We March Under the Banner of Visual
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IN THIS ISSUE: $7 • £5 • €5 • Nina Power on Women’s Work ( p.3 ) • Being s er ious : Henr y V I I I’s Wives ( p.3 ) • Lisette Smits Meredy t h Sparks talk about The Female Dandy (p.6) • ‘I don’t sing, no really I don’t sing, Contributors: not profes sionally any way ( in B flat )’; Rachal Bradley & Jessica Wiesner, Emma Hedditch, Henry VIII’s Wives, Kaisa Lassinaro, Avigail Moss, Nina Power, script by Rachal Bradley Jes sica Wiesner ( p.11) Lisette Smits, Claudia Sola, Meredyth Sparks, Marina Vishmidt Editors: • Align Spend 2011 (p.14) Melissa Gordon, Marina Vishmidt Layout: Kaisa Lassinaro • Marina Vishmidt on Working Artists Printing: Linco Press, Long Island, NY in t he Greater E conomy ( p.14 ) Cover image: Originally back cover of Heresies #7, ‘Women Working Together’, 1979 • Avigail Moss on What We Talk About Courtesy of Joan Braderman and the Heresies Collective Pagination images: When We Talk About Painting (p.22) Claudia Sola – p.2 Afghan women at work in a garment factory in Kunduz. • Lizzie Borden speaks about the p.3 Michigan State policewoman officer guards a road block. p.4 Angolan woman cuts maize. making of ‘B or n in F lames’ ( p.22 ) p.5 Denmark’s member of the European Parliament Hanne Dahl and her baby attend a voting session. p.6 French female commandant, Virginie Guyot, the first woman who leads the French aerobatic team “Patrouille de France”. p.7 Cuban Cigars’ marketing director Ana Lopez smokes a cigar. LABOUR is the first and foremost concern change it’s title, format, editorial team p.8 Plant protective forces in India. that arose during a series of female artist and subject with each manifestation, wants p.9 Swedish sailor seeking pirates in the Indian Ocean off Somalia’s coast. meetings in New York, Amsterdam and Berlin to bring such questions about ‘women’ to p.10 Employees inspect newly made products at an automobile components factory in Suining, throughout 2010–11. These meetings, orga- the forefront of a discussion about ‘art’. China. nized under the title ‘A conversation to know The subject of LABOUR is being p.11 American journalist Roxana Saberi shoots footage in Tehran. if there is a conversation to be had’, attempted approached here from a number of angles and p.12 Polish fencer Katarzyna Piekarska during (and continue to attempt) an operation to formats. Writers and artists who are critically the women’s fencing individual epee semi-final. p.13 German farmer Gerda Schmitt has six create a level and open field to ask if there investigating the question of production have cows. p.14 Patti Burkel and Tasha Livingston install is anything to discuss as a group of women been invited because their work addresses wiring in a car door at GM’s assembly plant. artists, lacking the appeal of any form of the very pertinent problems surrounding the p.15 Iran’s only woman truck and coach driver, Massoumeh Soltan-Blaghi. art-world promotional event, or pre-deter- figure of the (feminized) artist as producer. p.16 Israeli combat soldiers put mud on each other’s faces during a training exercise. mined prerogative of a discussion group or The intent is not to define or multiply p.17 Doctor in Kabul giving a vaccination seminar. What became apparent from long a singular ‘topic’, but allowing, as Lizzie to mark the World Health Day. p.18 Woman working in a brick factory in periods of talking without a director or Borden describes in her interview, La Paz Centro, Nicaragua. specific question was that not only is there ‘a cacophony of voices’. The wage-worker, p.19 Italian author and journalist Oriana Fallaci. p.20 Palestinian policewoman directing the plenty to talk about, but what there is to talk the dandy, the ‘woman who chooses to live traffic in the streets of the WestB ank town of Ramallah. about is not just about gender, but rather alone’, the painter with multiple personalities, p.21 Real estate agent Shellie Young puts up systems at work: systems that are in place a sculpture with high anxiety, a post-socialist an ‘Available’ sign in the U.S. p.22 Palestinian woman carrying sacks of olives. within the economy of production. A figure feminist revolutionary, and a collective p.23 Women rebuilding Berlin after WWII. p.24 A firefighter rests halfway through emerged of the dislocated subject; when who has put one of their members through a 24-hour shift in the Witch Fire area, California. trying to sketch the parameters of women a plastic Christmas tree wrapper and and working, one realized that the conditions dumped them on the corner. These are apply to all artistic workers; that the femini- the voices represented to do the job of talking zation of labour both requires a reading about LABOUR. A motley crew for a messy of ‘women’s work’, and at the same time subject. validates the current symptom which is Melissa Gordon perpetuating the very precarious situation we (art-workers) are in, now. LABOUR, and each For upcoming events, see: subsequent issue of this journal, which will amotleycrew.wordpress.com Letters to the editor: [email protected] 2 Issue #1 LABOUR Without the bodily has spent so much time and energy working out where women’s work begins and ends, if “We March labour and the it ever does. But what of the role of creative work in all of this, the female artist? Federici’s Under The labour of the body list of female subjects that capitalism needed of women, artists to demonise (the figure of the ‘witch’ and the Banner of brutal and terrifying witch hunts at the end or ot her w is e, t here of the feudal era are the central features of Visual Art her history) possess talents of healing but is no understanding also of antagonism and disobedience. The Henry VIII’s Wives are Rachel Dagnall, of labour in general ‘woman who dared to live alone’ is the one Bob Grieve, Sirko Knupfer, Simon Polli, who exits the circuits of male-dominated Per Sander and Lucy Skaer. In her 2004 study of the transition from economic relations, and perhaps refuses to The collective’s projects are discussed feudalism to capitalism Caliban and the Witch: have children. Is the female artist, in some in an interview with Lucy Skaer with Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation, Silvia sense, the one who refuses to subsume her Jovana Stokic at Location 1, NY Federici redefines work from, as we might labour to capitalism and to the reproduction (February 4, 2010) usually understand it, waged labour, to a of the labour force in the name of an entirely much more inclusive notion that incorporates different order of creativity and production? We March Under the Banner of Visual as well the ‘production and reproduction One of the clichés of contemporary capi- Art (published by Tramway 2001) of the worker as a socio-economic activity’. talism is the idea that all ideas are assimilable, We studied together in an art school Thus unpaid work (including birth, childcare, that any new mode of creation and resistance department strongly based in public art domestic labour) becomes part and parcel will ultimately be swallowed up and its which started off as quite a utopian left-wing idea of giving art to the people, and then over the ten years that it ran it became more convoluted, twisted, probably in some ways despairing. But WOMen’S WORK, what remained about it was that every year the students had to make a project ARtwORK in public, which led to a lot of hilarious, Nina Power ridiculous and brilliant moments. What it taught us most of all was to be fairly of Federici’s expanded notion of labour, original force muted by the speed and ability opportunistic, and to work together. carefully avoiding the mysticisms of contem- of capital to turn anything into profit.O nce porary descriptions of ‘affective’ labour in subversive images and ideas are today’s An Attempt to Make Fire (1997) particular, which seem to hint at feminist normality; the far out becomes all the all- This is a performance we made; it was contributions to ideas of work, but only in too-close. At the same time, those modes the first show we did at Transmission a gestural and ultimately unsatisfying way. of activity we would most want to remain Gallery in 1997, which is an artist-run Federici, through serious historical anal- outside of the circuits of capture become the space in Glasgow. The gallery had no ysis, seeks to identify ‘a world’ of female things most taken from us, then as now: work heating and our show was in the winter subjects that capitalism had to destroy in performed out of love or affection turns out to months so our first performance order to proceed: ‘the heretic, the healer, the be the pillar upon which work in general can together was an attempt to make fire. disobedient wife, the woman who dared to continue – children are future workers, taking We started off by using traditional live alone, the obeha woman who poisoned care of one’s family is at the same time materials like the bow and the rod and the master’s food and inspired the slaves to ensuring that workers are well-fed, slept and two bits of wood trying to make sparks, revolt’. Federici identifies the destruction of emotionally stable enough to participate and then we ended up with electric drills female subjects as integral to the systematic productively as employees.