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In the late 1960s and 1970s, women artists in the United States and Britain began to make texts and images of writing central to their visual compositions. This book explores the feminist stakes of that choice. It analyses how Adrian Piper, Nancy Spero, and Mary Kelly worked with the visual dimensions of language to transform how women are perceived. To illuminate the specific ways in which these artists and writers contribute to the production of a feminist imaginary, Part I charts the correspondences between the artwork of Piper and the writings of Davis. It analyses the artwork she created in the late 1960s and 1970s, when she began using text to create artwork that moves between what Piper identifies as 'the singular reality of the "other."' Davis's writing exposes the fictions animating projections that the black female body is perceived to be a malleable ground upon which fears and fantasies can take visual form. Part II focuses on aggression and traces how its repression plays out across Spero's Codex Artaud and Solanas's SCUM Manifesto. It argues that in Post-Partum Document, texts and pieces of writing become fetish objects that Kelly arranges into visual and linguistic 'poems' that forestall a confrontation with loss. Part III demonstrates that the maternal femininity thought to naturally inhere in woman is also restricted and muffled, quite efficiently repressing the possibility that women could address each other across maternal femininity's contested terrain.
Conclusion Across the arc of this book, I have made the case that the visual and textual manifestations of language were significant parts of art practices aligned with feminism in the late 1960s and 1970s. I narrowed in on the work three artists – Adrian Piper, Nancy Spero, and Mary Kelly – who deployed texts and images of writing to create an address that calls to viewers and asks them to participate in the project of deconstructing the sign woman. I argue that by doing so, these artists identified three crucial mechanisms for keeping that sign ideologically
reveal how her protagonist transforms her fetishistic attachment to her child into a language of desire that is not completely beholden to the place of woman in the Oedipal scenarios late capitalism reinforces. This chapter analyses how Mulvey and Wollen use texts and images of writing in Riddles to create a film that transforms pre-Oedipal pleasures into a site for feminist collaboration.18 Reading riddles Right from the start, it is clear that text and images of writing are central to the composition of Riddles. The film opens with a presentation of the second
encompasses the sense of a genealogy marked by absence as well as flourishing. These brutal erasures are the birth-marks of writing. 162 Walton_02_Ch5-End.indd 162 2/12/06 16:45:05 Hélène Cixous The Changeling Child The image of writing as child returns us to the central theme of Cixous’ work, and that is that writing belongs to the body, but not only to the body in its procreative power. In another extended prose poem, First Days of the Year (1998a), Cixous repeats the conflation of womb and tomb to describe her own birth as an author out of her father’s death: The
Introduction: addressing the other woman In the late 1960s and 1970s, women artists in the United States and Britain began to make texts and images of writing central to their visual compositions. This book explores the feminist stakes of that choice. It analyses how three artists – Adrian Piper, Nancy Spero, and Mary Kelly – worked with the visual dimensions of language to transform how women are perceived. I became interested in the way women artists engaged with text and writing when I saw WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution at MoMA PS1 in New York City in
of the semiotic, Pollock writes that a poetics take place between the ‘pulsions and energies’ of the preverbal body and the symbolic order.9 It is this poetics that makes feminist collaborations among women so crucial to understanding PPD. Kelly’s and Mulvey’s collaboration mirrors the value and place of these sensuous pleasures and make them part of a shared feminist discourse that can identify maternal femininity as a position in language rather than as a natural state. Making texts and images of writing the central objects of PPD, Kelly allows maternal
or context tremble. He shows how the stiles (the doorposts, the vertical bars that provide the frame) are out of joint. This image of writing ‘on the world’s cutting edge’ is a figure of deconstruction or what Derrida elsewhere calls ‘the opening of the future itself ’. 33 To read Cixous is to teeter, still, on the world’s cutting edge. ✂ She cuts off with Freud and Derrida down into the labyrinth. There are at least three intersecting paths or threads to be picked up: an acknowledgement of non-mastery (‘ the ego is not master in its own house
translation from text into image (typical of illustrated texts), but a furtive play between images, writing about images, and images of writing. After several interruptions to comment on “literary” style, for instance, Tony listens with “critical solemnity” to more of Sam reading his letter aloud and again intercedes, hearing some hesitancy
Haunted Hotel? Ask yourself if there is any explanation of the mystery of your own life and death – Farewell’ (p. 127). The novella, however, can also be read as incorporating references to popular commercial culture through images of writing. The countess’s play foregrounds such issues, which obliquely refer to Collins’s concern about the place of the artist in the marketplace
. The film alternates images of– and references to– childhood and adulthood, birds and buildings, movement and stasis, and its use of inter-titles from ‘Your Childhood in Menton’ (e.g. ‘… tokens and traces of chance’) does not so much structure the film and organise its fragments, as sustain its conversation with the poem. Likewise, images of writing (for example, graffiti, hand-written and printed signs), and various shop front windows in Little Italy displaying dolls, toys, religious statues (a ‘Child of Prague’), and mannequins, are moments when the