Am I an artist, a criminal, a whore or just an ordinary survivor? (Hagdorn) What am I? Who am I? The question eats away at my total beingness. What does it mean to be an artist, a criminal, a whore, or just an ordinary survivor? Women artists such as Annie Sprinkle, Hannah Wilke, Ana Mendieta, Kiki Smith, Sarah Jones and many others have completely re-defined my experience, not only of art, but also of myself. These women have led me through a soul-searching exploration while in a course called Women In Art- Issues of Representation. This paper reflects the inspiration these women provided me with an awakening to the healing of my creative spirit. When I first read about Linda Montano asking Annie Sprinkle to do a performance piece about the most painful, worst experience of her life, I was shocked. She did a performance in front of many audiences called A Hundred Blow Jobs. She says she enjoyed much of her work as a prostitute, but still had bad memories of around one hundred blow-jobs. She made a tape of abusive slurs that were said to her like Suck it, you bitch! and played it in the background while she performed fellatio on a board full of dildos. Annie Sprinkle said, I d cry and gag and really get in touch with the pain each time and after a dozen times I would no longer cry or gag- because I had transformed and exorcised that demon. Now I feel free- free from all that abuse I suffered... (Juno & Vale 32) The performance was her process of healing herself from the pain that was trapped inside of her body and mind. I had never heard of such a powerful way for anyone to process her pain. After reading this article I was inspired. I have been through many painful times and thought that if Annie could share these parts of herself, so could I. Just reading about her doing these self-exposing performances gave me strength to share parts of my story. Her shared process gave me strength, so I knew that the women that saw or read my work could also be strengthened. My biggest desire is still to clear myself of shame, guilt, and pain that hold me back from being full of self-love. This story gave me permission to do whatever art projects I wanted about anything I have ever experienced. This was just the beginning. After reading many articles about numerous women I gathered more and more encouragement. Annie Sprinkle s article was just the start of realizing how many women are not shy about expressing their grief and outrage in their artwork. Hannah Wilke was another inspirational woman. I read about her reputation of beauty and how she chose to express her own feelings of femininity. She did a series of photographs called S.O.S. Starification Objects Series. Striking high fashion poses, modeling her beauty, Wilke also scarred herself with chewing-gum sculptures that had a simple shape and multiple meanings. Chewed gum, twisted into shape that variously reads as vulva, womb, and tiny wounds, marks her face, back, chest, breasts, and fingernails, and marks, too, with pleasure and pain that are not limited to female experience. Sexual pleasure is universal, and anyone can be raped. Wilke s 1
scarification, symbolically related to the desire and admired keloided designs on the bodies of African women, who without anesthesia suffer hundreds of cuts, alludes to the suffering that Western women undergo in their own beautification rituals. To be a star as a woman is to bear starification. To be starified is, to some degree, to be ill starred, and the ornaments decorating Wilke are not only stars but also stigmata that mark the model as woman as martyr. S.O.S. is a cry for help. (Freuh 192) As a young woman I was always told I should be a model and I pursued this fantasy for many years in my teens. My beauty felt more like curse than a blessing in many instances. I always received attention from men and as a result I felt objectified and rather empty. For myself, I have needed to strengthen my internal beauty and find an outward medium to resolve all my gifts. I have included this example of Wilke s process because I later read an incredible article on her that brought sobs pouring out of me. I sat alone on my studio floor with pictures of her at fifty ravaged with illness. Her last pieces of art were images of herself decorated in various poses with a baldheaded puffy face dying from lymphatic cancer. She again posed sometimes in the high fashion style to distort and challenge our notions of beauty. She maintained enough strength and self-integrity to want to share these parts of her process with the world. Her last show was of large photos of herself, perhaps 2-3 feet high, exposing her most intimate details without shame. The audience was unable to avoid being confronted with her emotions and pain. What amazing courage! This puts my life into perspective knowing each hardship and joy is material for self-expression. If I dive deep enough into myself, I can explore all processes and make art out of my life and someday possibly my death. My modeling pursuit in my teens resulted in about sixty photographs of me posing coyly for an older man, who was at that time a family friend. I had pictures of myself from when I was age fifteen to nineteen, and now seven years later, I had never used them for anything. I re-discovered these photos and decided it would be perfect raw material for me to make into a piece of art. Seeing the work Hannah Wilke had done with pictures of herself combined with the healing performances of Annie Sprinkle, I found the power to use images of myself for my own art sculpture. I was rather surprised at the emotions that rose out of me when I looked closely at the pictures I had so desperately loved years before. They were part of an extinguished fantasy that now looked like soft porn. I had excitedly allowed him to place me in positions he found sexy and attractive: my nipple poked out from behind my leather jacket, my body exposed through sheer robes, for some photos I sat just in my underwear, and other completely nude photos I never received copies of. My anger boiled to the surface as I wrote an empowering poem about how this experience had perpetuated my inner lack, how my views of sexy were corrupted by this man s sick ideas of young beauty. Most disturbing was the last conversation I had with him months before I began this project when he had the audacity to asked if I was fat now? It became clear to me that my physical body is the 2
most important aspect for him and sadly our culture. Society has so overly promoted beauty that most women, given the choice between unusual intelligence and great beauty, would choose beauty. (Freuh 194) Using the contact-sheet-sized photos which were each 2 inches in height, I placed one word on the back of each picture and pieced together the one hundred and thirty four photos with a poem of equal length. I had found the inside of an old cot, with rectangular metal links connected together to make a vertical surface of 170 rectangles and hung it from springs on the wall. Each picture dangled on a fishing line swivel in its own little rectangle. This is an interactive piece called Touch Me that the spectator needs to participate with by turning each card (134 of them) in order to receive the entire meaning of the text and related images. The fishing line swivels also cause all of the hanging images to rotate on their own, so there is a continual mixture of text and words at all times. A person viewing the work will gather snatches of words and random glances of images unless they take the time to turn every rectangle around and discover the story held in the process. I labored over the many squares while collecting the parts of myself that had been held captive in these photographs. Kiki Smith is another woman who shocked my senses. I read a book called Kiki Smith that has a wonderful interview and a retrospective of many of her cumulative works. I have always liked art that pulls deep emotions from me. Years ago I was cutting out images from an Art In America magazine, and I found a startling images of two wax figures hanging off posts. One was a naked woman with milk flowing from her breasts and the other was a naked man with semen flowing from his penis. I did not notice who 3
the artist was but I used them for a collage in a computer class. When I opened the Kiki Smith book, there were large color photos of these works with many more, just as wild, images. Another of Kiki s pieces that awed me was one called The Tale. It is a wax figure crawling on the ground with a six foot long piece of excrement trailing from the butt down the length of the floor. It is not beautiful in the typical sense, but in reading her interview she shared her reasoning for creating such a unique sculpture. She said that the tail represented all of the shit that people haul around and do not let go of. She translated this thought into a very literal image that is shocking. Kiki Smith has artwork in many museums and galleries all over the world. At this point in time I realized there are no boundaries in the art world. Truly, people could possibly accept whatever creations came out of me. I took a required art history class that was incomparably bland to the experience of reading about women sharing their deepest emotions through their artwork. Kiki Smith is proof to me that anything can fly: wax creatures that have their backbones exposed, an iron digestive tract, twelve glass jars engraved with the names of all our body fluids- tears, vomit, sweat, blood, urine a wax figure squatting to pee, and a see though Virgin Mary who has all muscles and blood exposed. Kiki Smith s interview was inspiring because she spoke from her heart about her process of discovering and uncovering her pain through her art. Well, as an artist you make things that are as convoluted as you are. Your life is convoluted and your brain doesn t always act in your best interest, and you don t want to pretend otherwise. The first ten or fifteen years of making art I had so many emotional things to try and work out in my life. My work was very autobiographical. (Posner 35) My main interests in the past seven years have been art and healing through various methods of holistic medicine. I feel this awakening of my senses and emotions has brought a deeper realization of how these two fields of study are woven tightly into my daily life. My art and healing are more closely interrelated than I ever imagined. This quote from Kiki Smith validates this point. I try to be a feminist as a civic person, but not in my art because I don t have any agenda for my art other than for it to have a deep meaning to me. My work is about my life, and it protects my life. I trust my motives for doing things because I know they are deeply connected to me- that the more I look after them, the more they will look after me. (Posner 28) The more I express my emotions and pain through my art the healthier and more cleansed I feel. An example of one of my own mixed media pieces is entitled Whose territory is it?, which I created over the last few months. I wired over two hundred miniature plastic army men onto an outline of a woman s torso. They are in the midst of a battle that covers the span of territory from the breasts to below the thighs of a headless woman figure. This figure is placed on a large, red background of bullet-holed-metal cut into the shape of a heart- the ancient symbol for female genitalia. The female body is of life-size proportions and shares my own battle 4
of deciding what voice speaks to me the loudest- the voice of our culture s expectations around beauty standards or the voice of my own intuition that guides the natural shape of my body. At the end of her interview Kiki spoke of receiving dreams about what creations she needed to work on next. This was a moment of clarity and insight for me. I want to be that clear. I want to receive direction from the divine world whether during sleep or during waking hours. I feel as though this is my ultimate goal in life. My biggest fear has always been, am I doing what I am suppose to be doing? The answer is elusive because opportunities and my trust in myself are always shifting. I once read that trust in oneself is invariably trust in the divine. These women I have read about are exploring themselves and trusting at a level I have never before witnessed. Kiki Smith also gives herself permission to work in any medium she feels drawn to, whether it is cement, glass, a needle and thread, wax, metal, cloth, or clay. These are ideas that challenge the techniques of our modern day masters who work to perfect the art of using a canvas and brush or sculpting in clay. Ana Mendieta is yet another source of encouragement. She was a passionate Cuban woman who over time completed a series of 30 40 Silhouettes of the female form. She created a rather simple archetypal shape of a woman out of rock, sand, fireworks, flower petals, blood, anything available to her. The flower petals rotted, the fireworks went off, water washed away the sand, and grass grew up over the carved mud, 5
yet her fleeting images remain documented in photos. Ana says this about her artwork, exploring the relationship between myself, the earth, and art. I throw myself into the very elements that produced me, using the earth as my canvas and my soul as my tools (Duncan). Ana also did many other provocative interactive pieces and performances. I liked her Glass on Body Prints where she smushed her naked body onto a glass plate held up in front of the camera. She uses the three parts of female anatomy that are most played with in popular culture- the face, the breasts, and the butt. The author of this particular article wrote her features variously contorted by the glass make literal the invisible wall of social expectations that confront women (Duncan). Ana fed off the emotions and fears of people; one story was of how she fixed her doorway to have blood seep out underneath, while she recorded people s reactions that passed by. She had astonishing courage and remarkable ideas and tragically died at the age of twenty-six. I now need to mention that I received all of these articles from a woman who has changed the course of my life s work. Sarah Jones is an artist who worked with me over the course of four months, introducing me to all of the material from which I have gathered so much inspiration and courage. I read about Annie Sprinkle, Hannah Wilke, Kiki Smith, and Ana Mendieta, but I had Sarah Jones as a living example to share with weekly. She told me to use whatever materials I wanted in my work: dried fruit, tin cans, thrift store items, found objects and to not limit myself to formal hang on the wall art. She pushed me to dive deep. Sarah shared intimately her process of when she began to represent herself in her own artwork. For many years she was a successful, watercolor landscape painter. She was accepted to the school of Visual Arts in New York to complete her Masters of Fine Art. She had Kiki Smith and others for some of her teachers during her years in New York. Sarah was a nude art model for artists in New York and spoke of feelings awakening in her about how she was not being represented in these works of art. Her body was, but not her essence. Sarah s entire way and medium of expression shifted during her Master Program years. It has been incredible to hear first hand Sarah s process of wanting to represent her own body and the bodies of other women around her. Sarah did a series of body casts where she hardened the shaped of herself, her sister, her mother and her grandmother in gauze and plaster. She then drew on the molds and hung glass behind them. Each glass recounted the individual life story of these women s bodies. She told of ovarian cysts, hysterectomies, breast lumps, childbirths, cervical tears, menstrual difficulties, body image, pains and joys of being a woman and growing older. It was a multigenerational journey through the bodies of the women in her family. Sarah pushed me one day by asking me if I thought I was political. I said no because in my mind to be political somehow equated to being directly involved in governmental affairs. I would rather focus on my process and myself than interact with the mass media distortions of choices made by our patriarchal government. By the end 6
of the discussion, I realized that making art about myself is a political statement when I share my work with the public. I see myself involved in the burning away of misperceptions and bringing to the surface emotions people do not share openly about themselves. In this quote, Kiki Smith states one way she shared her strong feelings about the role of an artist in our culture, I would also silkscreen a word like cancer on a bandana and then walk around with it on my head, because I had an idea that I as an artist or citizen could be a cancer, corrosive, in a society. (Posner 33) There are both subtle and aggressive ways to force people to look closely at the beliefs they hold. I am discovering my role as a cancer growth/political artist. With Sarah s support and encouragement, and the wealth of support from article upon article of amazing women, my own re-defining progressed. My goals shifted and I realized I wanted my goal to be healing and my process to be my art. I listened to the suggestion of Linda Montano and chose to do a piece of art around one of the most painful experiences of my life. I did have a few awful experiences with blowjobs, but I felt more pain around the years I freely gave many men my body during the act of sex. Around this time, I had found an old metal spring mattress frame that was rusted and bent. It was sitting in my living room awaiting my creative touch. I knew I wanted to use this bed for this idea since much of my pain had occurred on beds. One evening an image flashed before me of using my own life size silhouette on the mattress frame. Ana Mendieta was no doubt the source of this idea. I had a friend trace my body lying flat, submissive with my legs open. It took months for all of the details to come together for the final piece. I ended up using fake pearl necklaces spread out, wired together, for the material to define and hold the shape of my body on the mattress frame. The frame was see through and had depth. My body was on the top and I chose to make wings on the underside of the metal. I had a string of old ammunition that had already been fired, and I used the bullets wired together to make wings. After I hung the piece on the wall, I realized from the various responses of my friends that I had left too much up for interpretation. I needed more of an explanation to guide viewers along the same path that I was sharing. I wrote these words and hung them on the wall next to the piece I called Empty Shell, and for eight years I knew nothing of my wings. I lay quietly underneath, smothered by my own fears. Disassociated from this body. Ignorant of the pleasure possible. This was an exposing yet empowering way to share the hurt I held inside from my years of disassociation during sexual intercourse. Reaching and displaying these deep emotions about my encounters felt like a necessary part of my journey towards wholeness. 7
I feel my actions resonate with many women from all over the world who have shared and continue to share their vastly different experiences of being alive in a woman s body. In the introduction of the book Angry Women, Andrea Juno and V. Vale discuss their thoughts about how they believe individual women can be influential in opposing cultural beliefs. One of the fundamental contributions of the Women s Movement was the realization that one cannot have a political change with out revolutionizing each individual. And that involves each individual s spirituality, personal and family relationships, and emotions- plus the ability to communicate those emotions. All personal growth efforts and self-healing are an essential part of the philosophical remapping necessary for political change, so we can fully deploy the imaginations we were born with. (5) I believe that I, and all of the women I have discussed, are actively involved in the Women s Movement that Juno and Vale discuss. We are communicating our emotions through our sculptures, performances, pictures, and words. What am I? Who am I? Answering these questions is a daily process just like creating my art. I gained life-changing insights from the many articles I read about these four women and from the conversations and guidance of one extraordinary woman. I want to thank Sarah Jones for introducing me to a world of empowering art and selfhealing that I never knew existed. My artwork and life have taken new form over the last six months. This course about Women in Art- Issues of Representation inspired and supported my first solo exhibition, Reclamati o n, May 16- June 16, 2001. 8
Bibliography Beatty, Maria. Sphinxes Without Secrets. New York: Women Who Make Movies, 1992. Chadwick, Whitney. Women, Art, and Society. London: Thames and Hudson Ltd, 1996. Duncan, Michael. Tracing Mendietta. Freuh, Johanna. The Body Through Women s Eyes. Challenging Moderism: The Facets of Feminist Art. 190-207. Juno, Andrea and V. Vale. Angry Women. New York: RE/Search Publications, Inc, 1991. Posner, Helaine. Kiki Smith. New York: Bulfinch Press, 1998. 9