WOMEN ARTISTS ATTHE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART

Edited by CORNELIA BUTLER and ALEXANDRA SCHWARTZ

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with essays by

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THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, NEW YORK

 HOW TO INSTALL ART AS A FEMINIST / HELEN MOLESWORTH

Let's begin with a working definition, According to Eli

Zaretsky, a Marxist historian writing in the 1970S, feminism
aspires to "revolutionize the deepest and most universal
aspects of life-those of personal relations, love, egotism,
sexuality, and our inner emotionallives,"l I like this defi­
nition; it helps me remember that part of what I'm after,
as a feminist, is the fundamental reorganization of the
institutions that govern us, as well as those that we, in
turn, govern, Therefore, thinking about the introduction
of feminism into the museum is no small matter. It seems
clear that feminist art history has made enormous gains
in the academy: we have recovered scores of women artists
from oblivion, populated the academy with female profes­
sors, established classes on feminist art practiCes, and
entered numerous women artists into the canon, so that
your average art history student would be hard-pressed to
graduate without knowing at least a smattering of women
artists and maybe even a few feminists, But American
museums have been slower to encompass feminism's
challenges than the academy, despite a work force largely
comprising women. Art history needs its objects of study
to be displayed, and thus the history of the museum can
be seen in part as a struggle for how to display works of
art, This essay looks to recent art-historical ideas with
the aim of beginning to think through the translation of
these new discursive formations into the spatial logic and
requirements of the museum, In other words: I feel fairly
confident that I know how to write an essay as a feminist,
less sure I know how to install art as one.
The pervasive sexism in museums is evidenced by how
slow museums of modern and contemporary art were to
acquire feminist art of the 1970s, And when they did buy
it or accept it as gifts, they were often reticent to exhibit
it, Much feminist art in permanent collections, like that
1.Joan Snyder (American, oil , and pastel on canvas,
of The Museum of Modern Art, rarely, if ever, graces the
born 1940). Sweet Cathy's 6' 6" x 12' (198.1 x 365.8 em). walls. For instance, MoMA owns two terrific paintings:
Song (For Cathy Elzea). The Museum of Modern Art ,
August-September 1978. New York. Gift of the Louis and
Children's drawings, Bessie Adler Foundation, Inc.,
newsprint, papier-mache, Seymour M. Klein, President
synthetic polymer paint, 499
 2. Lee Lozano (American,
1930-1999). Untitled . 1963. Oil
on canvas, two panels, ove rall
7' 10" x 8'1," (238.8 x 254 cm).
The Museum of Modern Art,
New Yo rk . Gift of Jo Carole
500 HOW TO INSTALL ART AS A FEMINIST and Ronald S. Lauder
Sweet Cathy's Song (For Cathy Elzea) by Joan Snyder (1978, without any history, so it is telling that what eventually
no. 1) and an untitled work by Lee Lozano (1963, no. 2). turned me around were my own scattershot attempts to
The Snyder work, acquired the year it was made, has been place her work into some kind of historical trajectory or
on view twice: once in an exhibition of new acquisitions narrative. For instance, several years after Schutz's meteoric
in 1979 and then again in a rotation of the collection in rise to fame I became interested in Snyder's stroke paintings
1987. The Lozano work was acquired in 2004 and has been from the 1970S. These paintings took a modernist grid,
shown just once, in What Is Painting? in 2007. I do not with all of its will to silence and impartiality, and com­
wish to engage in the ever-popular sport of MoMA­ bined it with wildly expressive brushstrokes resembling
bashing. There are a million reasons why art objects live those of an impassioned censor. The combination of
lives of quiet desperation in the vault. Rather than simply expressionism and its disavowal seemed to me emblematic
denounce the status quo, I'd like to ask some questions of the feminist struggle to make the personal political. My
about the distinct lack of visibility of feminist art produc­ interest in Snyder was accompanied by an associative­
tion. What are the ramifications for the reception and but rather counterintuitive-chain of thoughts about the
understanding of contemporary art given the lack of importance of Willem de Kooning for Amy Sillman (no.
display of earlier feminist work? How do we redress the 4). As a feminist trained during the heady days of 1980s
incomplete history currently on view in most museums? theory, I was under the impression that de Kooning paint­
Given that art made by women and subsequently by ings were bad -their expressivity garish, their misogyny
feminist artists (women and feminists not being the same self-evident. But it became clear to me that Sillman had
thing) has been so prominently absent, what forms of picked up on the extraordinary use of pink in de Kooning's
history can feminism offer in the space of the museum? paintings, which meant that she wasn't having the same
And, more specifically, if art objects demand of their problems. Far from feeling compelled to decry de Kooning
viewers various forms of competence for interpretation, "the misogynist," Sillman, in her paintings, suggested
what conditions of exhibition does the museum need to that in de Kooning one might find a feminized practice
establish to create and satisfy those demands? For instance, of painting in which abstraction is ineluctably linked to
if feminist works demand that viewers draw on new and the decorative in a nonpejorative way. (I'm thinking of his
different skills to interpret them, how can the museum paintings from the 1970S, the pastoral, frothy, and almost
help create and accommodate those skills? rococo ones, with palettes of rose, cream, and silver.)
These questions of history-making struck me very When I next saw work by Schutz it was in the context
strongly in 2005, when MoMA bought and quickly exhib­ of an awful exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts in
ited Presentation, a mammoth painting by a young artist London called USA Today, a show of recent American
named Dana Schutz (2005, no. 3). Schutz had garnered art drawn exclusively from Charles Saatchi's collection.
an enormous amount of press: she was young, a recent Schutz's paintings did not support the exhibition's
graduate of the newly hot Master of Fine Arts program jingoistic premise (such crass nationalism during wartime
at Columbia University, and she made big, expressive was hard to swallow) but unraveled it from the inside.
paintings. I confess I was slow to see what was interesting Her oversized, self-devouring figures, awash in a pukey
about Schutz's work; I had a typically contrary reaction to palette, seemed to encapsulate perfectly the horror of
a splashy article about her in the New York Times Magazine. America's wartime conditions, particularly the obliteration
I think I had· difficulty seeing what was interesting about of rational speech that was a central strategy of George W.
Schutz largely because she was presented as an ingenue Bush's administration.

MOLESWORTH 501
 3. Dana Schutz (America n, born
1976). Presentation . 2005. Oil
on canvas, 10 x 14' (304.8 x
426.7 cm). The Museum of
Modern Art , New York.
Fractional and promised gift
502 HOW TO INSTALL ART AS A FEMINIST of Michael and Judy Ovitz
4. Amy Sillman (American, born
1956). Psychology Today. 2006.
Oil on canvas, 7' 8" x 7' '/2"
(233.7 x 214.6 cm). The Museum
of Modern Art, New York. Fund
for the Twenty-First Century MOLESWORTH 503
 Perhaps part of the unbridled popular affirmation for Sweet Cathy's Song (For Cathy Elzea) and Lozano's Untitled
Schutz's paintings was due to their energy and vibrancy- should MoMA hang these works? Is it really as simple
a directness of paint on canvas and a disarmingly emotional as reinserting them into a chronological narrative that
palate. The paintings display a particularly legible kind of hitherto hasn't accounted for them? Lozano near Philip
neurosis about power and the body, with devouring and Guston, Snyder near Brice Marden? The chronological
purging mouths desperately spitting out paint-instead purist in me loves this idea, but I fear it is the nonfeminist
of food or words-in an attempt at a kind of pre- or post­ in me that desires such a pat formulation: a broken story
linguistic form of communication. Although the body is a repaired by insisting that these artists occupy their
perennial feminist subject, Schutz, for the most part, was rightful places in the grand narrative. But is this solution
not discussed in terms of a tradition of feminist work; feminist enough? Is it a revolution of the deepest order
rather her newness and youth were offered as the primary to insert women artists back into rooms that have been
filters through which to approach her paintings. Part of structured by their very absence? What would it mean to
her meteoric rise, therefore, was tied to the way her work take this absence as the very historical condition under
appeared unconnected to artistic precedents. This amnesia, which the work of women artists is both produced and
although prevalent in the current market-driven art world understood? Might feminism allow us to imagine different
in general, is largely not the case with young male artists, genealogies and hence different versions of how we tell
who are quickly legitimized into comfortably entrenched the history of art made by women, as well as art made
art-historical narratives, given fathers by their critics. This under the influence of feminism?
makes sense given that the average museum's presentation For instance, I have a fantasy room in which hang works
of its permanent collection is an offering of pluralist by Snyder, Cindy Sherman (no. 5), Sillman, Wangechi
harmony (one good picture after another) intermittently Mutu (no. 6), and Schutz. I have an intuition that these
punctured by Oedipally inflected narratives of influence, works might, as curators say, "talk to each other." My
in which sons either make an homage to their fathers first response to this fantasy is to be made nervous by its
(Richard Serra to Jackson Pollock), kill their fathers (Frank ahistorical or potentially essentializing nature, but despite
Stella to Pollock), or pointedly ignore their fathers (Luc my anxieties, such a room would be true to the kind of
Tuymans to Pollock). associative chain I described earlier, when I moved from
Genealogies for art made by women aren't so clear, Schutz to Snyder to Sillman to de Kooning and back again .
. largely because they are structured by a shadowy absence. Might such a room, organized by the very process of coming
This is why art historians and curators have so often turned to terms with new work, offer a way out of the current
to the tasks of recovery and inclusion (we can think impasse created by the opposition of chronological instal­
here of the recent retrospectives of Snyder, Lozano, and lation (such as that favored by MoMA) versus thematic
Lee Bontecou, as well as WACK! Art and the Feminist (favored by Tate Modern, in London)? Instead of coming
Revolution}.2 The work of recovery is important; I have done to terms with Schutz, Snyder, and de Kooning and then
it myself and will continue to do so. But I am increasingly putting them back where they "belong," should the .museum
puzzled about how to reinsert these absences, repressions, experiment with other models of history-making?
and omissions into the narrative continuum favored by Two art historians, Lisa Tickner and Mignon Nixon,
the museum. I know I don't want ghettoized galleries have recently argued, tentatively but with promise, for
dedicated to art made by women or even a room of "femi­ historical models of influence, production, narration, and
nist art."3 But where, for instance, after not exhibiting interpretation that eschew the two most powerful and

504 HOW TO INSTALL ART AS A FEMINIST

5. Cindy Sherman (Ameri can,
born 19 54) . Untitled #92.1981 .
Chrom ogenic color print,
24 x 47 15 116" (61 x 121.9cm).
The Mu seum of Modern Art,
New York . The Fellows of
Photography Fund

familiar in art history: the Oedipal narrative of the son although women may experience "the anxiety of finding
who murders his father (the trumping of one style by oneself a motherless daughter seeking attachment," the
another) and the mother-daughter model of the daughter discovery of "(real and elective) artist-mothers releases
learning through the transmission of oral history (women women to deal with their fathers and encounter their
painters who worked in their fathers' studios; the history siblings on equal terms. Feminism fought for our right to
of the decorative arts; even some of the mythology publicly acknowledge cultural expression; it also insists
surrounding Womanhouse}.4 Tickner and Nixon look to on our place in the patrimony, as equal heirs with our
another version of family life for models of production brothers and cousins."s This is an interesting idea for two
and reception, specifically to the relationships of siblings reasons . On the one hand it moves quickly from a familial
and cousins. narrative to a social one-from a putatively private
Tickner argues that historically women artists have arrangement to an explicitly public one--cin a hallmark
sought attachment rather than separation, meaning that of feminist critique: the making public and legible of
one of the effects of operating within a genealogy marked inequities deemed private. On the other hand it subverts
by absences and omissions is that you try to seek out the potentially pathological nature of familial narratives
your predecessors rather than refute them. She writes that by insisting on the category of "elective mother." Queer

MOLESWORTH 505
 6. Wangechi Mutu (Kenyan,
born 1972). Yo Mama. 2003. Ink,
mica flakes, pressure-sensitive
synthetic polymer sheeting,
cut-and-pasted printed paper,
painted paper, and synthetic
polymer paint on paper,
overall 59 '/B" x 7' 1" (150.2 x
215 .9 cm). The Museum of
Modern Ar t , New York. The
Judith Rothschild Foundation
Contemporary Drawings
Collect; on Gift
506 HOW TO INSTALL ART AS A FEMINIST
life and theory have offered us increasingly expansive over that more powerful vertical spatialization of chronol­
models of the family, and Tickner's argument reaps the ogy or those hierarchical family dramas? Better yet, might
benefit of a model developed by those for whom family is we be able to highlight or foreground the idea that the
established through choice as well as through chance. 6 model of interconnectedness and the older chronological
To amplify the logic of her argument, Tickner turns Oedipal model are already simultaneous with each other?
to Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's powerful idea of the Might we be able to give credence to the deferred and
rhizome as a metaphor for organizing history and knowl­ delayed temporality of the recognition of feminist art, to
edge. Unlike the image of the tree-vertical, hierarchical, pay better attention to which artists become available and!
and evolutionary-the rhizome offers a horizontal, non­ or important to us, and at what point? Can we allow this
linear structure in which all ideas have the possibility of double sense of time and space to have more traction
connecting to all other ideas. Building on this open model in our ideas about how to present art to contemporary
of family, she quotes Deleuze and Guattari: "The tree is viewers? If we did this, we could better understand the
filiation, but the rhizome is alliance, uniquely alliance:' 7 If young woman who comes of age as an artist in the halls
we think according to the logic of the rhizome, we can see of MoMA but doesn't see her first Snyder painting until
that history is filled with gaps and fissures and moments it suddenly emerges at the (corrective) retrospective at
of connection and synchronicity, and that while there is The Jewish Museum. Does this young artist, when she
loss and neglect (as there is regarding the history of art encounters an artist heretofore left out of the grand nar­
made by women), there are also alliances formed despite rative, need the diachronic narrative of mother-daughter
geographical distance and temporal incommensurability. or father-son influence in order to incorporate and make
Thus an artist seeking an elective mother might not place sense of the lessons of her discovery? Or does Tickner's
her in a hierarchical relationship but might instead con­ model of affiliation and alliance offer other possibilities?
struct a situation of relative degrees of parity-which And what new forms of competence would the objects
;night cause th?se elective mothers a degree of conster­ in my fantasy installation, placed in such a configuration
nation, especially those from the generations of women with one another, demand of the viewer? In the back and
who fought for the rights we currently take for granted; forth between the forces of abstraction and representation,
to them such a synchronic version of history might appear between expressionism and its restraint, in the highly
W1fair. But a model of history structured by alliance allows affective use of color, might we see a common exploration
us to think about lines of influence and conditions of of nonlinguistic communication? Establishing Snyder as
production that are organized horizontally, by necessarily an elective mother allows us to see her expressive strokes
competing ideas of identification, attachment, sameness, of enthusiastically colored paint as a rejoinder to the
and difference, as opposed to our all too familiar (vertical) properness of a tastefully muted Minimalist palette, as
narratives of exclusion, rejection, and triumph. Such a both a refusal and an embrace of modernism's love of the
modification in our thinking might, in turn, help us monochromatic grid. My hope is to suggest that abstrac­
reorganize our institutional dynamics of power. tion, expressionism, and beauty or bad taste (depending
What would happen if we thought about the museum on your predilection for Snyder's dime-store palette) are
in this way? After all, it presents its objects simultaneously not only formal attributes but also constitutive elements
and equally, while at the same time arranging them in the highly contested field of nonlinguistic expression,
chronologically and with an implied tale of progress. Is it a form of expression that might have been particularly
possible to privilege the horizontal or rhizomatic aspect problematic for artists negotiating the terms of patriarchy

MOLESWORTH 507
(that is, the rules surrounding who gets to speak when artists with certain challenges, ranging from the neglect
about what). Seen in this framework, the tension between of historical figures to the hierarchy of gender, from the
Snyder's censorious strokes and demonstrative use of assignation of very strongly defined societal roles to the
color coheres into a kind of unsolvable contradiction. exclusion of women from the history of painting, and that
Establishing Snyder as an elective mother lets us tease in this room those challenges and struggles are made
out elements of struggle between silence and expression visible and become part of the competency required for
in all of the works: in Schutz's proliferation of mute figures engaging with art made and installed under the rubric of
facing a gaping void; in Sherman's macabre mimicry of feminism. The elective mother allows us to see that the
Hollywood and fairy-tale narratives, her characters forever silences and absences are indeed part of the history of
silent (despite the prominence she gives to images of feminist thought and art-making. By installing a 1970S
mouths); in Mutu's laying bare, with her unwavering cut­ stroke painting by Snyder in a room with more contempo­
and-paste, of women's bodies, particularly her exposure of rary works I hope to articulate the temporality of certain
the colonialist fantasy that is the resplendent, silent, and art becoming necessary for artists and art historians at
perpetually available body of color, poised for pleasure and certain times. This act is something more than merely
destruction; and in Sillman's neurotic cartoonish figures, rescuing Snyder from the vault. The painting should cer­
delicately sitting on top of powerfully explosive fields of tainly be shown: it's a great painting (made by a woman),
color, begging for captions that never appear. What I see and it's a great feminist painting. By installing it in this
in this installation is an alliance among works formed by way I hope to intimate that "to articulate the past histori­
a shared disavowal of speech and language and a common cally does not mean to recognize it 'the way it really was,'"
ambivalence toward claims of self-expression and toward but might mean instead to present it as crucial for recali­
the privilege afforded such claims by bourgeois capitalism brating the effects of the new. 8
and patriarchy. The internal dynamics of each image show My earlier quandary-how we might create feminist
a pictorial struggle to occupy a place in a world structured genealogies in the museum-remains. I have declined a
by language-be it the language of painting, abstraction, ghettoized room of feminist art and refused the simple
color, Hollywood, glossy women's magazines, racism, insertion of women back into canons predicated upon
gender, or family. The combined effect suggests that the their exclusion. My fantasy room suggests that I am also
artists have entered into these preexisting languages with not interested in rooms where who made the work and
ambivalence and a degree of difficulty. The works also under what conditions doesn't matter; it's important
suggest a perennial feminist dilemma: the simultaneous to me that these artists are women (important even in
occupying and denying of these positions (or of our place the midst of wanting it to not be important: feminism's
in these languages). They want expressive power as much double bind, its inescapable contradiction). Assembling
as they are critical of it. My hope is that this fantasy room works of art synchronically through alliance permits them
of artworks would make an issue out of the psychic and to "talk to each other" about what does matter in our
social conditions of patriarchy, suggesting that not all art struggle for cultural expression: that women artists,
by women is the same (the problem created by thematic although they might find themselves on what appears
installation), or that art by women gets progressively better to be equal footing with their brothers, still labor under
over time and therefore can now be exhibited (the weak­ conditions that are demonstrably shaped by patriarchy,
ness of the chronological installation); it would suggest and that those conditions and the work they produce can
that these conditions have consistently presented women and should be discussed rather than ignored. But lest the

508 HOW TO INSTALL ART AS A FEMINIST

model of alliance seem too sunny-everything and every­ our siblings and cousins-generates in us a terrifying
one happily ensconced in their equality in the benign fantasy of annihilation and of our expendability. Siblings
space ofthe museum-I want to attend to some of the are the traumatic recognition of our mortality. Nixon
psychic ramifications of such a model. takes Mitchell's emphasis on repetition in sibling relations
Nixon has also been thinking about shifting our inter­ and makes an analogy with the serial as a mode of artistic
pretation away from the vertical, with a feminist analysis production (from Minimalism and photography to the art­
that redirects the hierarchical and vertical family drama ist producing her works in editions or series) and suggests
of psychoanalysis ("mommy, daddy, and me") toward the that in the hands of someone like Eva Hesse, an artist
horizontal logic of siblings. 9 For Nixon, however, this highly attuned to the activities of her artistic peers, lateral
would not be primarily a model or metaphor for alliance thinking and feeling, rather than Oedipal rivalry, was the
or equality; rather it constitutes a recognition as traumatic very engine for her quirky, medium-extending, bodily
as that of sexuality itself, that siblings and cousins are the engaged, psychically affective work. l l
undeniable proof that one is serial, that one exists in a I return to my question: is there a way to install
continuous chain of sameness and difference, of repetition works of art so that the artist and the art historian do not
and death. Nixon comes to her argument through Siblings: experience the space of the museum as the site of one
Sex and Violence, a book by the feminist psychoanalytic triumph over another? What of the artist who experiences
theorist Juliet Mitchell.lD Why, Mitchell wonders, do ,we . a sisterhood of artists, in which sameness and difference
organize our most powerful narratives of personal identity are attributes in constant (pleasurable?) friction with one
around our parents rather than our siblings? After all, we another? Mitchell, sensing the possibilities her argument
know our siblings for our entire lives, and they us. She has for artists, discusses how artists experience their
notes that in Western cultures we talk of liberty, equality, predecessors "though long dead and buried ... as the same
and fraternity, and feminists, in upending the gendered age as the subject. In other words, these artistic ancestors
logic of dep1ocracy, once talked of sisterhood. Mitchell are 'lateralized."'12 Thus it's possible that artists already
contends that while we foreground and even fetishize the see the museum as lateralized in that they imagine them­
hierarchical nature of society, the primary structure of our selves in a kind of temporal continuity with either Hesse
social organization is lateral, and sibling-based social for­ or Albrecht Durer. Can we permit the fantasy of contem­
mations (such as peers, friends, and colleagues) are based poraneity and the trauma of sameness and its attendant
on alliances and as a result operate differently from those fear of mortality to permeate our museums in a recogniz­
based on vertical structures (such as parent and child, able way? Can we install works of art in ways that permit
employer and employee, king and subject). Why, then, do us this complicated realm of feelings and associations
our accounts of selfhood privilege the vertical model to rather than in ways designed to hold such anxieties at
the exclusion of the lateral? Might it be that museums bay? Could we reengage with the language of sisterhood,
celebrate uniqueness (the genius, the masterpiece) as a way not as a discourse of essentializing sameness but as a
of denying or avoiding the psychological tension produced complicated narrative of horizontal or lateral thinking?
by the equally strong counternarrative of sameness? I have been thinking about relatively new models of
(Let's face it, a lot of those Renaissance altarpieces look thinking (Deleuze and Guattari's horizontal rhizome and
alike, as do formal portraits, stilllifes, even abstract paint­ Mitchell's lateralization of siblings) and how these are
ings.) Mitchell proposes that the recognition of sameness­ being used by feminist art historians (Tickner and Nixon
the seriality and repetition implied and instantiated by respectively) to rethink the kinds of stories art history

MOLESWORTH 509
tells us, particularly the stories it tells us about art made In both of these instances, and notable also in the
by women-stories of exceptionalism or uniqueness, or writing of Briony Fer, a new language has crept into the
stories of strays and misfits who simply cannot find their discourse of art history: an understated but decided move
proper place in the gallery. I have been groping around for away from dialectical thinking, a tacit refusal to structure
ways to ways to imagine the fullness of these feminist cri­ arguments in terms of opposition. IS This art-historical
tiques in the space of the museum, using the installation generational shift is being mediated neither through
of the permanent collection as a kind of limit case. Before "a line of unbroken maternal production" nor "through
I close I want to register a few other instances of lateral murderous rivalry either."l6 We are witnessing the
thinking, as a way to suggest that the influence of feminist replacement of the either/or logic of the dialectic with
thinking might not always be labeled as such, but we the conjunction "and:' So, too, the go-to structuring word
might find it flowing through our discipline nonetheless. "tension," used to discuss an artwork, has given way to
For example, the art historians George Baker and "touch:' To my ear such shifts, however delicately deployed,
Miwon Kwon have taken up the problem of the postmedium rhyme with the drift away from vertical or hierarchical
condition. Examining the works of Anthony McCall and thinking toward the more lateral and connective rhetorical
Jessica Stockholder, respectively, they have each tried to tissue offered by Tickner and Nixon. "And" and "touch"
articulate what is at stake for contemporary artists as they imply proximity; they are not the language of the inevitable
extend and explore the boundaries between and among but the contingent, wobbling our routine spatiotemporal
traditional mediums such as painting, sculpture, and film. conventions, shying away from the hard-and-fast language
Far from celebrating the proliferation of the new post­ of causality. They are words that when used in a museum
medium condition for its own expansive sake, they have context might offer an opening that would allow us to
attempted to make sense of why and how discussions of learn from artists seeking elective mothers in the mode
medium have either fallen into disrepair or become so of alliance (as Tickner would have it) or to experience the
contentious as to be rendered useless. I have been paying museum as a site of temporal immediateness (as Mitchell
close attention to their language, sifting through the layers suggests) or to negotiate the psychic ramifications of
of nuance and possibility in the words they chose to sameness and difference as they are played out in a field
describe their objects of study. I listen as Kwon confronts marked by parity (as Nixon proposes). What if we let art­
the "tendency toward spatialization in postwar art" and works touch each other in the museum? What if, instead
discusses how "three notions of space seem to come of making demarcations between mediums and artists,
together and coexist in her [Stockholder's] installations," we let their mutual otherness act as a kind of contagion?
meaning that "Stockholder's work asserts (sometimes What if, in the next room, around the corner from the
voraciously) a both/and attitude rather than one of either/ Sillman we placed a de Kooning, and maybe next to it a
Or."l3 Consider this alongside Baker's account of the status Hesse? (It's worth noting that Hesse was obsessed with
of medium specificity in McCall's works; he does not de Kooning.) I'd like to install an early Hesse (1960, no. 7),
insist that they are sculpture, nor that they are film. Baker one of those not thought to be fully mature, the paintings
instead lands upon the seemingly simple word "touch," in which she worked through the logic of one, two, a'nd
as in, "A transgressive model of medium-belonging that three. Or, abandoning the language of math, the ones in
sought to take mediums to the limits where they began which she negotiated aloneness, the couple, and the group.
to touch and shape other forms, but only by 'othering' What if we made a gallery of paintings by the feminists
themselves in the process."l4 who were touched by de Kooning, artists for whom there

510 HOW TO INSTALL ART AS A FEMINIST

7. Eva Hesse (American, born
Germany. 1936-1970). Untitled.
1960. Oil on canvas, 18 • 15"
(45.7 x 38.1 cm) . The Museum
of Modern Art, New York. Gift of
Mr. and Mrs. Murray Charash

MOLESWORTH 511
is no either/or between de Kooning and feminism? Could and a grandmother: everyone's identity shifts.) In such
we recover what they found in his work that perhaps now a model, narratives of influence would be open to ,a
we can no longer see or feel; can we register the artists' Rashomon-like chorus of voices of nieces, nephews,
sense of alliance; can we enable museum viewers to see cousins, sisters, and brothers, opening up single objects
their sisterhood? to multiple points of alliance, much the wayan individual
To close a provisional note: Might there be a way of can simultaneously be an aunt, sister, mother, and
rethinking the notion of sisterhood-a word so out-of­ grandmother. In such a model the seemingly ahistorical
date it almost sounds cool 'again? What if sisterhood were installation of Snyder in a room with Schutz, Sillman, and
not based on essentialist claims of gender?, What if it Mutu would allow us to register the affiliations among
were not dependent on behaving as our mothers or fathers the artists, to see them as engaged in a common pursuit
would like us to (or rebelling against them as they expect striated with differences. It might be the beginning of
us to)? What if sisterhood offered a model for forming a way of telling history that incorporates the challenges
alliances structured by a loving but skeptical engagement of feminism beyond enumerating which women worked
with the new, one that saw the new as part of a larger pat­ when. So, too, it might be a way of acknowledging the
tern of seriality and repetition, sameness and difference, long gaps and absences, the blind spots produced by the
annihilation and birth, that defied the logic of chronological vertical narratives of patriarchy, stories so familiar that
or teleological history? Such a model of interpretation, we often forget that they serve certain interests and not
sisterhood, or genealogy would demonstrate that the new others. Such a room might instead suggest something
does not cancel out the old; it would show us that the about how women artists have often forged connections
new is not a form of triumph but a recalibration of alliances. over disjointed periods of space and time, about moving
(Think of the moment a new baby comes home, an arrival laterally in order to revolutionize the deepest aspects of
that simultaneously produces a mother, a sister, an aunt, our lives.

512 HOW TO INSTALL ART AS A FEMINIST

1. Eli Zaretsky, Capitalism, the tions of renderi ng a political Dictionary of Queer Slang and on Jessica Stockholder'S
Family. and Personal Ufe (New stance into a matter of style Culture," www.geocitrus.com/ Scenographic Compositions,"
York: Harper and Row, 1976), or preference. WestHollywood/Stonewall1 Grey Room 18 (Winter 2004):
p.1 . 4.lt bears noting that despite 4219. 52-63. The quotes appear on
2. Each of these exhibitions the powerfu lly gendered quality 7. Gilles Deleuze and Felix pages 54, 58, and 59.
was accompanied by important of these narratives of influence, Guattari,A Thousand Plateaus: 14. George Baker, "Film Beyond
catalogues: Hayden Herrera, they are structural, available to Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Its Limits," Grey Room 25 (Fall
Joan Snyder (New York: Harry either sex; some male painters trans. Brian Massumi (London: 2006): 92-125.
N.Abrams, 2005); Adam have been taught via oral tradi­ Atholone Press, 1988), p. 25: 15. See in particular Briony
Szymczyk, Lee Lozano: Win tion, and some female artists quoted in Tickner, "Mediating Fer's chapter on Eva Hesse,
First Dont Lost Win Lost Dant have staged Oedipal rebellions. Generation: pp. 91-92. "Studio," inAn Infinite Une:
Core (Basel: Schwabe AG , See Lisa Tickner's "Mediating 8. Walter Benjamin, "Theses Remaking Art after Modernism
2006); Elizabeth A. T. Smith, Generation: The Mother­ on the Philosophy of History: (New Haven:Yale University
Lee Bantecau: A Retrospective Daughter Plot," in Carol 1950, in Illuminations, trans. Press, 2004), pp. 116-43.
(New Haven:Yale University Armstrong and Catherine de Harry Zohn (New Yo rk: 16. Tickner, "Mediating
Press, 2004); and Cornelia Zegher, eds., Women Artists at Schocken Books, 1969), p. 255. Generation: p. 94.
Butler and Lisa Gabrielle the Millennium (Cambridge, 9. Mignon Nixon, "0 + X,"
Mark, eds., WACK! Art and Mass.: MIT Press, 2006), pp.85­ October 119 (Winter 2007):
the Feminist Revolution (Los 120. Tickner suggests that it is 6-20.
Angeles: The Museum of better to think of "the question 1O.Juliet MitChell, Siblings:
Contemporary Art: Cambridge, of attachment or rupture not Sex and Violence (Cambridge:
Mass.: MIT Press, 2007). as a gendered distinction, but Polity Press, 2003).
3.1 place "feminist art" in quotes in terms of a historical contrast 11 . Nixon, "Child Drawing," in de
because I don't believe in it as in modes of productian."lbid., Zegher, ed., Eva Hesse Drowing
a designation of style. I prefer p.89 . (NewYork:The DrawingCenter;
"art made by feminists" or "art 5. Ibid., p. 91. New Haven:Yale University
made under the influence of 6. "Family-a code word refer­ Press, 2006), pp. 27-56.
feminism"-both are awkward ring to gays or the gay commu­ 12. Mitchell,Siblings, pp. 16-17.
formulations but nonetheless nity, as in, 'Ellen DeGeneres is 13. Miwon Kwan, "Promiscuity
speak to the inherent limita­ Family.'" Rebecca Scott,"A Brief of Space: Some Thoughts

MOLESWORTH 513