STAGING THE SELF
Courtesy of: ICI, New York.
Martha Wilson’s career, spanning forty years, encapsulates the contestations inherent in feminist and socially engaged practices. In her work and throughout her life, Wilson has explored how identity and positioning are not just self-defined or projected, but also negotiated. The complex nature of her work encompasses her activities as an artist, creating conceptually-based performances, videos, and photo-text compositions since the early 1970s; her position as the founder and director of the non-profit space Franklin Furnace; her collaboration with other women to form the group, DISBAND; and her key role in jump-starting the activist feminist art group, the Guerrilla Girls.
Written into and out of art history according to the theories and convictions of the time, Wilson first gained attention through Lucy Lippard, who contextualized her early work within the parameters of conceptual practice as well as among other women artists. A year later, in 1974, Wilson was denounced by Judy Chicago after a performance organized by Womanspace in Los Angeles for “irresponsible demagoguery.” She has also been regarded by many as prefiguring some of Judith Butler’s ideas on gender performativity though her practice, and more recently, in the words of the art critic, Holland Cotter, she was described as one of “the half-dozen most important people for art in downtown Manhattan in the 1970’s.
Regarding gender and identity as fluid expression, Wilson has focused on fictive appearances and double transformations, while consistently asserting the artistic agency of herself and others she has championed. She was one of the very earliest artists to explore the effects of “camera presence” in self-representation, using masquerade as a form of resistance in manipulating both her internal sense of self and her outward appearance. Aligned with a feminist trajectory that is about gaining visibility, both her art practice and her social role have rendered her at once visible and invisible. In an early performance, Self Portrait in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1973, she posed as herself, inviting the audience to give their impressions of her, which then became part of the work, “creating” Martha Wilson in 1973. In other early works she posed as a man posing as a woman (Drag, 1972), and as a twenty-five year old artist trying to look like a fifty-year old woman, trying to look like she is twenty-five (Posturing: Age Transformation, 1973). From the 80s onward, she took a different approach ‘invading’ the personas of high profile women such as Barbara Bush and Tipper Gore.
Martha Wilson was the founder and director of Franklin Furnace from 1976 to 1996. The mission of Franklin Furnace is to present, preserve, interpret, proselytize and advocate on behalf of avant-garde art, especially forms that may be vulnerable due to institutional neglect, their ephemeral nature, or politically unpopular content. For twenty years, from 1976 to 1996, Franklin Furnace occupied a storefront space in Tribeca in Lower Manhattan, presenting historical and contemporary exhibitions of artists’ books as well as temporary installation and performance art to the public. Since its inception, Franklin Furnace has served the local, national and international community of activist artists—artists who have addressed urgent subjects such as war, poverty, disease, racism, sexism, and homophobia. In the wake of the Culture Wars of the 1980s and 90s, Franklin Furnace came to be identified with artists’ rights to freedom of expression as a result of its presentation and support of the four artists who came to be known as the “NEA 4,” artists whose grants from the National Endowment for the Arts were revoked due to the subject matter of their art. Franklin Furnace “went virtual” on its 20th anniversary, providing artists with a digital platform for freedom of expression.
From forging ideas in isolation in Nova Scotia, to working in the epicenter of New York’s activist communities, Wilson has been a force of transformative change in her role as a disseminator of like- minded individuals’ work, as well as her innovations in playing with different identities. Indeed, Franklin Furnace’s thirty-three years of programming from 1976 to the present creates another negotiated self-portrait of sorts, demonstrating the scope of Wilson’s activity as director and the supportive environment she created for others.
By her attitude to collaboration and openness to constantly redefining both personal and collective identities, Martha Wilson has made a significant contribution to current attitudes toward feminism, activism, and collaborative practice.
Produced with the support of the Frederick and Mary Kay Lowy Art Education Fund.
Curator: Peter Dykhuis
Organized and circulated by Independent Curators International (ICI), New York.
Martha Wilson
This exhibition presents three interwoven layers of Martha Wilson’s career, throughout which she has been a force of transformative change, considered both within the context of early feminist and socially engaged studio practice and in her role as a disseminator of like-minded individuals’ work. A selection of Wilson’s early solo photographic works from her years in Halifax, a transitional period in her life, shows her innovations in playing with different age, gender and social identities. In New York in the mid-1970s she continued to be active as a performance artist in collaboration with other feminist performers in the female group DISBAND (1978 – 82) and then in solo performances in which she ‘invaded’ the personas of Nancy Reagan, Barbara Bush and other political figures of the Conservative Right. The third interwoven stage of Wilson’s career is represented in the exhibition by her selection of projects by other artists and curators—one project from each of Franklin Furnace’s thirty years of programming, from 1976 through 2006—which add up to a self-portrait of sorts. The projects Wilson has chosen are historically significant for pushing the boundaries of exhibition and display practice and for disrupting cultural expectations about art, politics, gender, and race.
EXPLORE
- The ways in which artmaking is related to and contributes to the construction of identity;
- Notions of self in relation to questions of image, dramatic effect, and performance. When are we and when are we not performing and how does this affect or contribute to who we are and what we do?
- The question of one’s visibility in a culture. What types of strategies does Martha Wilson employ in examining this question?
- Activism and try to identify the ways in which the various works presented in this exhibition are activist. What historical and political contexts are these works responding to?
- The ways in which one constructs oneself and one’s image. What is required to do this and how are these constructions interpreted?
In tandem with her public presence as Director of Franklin Furnace, Wilson maintained her practice as a performance artist and, as with her work as a gallery administrator, developed her desire to work with other like-minded artists. Wilson formed the all-female vaudevillian-punk group DISBAND (1978 – 82) that, in its early days included Daile Kaplan, Barbara Kruger and April Gornik. In its next evolutionary stage, Wilson performed in a revamped DISBAND with Ilona Granet, Donna Henes, Ingrid Sischy and Diane Torr. None of the performers, however, were trained musicians let alone capable of playing musical instruments at the most rudimentary level. Armed with their vocal chords and ‘playing’ a wide range of domestic noise-generating objects, DISBAND, through chants, skipping songs, ‘call-outs’ and hand clapping, irreverently inserted the female voice into the male forum of New York punk rock while commenting on social issues in an increasingly conservative American social zeitgeist.
With a strong feminist programming presence, Franklin Furnace often found itself in conflict with an increasingly conservative American political system, particularly during the two terms of Ronald Reagan’s presidency (1980 – 1988). The struggle for a voice in the New York art community involved hard-fought battles with conservative groups who attempted to censor Franklin Furnace’s programming through direct intervention or by pressure placed on governmental arts agencies to deny the gallery funding. Wilson, as Director, held her ground throughout these tumultuous years.
During this volatile period, Wilson produced a series of satirical performances in which she impersonated ‘First Ladies’ – the high-profile presidential wives of the Republican Right such as Nancy Reagan, Barbara Bush and, during the Clinton Administration, Tipper Gore (wife of then Vice President Al Gore), who led pro-censorship, content advisory campaigns against the music industry and the creative community. By dressing up and using parody, irony and humour in her delivery, Wilson ‘dressed down’ those on the opposite side of her political spectrum, revealing the privileges, biases and right-wing ideologies imbedded in their worldviews.
Franklin Furnace’s mission is to present, preserve, interpret, proselytize and advocate on behalf of avant-garde art, especially forms that may be vulnerable due to institutional neglect, their ephemeral nature, or politically unpopular content. Franklin Furnace is dedicated to serving artists by providing both physical and virtual venues for the presentation of time-based visual art, including but not limited to artists’ books and periodicals, installation art, performance art, “variable media art”; and to undertake other activities related to these purposes. Franklin Furnace is committed to serving emerging artists; to assuming an aggressive pedagogical stance with regard to the value of avant-garde art to life; and to fostering artists’ zeal to broadcast ideas.
– from the current website of Franklin Furnace Archive, Inc.
Although Franklin Furnace closed its physical space at 112 Franklin Street in Tribeca in 1997, it continues as a virtual exhibition site at www.franklinfurnace.org and maintains an active archive in Brooklyn while continuing to offer grants to emerging artists. Wilson, as Founding Director, is one of the longest-standing administrators of a single institution in the contemporary New York art community. She continues to be a fierce advocate of its mandate: Franklin Furnace – on a mission to make the world safe for avant-garde art.
This section of the exhibition creates a ‘self portrait’ of sorts of Martha Wilson through her own selection of 30 notable projects from Franklin Furnace’s adventurous history of presenting contemporary art. Each selection reflects what Wilson intellectually, politically, socially and, most importantly, personally believes to be worthy of revisiting and retelling.
ADDITIONAL SOURCES OF INFORMATION
Martha Wilson, official Web site: www.marthawilson.com
Franklin Furnace Archive Inc., official Web site: www.franklinfurnace.org
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and The Subversion of Identity. New York; London: Routledge, 1999.
Conboy, Katie, Nadia Medina, and Sarah Stanbury, eds. Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997.
DeNobriga, Kathie. An interview with Martha Wilson and Ruby Lerner. Art Papers 19, 1995: 8-14.
Drake, Nicolas. Shifting into Cyberburn: A Conversation with Martha Wilson. Art Papers 21, 2007: 30-33.
Garber, Marjorie. Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety. New York: Routledge, 1992.
Goldberg, RoseLee. Peformance Art: From Futurism to the Present. London: Thames & Hudson, 2001.
Jones, Amelia. Body Art: Performing the Subject. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998.
Lippard, Lucy. From the Center: Feminist Essays on Women’s Art. New York: Dutton, 1976.
Lippard, Lucy. Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972. New York: Praeger, 1973.
List, Larry. Disruptive Innovation: Marcel Duchamp + Andy Warhol = Martha Wilson. Unpublished manuscript. Halifax: Dalhousie Art Gallery, 2009.
Phelan, Peggy. Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. London; New York: Routledge, 1992.
Sant, Toni. Franklin Furnace and the Spirit of the Avant-Garde: A History of the Future. Bristol; Wilmington: Intellect Ltd., 2011.
Till-Landry, Kaitlin. Kaitlin Till-Landry Interviews Martha Wilson. C Magazine 105, 2010: 22-5.
Roth, Moira, ed. The Amazing Decade: Women and Performance Art in America, 1970-1980. Los Angeles: Astro Artz, 1983.
Wark, Jayne. Conceptual Art and Feminism. Woman’s Art Journal, 22.1, 2001: 44-50.
Wark, Jayne. Martha Wilson: Not Taking it at Face Value. Camera Obscura 45, 2001: 1-33.
Warr, Tracey, ed. The Artist’s Body. London: Phaidon, 2000.