itself, and punctuated with blank stallations and performances—from iconoclas- Manon de Boer, Sylvia slides that allow the viewer to pause and take tic artists and designers to unnamed models Kristel, Paris, 2003, stock of Klint’s dramatic biography, the story and dancers. Drawn especially to women who super-8 film transferred to betacam chronicles Rönicke’s first meeting with Klint made the presentation and performance of image courtesy of as well as the women’s trip to Paris for the self central to their artistic practice, her work jan mot, brussels opening of Without a Name. While the project stages a fascination with the creative possibili-

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ties of striking a pose and making a scene. The ticipates Barbara Kruger’s protest “We won’t gesture of giving space to other artists in her play nature to your culture.” Completed a year works is both generously self-effacing and un- before Boty died, the piece contrasts her light- apologetically narcissistic, as Olowska’s bob- er, earlier efforts and shows her clear-eyed haired, stylishly clad subjects often resemble understanding of the gap between political her. As such, they function both as individuals and sexual representation. with distinct biographies and as stand-ins for Olowska tries to settle historical scores on the artist. Olowska’s appropriation of images Boty’s behalf. Alongside a reproduction of the of glamorous women might not seem obvious- notorious newspaper article for which Boty ly feminist, but it has been pivotal to femi- posed naked with her artworks, she depicts the nism’s development, as Maria Elena Buszek smiling artist pulling her shirt above her head. shows in her 2006 book Pin-up Grrrls: Femi- Another female figure—a bob-haired paint- nism, Sexuality, Popular Culture. Linking the er in a snazzy zebra-print dress, leopard-print female pin-up and the women’s movement to shoes and a painter’s apron—stands at an ea- their mid-19th-century origins, Buszek inves- sel, brush in hand. While resembling Olows- tigates how Victorian actresses’ and burlesque ka, this second woman in fact comes from an performers’ presentation of themselves as lib- issue of Art in America from the 80s. This was, erated—on and off the stage—provided valu- of course, a time of unprecedented prominence able symbols of women’s emancipation that for feminist artists in New York’s art world, a later boosted the women’s suffrage movement. reference that the pasted-in backdrop of the Not only did suffragettes use pictures of fa- Manhattan nocturnal skyline reinforces. Yet mous stage performers in their campaigns, but where the discourse of 80s feminists tried to they also took on “the self-consciously stylish deconstruct women’s place in the patriarchal image and performative feminism of the ac- order, ignoring or denying the pleasurable as- tress as tools through which suffrage protests pects of female self-display, Olowska makes 4 Maria Elena Buszek, might be turned into persuasive ‘parades.’”4 room for both. By isolating Boty’s prescient, Pin-Up Grrrls: Feminism, This strain of what Buszek terms “theatri- exhibitionist gestures, and imagining her view- Sexuality, Popular Culture (Durham: Duke cal feminism”—prevalent in the early 20th er not as a sleazy tabloid reader but as another University Press, 2006), 23. century and between the world wars—took a female artist, Olowska implies that the abili- knock during the 50s’ backlash against femi- ty for women to delight both in painting and nism, only to return with a vengeance in the posing, and in seeing and being seen, is one of 60s. Her mixed-media canvas Pauline Boty feminism’s hard-won goals. Acts Out One of Her Paintings For a Popular Pauline Boty Acts Out One of Her Paint- Newspaper (2006) explores a key, though ings For a Popular Newspaper and the other largely overlooked, figure from this era: art- eight large works in Olowska’s 2006 exhibi- ist Pauline Boty. The only prominent woman tion, Hello to You Too, share the same size and in the British Pop Art movement, Boty died vertical orientation, each centring on a female from leukemia at age 28 and her work, which figure that Olowska copied or collaged from examined mass-media depictions of celebri- magazines and other printed media. Tightly ty, has only recently received scholarly atten- grouped, with one painting doubling as an ex- tion. This neglect stems partly from Boty’s hibition announcement (including the dates, habit of modelling nude beside her paint- “8th February – until International Women’s ings and “acting out” the poses of her female Day,” and the opening reception dress code, subjects—a prescient postmodern gesture “Avant-garde Costumes necessary”), the works of hyperbolic mi micry that was viewed at had the feel of weathered billboards. These the time as frivo lous exhibitionism. Yet, de- “distressed” yet appealing images of glamorous spite critics being more interested in viewing modern women energetically greeting female- her physique than her art, Boty was commit- centred futures recalls the suffragettes’ use of ted to using her body as an aesthetic tool, for pictures of actresses and activists as “ads” for pleasurable self- expression as well as mimetic female emancipation. The wish- fulfilling as- subversion. Evidently she recognized the prob- pect of this project—the idea that to fulfil your lematic ubiquity of the female nude, as her desire you have to act out and publicize it— two-part painting It’s a Man’s World I and It’s underpins the performative nature of Olows- a Man’s World II (1963–65) shows. The work ka’s work. The title of Olowska’s exhibition, juxtaposes important male public figures of Hello to You Too, with its ring of sexual innu- the century on one panel—Elvis, the Beatles, endo, suggests women hailing one another jfk, Cassius Clay, bullfighter El Cordobes and across generations. Instead of presenting femi- Lenin—with female models (some of them nists from different periods battling out their headless) from contemporary girly magazines, ideological and aesthetic differences, as most montaged against a bucolic backdrop that an- chronicles of the movement have done, Olows-

C104 Winter 2009 ka creates a utopian environment wherein for- terling favours the cross-dressing androgyne. merly antagonistic positions are acknowledged In Eileen Gray, the jewel and troubled water and Boty is recognized as an important figure (2008), Winterling channels one such short- then and an enabling presence today. haired garçonne, an Irish furniture designer, This investment in another woman as an lacquer artist and architect known in Left Bank ideal ego takes an even more mimetic turn in Paris for her lesbian liaisons (though she did Olowska’s work concerning Zofia Stryjenska. marry a man). Her villa on the French Riviera, This Polish artist ’s career flourished between named E-1027, which she built in 1929, chal- the world wars but declined under Commu- lenged Le Corbusier’s ideas that “the house is nism when she wouldn’t join the state-loyal a machine to live in” and was designed in rela- Union of Artists—though the state still repro- tion to the shifting angles of the sun, the wind duced her works without paying or crediting and the site’s physical attributes. Gray also her. The strong-willed Stryjenska passed as a did not share her modernist architectural col- man in order to study at the Munich Art Acad- leagues’ obsession with open spaces, but in- emy and raised her children on her own after troduced mobile shutters into her villa that her marriage collapsed. Olowska’s affiliation combined privacy and intimacy with fluidity. both with Stryjenska’s feisty spirit and her ex- Despite its implied critique of austere modern- uberant work in myriad media took the form ism, her building so impressed Le Corbusier of homage in a show that she organized for the that, after she left, he moved in— ultimately 2008 Berlin Biennale. suffering a fatal heart attack while swimming Merging the role of artist and curator, in a nearby bay. Yet Le Corbusier’s regard for Olowska revisited Stryjenska’s 1925 Parisi- E-1027 took a strange turn in 1938 when he enne debut at the Exposition International des decorated it with lurid, sexually graphic murals Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes, from that Gray interpreted as an act of violence, and which she copied six large panels celebrating subsequently erected three structures near the country life and the seasons. Yet where con- house that destroyed her cherished privacy. temporary accounts comment on the vivid Winterling’s Gray-inspired exhibition colours of Stryjenska’s paintings, Olows- (which was included in When things cast no ka’s monochromatic remakes reflect the fact shadow, the 5th Berlin Biennale, which also that her only source was black-and-white featured Olowska’s Stryjenska-focused project) photographic documentation. However, the took place inside another classic modernist colour and texture of Stryjenska’s personali- edifice: Mies van der Rohe’s Neue National- ty was evoked in entries from her diary, which galerie. Within two matching wood- panelled Olowska reproduced in the exhibition cata- coat-check rooms, Winterling created sym- logue, as well as through portraits, including metrical installations that each included photographs taken at the time of the open- spot-lit photographs of Gray, a maquette of ing and also a self-portrait Stryjenska paint- a reflecting pool and a 16mm film projection ed in later life. Placing this latter work to the of a window on which drops of water reflect- side of the installation, Olowska introduced ed diffuse, coloured lights. The film depicted the idea of the artist reviewing her career and the window inside the Nationalgalerie and, as its early, unfulfilled promise. The literary crit- such, remarked elliptically on the disregard for ic Gary Saul Morson refers to such strate- the natural elements that led (and still lead) gies as “sideshadowing,” which he contrasts to faulty engineering in many modern glass with the literary device of “foreshadowing.” buildings. Implying a contrast to Gray’s enviro- Where foreshadowing suggests that historical nmentally responsive designs, the glass be- events are inevitable, sideshadowing implies comes a skin or membrane that suggests that that things might have turned out differently, relations between inside and outside, self and and that the past contains the seeds of untold other can be pleasurably reciprocal rather than 5 Gary Saul Morson, Narrative and “might-have-beens” or “might-bes.”5 invasively antagonistic. Freedom: The Shadows of Time Shifting from Olowska’s sisterly embrace, Josef Strau describes Winterling’s affilia- (New Haven: Yale UP, 1994). the German artist Susanne M. Winterling fix- tions with other female artists and their so- 6 Josef Strau, “Susanne Winterling” trans. ates similarly on enabling figures, gestures and cial and professional crises, as “cross-fades Richard Watts, Camera Austria 105 projects from the modernist, female-centred of identity.”6 Aptly, this term references both (2009), 20. past—but with an overtly erotic charge and Winterling’s understanding of subjectivity more self-consciously autobiographical intent. as porous and her use of “dated” techniques Like Olowska, Winterling frequently depicts like cross- dissolves and multiple exposures. women who share her physical characteristics. The appropriately titled 2006 exhibition I’ll Again we see the bob-haired modern woman be your mirror, but i’ll dissolve... includes the who dresses dramatically. But rather than the video projection Piles of Shade (2006) of flu- glamorous femmes in Olowska’s pictures, Win- orescent-toned multiple exposures of Winter-

35 36 Who Was That Woman?

ling, the actress Tilda Swinton and the singer ments and sensations deserve to be chronicled. Brigitte Fontaine. It calls to mind Claude Her art resonates with the cultural critic Eliza- Cahun’s exploration of likeness as inherent to beth Freeman’s focus on alternative timelines lesbian relationships that exceed familial struc- that chart the course of atypical queer life cy- tures: “Friend, you and I, who do not bear the cles. “Some events count as historically signif- same name, resemble each other like a pair of icant, some don’t; some are choreographed as synonyms… yet it is the spirit, not the letter, such from the first instance and thereby over- 7 Claude Cahun, Les Jeux that gives us the same meaning.”7 In the same take others. Most intimately, some human ex- uraniens (manuscript, c. exhibition, the projected video Le Sens Pra- periences officially count as a life or one of its 1914, Jersey Museum archives) quoted by Whit- tique (2005) inspects tropes of doubling and parts, and some don’t,” she notes. “Supposed- ney Chadwick and Tirza repetition to explore how we define ourselves ly postimperial nation-states still track and True Latimer in “Becom- both relative to other people and through manage their own denizens through an official ing Modern,” The Modern Woman Revisited: Par- dress. Two young women with cropped dark time line, effectively shaping the contours of a is Between the Wars, eds. hair and dark clothes pass a large Burberry meaningful life by registering some events like Chadwick, Whitney and raincoat back and forth, draping it over each births, marriages, and deaths, and refusing to Latimer, Tirza True (New Brunswick and London: other’s shoulders. The coat gives temporary record others like initiations, friendships, and Rutgers UP, 2003), 19. form to their silhouetted bodies, which other- contact with the dead.”8 wise vanish into the dark background. After A desire to be seen, coupled with an interest 8 Elizabeth Freeman, “Time Binds, or, Erotohistorio- one slips on and buttons up the coat, but be- in how they are seen, unites the aforemen- g raphy,” Social Text, Vol. fore swapping it, the women pause and ex- tioned women artists and is reflected in art- 23, Nos. 3-4 (Fall-Winter change a calm gaze as if acknowledging one works that feature tropes of disappearance 2005), 84–85. another’s sameness and emergence. and illumination and a succession of looks These objects from the feminine realm of sought, sent out and exchanged. Yet, as Michel dress, domesticity and the decorative arts in Foucault famously argued, visibility comes Winterling’s art often have a biographical sub- at a cost, especially for marginalized social text. The video projection Untitled (Play, groups, who risk attracting unwanted atten- Winterling) (2007) shows another dark-haired tion, surveillance, categorization and control. androgyne, dressed dandily in black with a These dangers have been particularly acute for stiff white collar and cuffs, playing the violin. women who have been both overlooked and While the title might indicate that the musi- looked at too much. cian and the artist are the same, in fact it re- Dutch artist Manon de Boer explores the im- fers to the Winterling violin once made by plications of excessive visibility for women. a branch of the artist’s family. Its discordant Her biographical films Sylvia Kristel: Paris notes distance us from this erotic notion of one (2003) and Resonating Surfaces (2005) belong woman playing another. Similarly, the gold- to a planned trilogy about creative women who rimmed porcelain cup that is twirled around came of age during the sexually and cultural ly by a white, pearl-buttoned kid-gloved hand experimental late 60s and early 70s (the third, in the 16mm film Untitled (cupstairspearls) as-yet-unfinished work will focus on the (2008) also has family associations: the china Ameri can percussionist Robyn Schulkowsky). was made by Winterling Porcelain Factories, In different ways, the subjects of these films— before it went bust, and bears the Winterling Sylvia Kristel, the Dutch star of the soft core name on its base. Violins, cups and gloves have Emmanuelle films, and Suely Rolnik, a Brazil- corporeal connotations, “performing” almost ian psychoanalyst—suffer by being reduced to as models on a stage as well as linking the an image. In Kristel’s case, it’s sexual; in Rol- bodies—past, present, and future—that use nik’s case, it’s political. In both instances, De them, and connecting Winterling’s autobio- Boer aims to free Kristel and Rolnik from fixed graphy to an imagined collective history. These historical representations by showing them in objects have class connotations, too. Suggest- the process of recounting their memories while ing that Winterling comes from the kind of exploring memory as fluid and time-based. She privileged background that enabled wealthy also departs from art and cinema’s tradi tional fin-de-siècle women like Gray to pursue lives reliance on visual representations of women to of sexual, social and creative independence, create a complex palimpsest of images, voice these objects hint at nostalgia for a time be- and sound that keep the viewer at a critical dis- fore our homogenizing contemporary climate tance. Although Kristel and Rolnik’s mono- of gay marriage, when lesbianism still carried logues anchor these works, we see neither the whiff of glamour and scandal. By teasing woman saying the words that we hear, and the out the queer undercurrents in her family his- images and sounds that we do encounter exist tory, and by isolating fleeting gestures and in- as autonomous, disjunctive layers. timate artifacts under what she calls “a sensual Sylvia Kristel: Paris, which focuses on the spotlight,” Winterling implies that minor mo- actress’ move to Paris to star in the Emmanuelle

C104 Winter 2009 37 38 Who Was That Woman?

C104 Winter 2009 films (“no French actress dared to play a role operas emerge later in the film when Deleuze like that”), is divided in half, with Kristel re- plays them for Rolnik as examples of two ways counting the same part of her life in each. The of facing mortality. Maria’s final dying cries interviews were recorded almost a year apart: are weak and submissive; she has accepted the the first monologue that we hear was taped af- end. But as Lulu faces her killer she emits the ter the second more detailed but less revealing defiant scream of a woman who wants to live. version. So our experience of memory as tem- The significance of these differing attitudes poral is woven into the film’s fabric. Both parts for Rolnik becomes clear later in a singing begin and end with Kristel in a garden, poised class. Responding to her teacher’s suggestion and rather austere in red lipstick and nails, that she practise a song from Brazil, Rolnik turning to face the camera and smoking a cig- sings a number by the Tropicalismo star Gal arette. She does not reappear until each sec- Costa. The experience of singing in her mother tion’s end. Instead, we see Super 8 footage of tongue connects her to suppressed memories Paris streets, buildings and parks, a mixture of Brazil and “penetrates” her body. Like a pro- of slow pans and street-level shots. Frequently tective plaster, and echoed in the white dunga- out of focus and overexposed, the footage has rees that she has worn since moving to Paris, a home-movie quality that feels almost con- Rolnik realizes that the French language has temporaneous with the time that Kristel is re- protected her Brazilian-inflicted wound while calling. A note of ironic distance characterizes preventing it from healing, and that she is Kristel’s recollections, a lightness that differs ready to return to Brazil. pages 37 & 38 both from her sculpted appearance and from Although less obviously mirror images for Zofia Stryjen´ska, Collaged Stryjen´ska, her hyper-sexual celebrity persona. She speaks the artist than Stryjenska is for Olowska or 2008, curated by Pauli- of herself as someone without a will, who has Gray is for Winterling, parallels between de na Olowska (paintings, allowed herself to be seduced and directed by Boer and her subjects exist. Like Kristel and posters, illustrations, one “charming” man after another. Of the ac- Rolnik, de Boer left her home (the Nether- and documents by and about Zofia tor Ian McShane she says, “He treated me like lands) to live in a French-speaking city (Brus- Stryjen´ska, with floor- someone who didn’t know anything, and that sels) and she has discussed how this transition piece and paintings fascinated me.” forced her to confront herself and her commit- by Paulina Olowska), Paris is also the centre of action in Resonat- ment to art-making. Like the other artists al- installation view of the 5th Berlin Biennial for ing Surfaces and—like the Dutch Kristel—the ready discussed, de Boer attempts to “see” her Contemporary Art at Brazilian Rolnik speaks French when recount- female subjects, to understand them through im Schinkel ing her time spent there. The film presents close listening and observation, while respect- Rolnik’s memories of her imprisonment for ing their fluidity and refusing to pin them anti-dictatorship activities in Brazil, her trau- down. This view of the other as a mirror for ma at being publicly branded, and her sub- ourselves expresses our basic need for mutu- sequent exile to Paris, where she studied and al recognition. It evokes Benedict Anderson’s became intimate with Gilles Deleuze and was concept of “imagined communities” as collec- Félix Guattari’s analysand. Like Sylvia Kris- tive identities that derive less from geograph- tel: Paris, the film explores a woman who ical proximity than from shared values and defines herself in relation to other people— points of reference. again mostly men—and traces her struggle Anderson’s arguments, published in 1984, for self-definition. Here, however, Rolnik’s became even more relevant with the advent responsive nature emerges as an affirmative of the Internet and the proliferation of virtu- trait—a fluid subjectivity with the potential al communities and online connections that to expand through its encounters with people do not require physical proximity. Together and events. Resonating Surfaces also privileg- with the previously suppressed records that es Rolnik’s voice over her physical depiction emerged after the collapse of Communism, the and prevents the viewer from having too easy Internet is a central cause of the “archive fe- access to her image. We see Rolnik talking, ver” that has infected the art world recently. smoking, reading a letter, but the footage is in- Not only has the Web given people access to itially underexposed, brightening as her voice vast sources of information, but it has also al- becomes stronger and other people’s voices re- lowed them to interact with and develop their cede—emerging gradually, as Christy Lange own archives. The impact of such a flourishing 9 Christy Lange, “Manon de Boer: Focus,” says, like a photograph in a dark room.9 Roln- of research has been keenly felt in feminist and Frieze, Issue 100 (June-August 2006). ik does not appear in Resonating Surfaces until queer circles. Thirty years ago, the paucity of several minutes in, and the first few seconds historical evidence about women and gays, and depict “nothing:” the white, grainy space of the invisibility of role models and precedents, scratched celluloid. We then hear two operatic was widely lamented. This sense of deprivation screams—cries of death, of Maria in Wozzeck recently has given way to a spirit of optimism and Lulu in the eponymous work. Alban Berg’s in the light of the historical material that has

39 40 Who Was That Woman?

Susanne M. Winterling, emerged. Moreover, bringing their feminist reduced, or stereotyped, while Olowska and Untitled (cupstairs and queer eyes to mainstream sources, artists Winterling enact a more intense identifica- pearls), 2008, 16 mm and researchers are also revealing unacknowl- tion with their subjects that suggests the desire film loop, 1m:15s image courtesy of edged erotic dimensions within mainstream both to possess and to fuse with them. But all daniel reich gallery, records. four position themselves as students of their new york In her 2003 anthology The Literature of adopted mentors, hinting at the libidinal dy- Lesbianism, Terry Castle strays widely from namics within pedagogical relations and the the brief of “writing by lesbians.” Voraciously embodied nature of learning and understand- sampling everything from Book of Ruth to ing. By revisiting the female past for “might- Shakespeare’s ballads, Gertrude Stein to have-beens” or “might-bes,” they show that, far lesbian blues songs, Castle presents romantic from passé, the work of these once-innovative love between women as an enduring literary women still brims with potential. ◆ theme, noting, “The story I have sought to tell 10 Terry Castle, The Litera- is one of abundance rather than scarcity.”10 • Helena Reckitt is Senior Curator of Programs ture of Lesbianism: A Simultaneously, and responding to the prev- at The Power Plant in Toronto. Forthcoming cu- Historical Anthology from Aristo to Stonewall (New alence of virtual relations and archival study, ratorial projects include the first Canadian solo York: Columbia forms of liveness and embodiment have show of US artist Ryan Trecartin (curated with UP, 2003), 47. gained renewed prominence in the art world. Jon Davies) and the group exhibition ‘Adapta- While they all prioritize physical and tactile tion’ exploring cross-species identifications and approach es to biography, the artists discussed impersonations. here do so in quite different ways. Rönicke and de Boer restore richness and complexity to the lives of women that have been erased,

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