I Like Feminism and Feminism Likes Me

The art world is smaller than it seems, more local. Yet curatorial writing suggests an expansive map of global travel, from MoMA to documenta, Cochin to Venice. Mattel’s barbie doll curator would live happily in this art world. Rake thin and accessorized with neat rolling luggage, this luxury brand version of curating may only be a fantasy, but it is alive in the scholarship. Yet there is a smaller art world, more heterogeneous, poorer, with different bodies. There’s no barbie doll for the college gallery curator in the public university. Her feminist body is getting fat, she can be embarrassing, yet she’s unashamed. Writing about the poor art world demands a different kind of feminist politics of care. So, let’s set the scene. My curatorial labor is at the Art Gallery of the College of Staten Island, which is part of the City University of New York, the largest urban public University system in the United States. Our campus is at the periphery of New York City, Staten Island residents typically don’t even think of themselves as part of “The City,” it leans to the right in the voting booth, once tried to secede from New York, supported the British during the Revolutionary War, and the (big) art world could just as well be on Mars.

One semester the gallery budget was slashed so brutally, we had to give up the insurance. So, together with the artist Oskar Korsár, I co-wrote a two act play about Joseph Beuys’s first trip to the US, in 1974, when he asked to meet with “American feminists.” I Like Feminism and Feminism Likes Me featured student actors and was presented in the Art Gallery of the College of Staten Island in March 2020. It reimagines an ambivalent, little-known, and quietly unpleasant episode in feminist art history and elevates this into a trashily amateur two-act play. The title’s punning reference to Joseph Beuys’s 1974 performance I Like America and America Likes Me was not recognized by our students. But this was fine. Their indifference—their lack of caring—served another purpose, since the project, like this essay, is not really about Beuys at all. Our title was an invitation for identification with feminism not a renowned German artist. I Like Feminism is part slapstick comedy, part exaggerated amateur dramatics, part allegorical attack on male charisma in the only New York City borough that elected Donald Trump, and part feminist revenge tragedy. This account of the project is written through a “minded body” in which shards of the personal, the material, the fragile cut through the more analytical-type writing in flashes of pain and joy. Likewise, the students’ bodies—including Black, queer, fat, lesbian, disabled, and poor—performed a somatic challenge to the ongoing elitism of the art world and how it is written by art history.

Both the performance and the writing of this essay mobilize a feminist politics of care in ways that emphasize ambivalence and conflict. As Maggie Nelson puts it, “Caring and coercion often exist in a knot, with their extrication never simple.”^[1] One only needs to have experienced the dynamics of being either a reluctant carer or the helplessness of being cared for to realize how difficult both roles can be. Resentment, anger, and guilt so often put pressure on the affective scenario of caring in ways that are hard to control. But there is also a pragmatics involved in taking care. For this, Deva Woodly’s framing of the politics of care, from a non-art context, is particularly useful:

Care, here, is not a mere sentiment. Nor does it indicate a posture of deference or coddling. Instead, care is a pragmatic value, requiring the provision of what is necessary for health, welfare, maintenance, and safety with serious attention to doing things correctly in order to avoid unnecessary damage or risk. In this way, the politics of care begins with the conviction that lived experience matters and the reality of our experiences must be centered in our politics.^[2]

Woodly’s matter-of-fact framing of the term is particularly relevant to the etymological root of curating in the Latin word to care for, curare. Curating-as-care-work, therefore, has a practical aspect that also indicates access to resources: economic, cultural, and intellectual. Let’s file it under the heading: handle with care. The following reflections on poor curating, curating-ascare-work, and the implications of this for writing feminist art history have been brought into particularly sharp focus by the recent global crisis of care. I reanimate this project from March 2020, through the affective scrim of my experience during the Covid-19 pandemic. This is an experiment in teaching and writing art history through the body: mine, theirs, maybe yours as well. In the face of the elitism that is baked into the discipline, I am bored, vulnerable, fragile, pathetic, and enraged.

March 2020. The body remembers many things. Perhaps it prompted me to set the date of the performance for March 12 because it was the third anniversary of my mother’s death. Was it just me distracting myself, or did I unconsciously schedule it for just the right time? My dad told me the other day about the ghosts he sees sometimes. He wakes up in the night and she’s lying there in bed next to him. Or he gets up to go for a pee and there’s someone standing in the doorway, like a wraith, then it’s gone. I ask him if he’s afraid. Why would I be? he responds, surprised. Its only your mam. He’s not a spooky kind of guy, no new age purple mage. He’s practical, conventional, respectable. We co-wrote her funeral eulogy, which I would recite. He wasn’t a generous collaborator. All the memories I had of her body, he rejected, shocked and outraged, as if I had proposed describing her vagina to a chapel of mourners… I remember Kat Chamberlin’s installation in the college gallery from a couple of years before. Mysterious, delicate fluorescent light sculptures resting on the floor in the darkened space and outside a lamp post had been rewired to blink out her mother’s eulogy in morse code.

The project began as a joke. We were walking the dogs in Gleisdreieckpark in Schöneberg, Berlin back in the summer of 2019. Oskar was telling me about his former shrink who knew several ex-students of the charismatic German artist Joseph Beuys. It turns out that beneath his democratizing rhetoric Beuys could be cruel. He would single out individuals to be the butt of his jokes. One time he was lecturing about creative egalitarianism, “everyone is an artist,” as he was wont to say, then he pointed to a randomly selected victim, “except you, you’ll never be an artist. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!” Pretty funny. Maybe not. Several Beuys students committed suicide. This had to be something to do with his cruelty but also, we speculated, a side effect of group psychology produced by charisma as a social and aesthetic project.^[3] Back in 2019, with Trump more than halfway into his (first) presidential term, charisma seemed like an important problem to think about. And, Oskar observed, the Beuysian mode still holds sway over a good deal of contemporary German art—a diluted version of his cruel charisma is operative in art school culture across Europe. While coercion belongs to the dynamics of care, cruelty is surely its inverse. So, I told Oskar about the Stanhope breakfast back in 1974 where a group of feminists in New York challenged Beuys.^[4] Although he was a household name in his native Germany, Beuys was virtually unheard of in the New York art world in 1974. A stranger among this group of women, he was received as just another self-important man. Before the end of our walk, we had the title: I Like Feminism and Feminism Likes Me.

April 2020. It’s impossible to write, or think, or act. I’ve cried every day this month. Not because of a firsthand experience of losing someone to the virus. I’m not endangered at work, or in danger of losing my job. I traipse along, safely working from home in Washington Heights. But I feel so alone. I am alone. Ice truck morgues are parked up the street. New York Presbyterian is one of the hospitals with monster deathrates. I’m overwhelmed and incapacitated by all the loss. It’s like I‘ve been conscripted to join an anonymous community of mourners. Crying alone, unstoppably. B. feels the same and she has an ice truck morgue parked right across the street! But other friends seem immune or numbly disassociating. Fridays are the worst and the best. I meet my students online for class. Someone is always sick or recovering, but mostly they’re all so afraid. Afraid of the unknown. Afraid of endangering elderly relatives. Many are living in multigenerational households; they share rooms with siblings and there’s often just one computer (if that) for the whole family. Many are frontline workers or have family members they live with who are—food store cashiers, amazon packers, ferry crew, prison guards, etcetera. WIFI is always cutting out. One student can only come to class if he sits in his car outside Starbucks to borrow a better connection for his phone. It’s so chaotic. Yet they show up and complete the assignments (although not always on time). Like me, some of them talk fondly of the performance project we staged a day before the campus finally closed. We reminiscence and bathe in the warm glow of our memories. The good old days when we were unthinking in our physical togetherness, and our joyous feminist milieu!^[5]

January 1974 was Beuys’s first trip to the United States. This was several months before he returned to stage his most famous performance, I Like America and America Likes Me, where he lived for three days in the René Block Gallery with a live coyote. The first visit was a lecture tour with various side meetings, including his feminist breakfast. Like the king receiving his subjects at court, thirty-two art world women—artists, curators, critics, and other professionals—were invited by the Ronald Feldman Gallery to have breakfast at Beuys’s hotel (figs. 1, 2).^[6] Surrounded by a male film crew and several photographers (including one woman, Peggy Jarrell Kaplan, documenting for the Ronald Feldman Gallery), he began by rehearsing some of the ideas from his lecture tour, “Energy Plan for Western Man.”^[7] With growing impatience, the women began to challenge him.^[8] Some had already heard him lecture at the New School the previous night and spoken out there as well (Hannah Wilke most memorably).^[9] They objected to his paternalistic advice and hollow expressions of solidarity. While he had expected to bring them under his visionary sway, these sexually free, fierce, forthright daughters of the feminist revolution had long since killed the symbolic father.

1

Beuys (left) mid-speech, the Stanhope Hotel, January 1974, photograph by Gerhard Steidel/Klaus Staeck

2

Skeptical women, the Stanhope Hotel, January 1974, photograph by Gerhard Steidel/Klaus Staeck

And yet, his zombie corpse keeps returning. Take Arthur C. Danto’s remarkable opening sentence to a 2007 reader on the artists: “Joseph Beuys, together with Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol, are the artists one must turn to in order to understand the present shape of art—the Founding Fathers of contemporary sensibility” (italics added, caps in the original).^[10] Presumably, there are no mothers. Perhaps a few dutiful daughters, chaste, like Athena, born fully grown women from the head of one of these Zeuses.

It’s time to bring back Medusa (or Valerie Solanas) for some feminist revenge. Revenge on all the mansplainers. Our vengeance is forged into camp humor and redirected by a milieu of affirmation built around an identification not with Beuys but with feminism and what this meant for the students now. I Like Feminism and Feminism Likes Me was a call for identification, belonging, and connection that was open to actors and non-actors alike. In doing so it also generated a form of creative dis-identification with the cruel charisma of the Beuysian method. In a nod to the queer inclusiveness of Warholian amateurism, everyone was assured that fluffing lines and awkward delivery was an accepted part of the overall texture of the event. Unevenness in performances—wooden, over acting, and perfectly on pitch—were all a necessary and desired part of the project’s affirmative aesthetic texture. Since the milieu of working together was as important as the final event. The varied levels of experience among the student performers created a milieu of collective care. This togetherness was visible in the energy and camaraderie of the final performance.

April 2020. I read somewhere one sleepless night that in northern Sweden (or was it in Norway or Finland…?) children in kindergarten have a day when they bring a log to school in their back packs. They learn how to make a fire and kindle togetherness around its warmth. It’s turned cold again in New York. I imagine what it would be like to do this now. We could meet, strangers in the park by the Hudson, each carrying a log (and a bottle of wine).

From thirty-two to a group of nine—Camille Billops, Freyda Feldman, Joan Jonas, Mary Miss, Yoko Ono, Lucy Lippard, Faith Ringgold, Caroline Tisdall, Marcia Tucker, and Hannah Wilke—plus two characters who were not at the original events. A pantomime rendering of the coyote (from Beuys’s performance I Like America and America Likes Me) and the lesbian-feminist writer Valerie Solanas. Our coyote was modeled on Disney’s urbane English-accented Wile E. Coyote, whose smooth control and cultured superiority waged an internal war with the appetites of a wild animal (fig. 3). Whenever something related to the body was mentioned, the Coyote’s animal instincts erupted in Tourette-like physical and verbal ticks. (Fat! Oo, ah, oo, ah, uh, uh, oh, ummmmmm, f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-fat!) Beuys’s live coyote in I Like America was a moralizing symbol aimed at the country’s genocidal past. But he showed no interest in the present, in contemporary Native American life, politics, and art. A mute animal [theatrically zips his mouth closed] I have no time or culture, thought Joe! Not bad as a symbol… but American Indians are sick of being symbols for settler colonists and their friends. The symbolic coyote is nothing to do with the actual Native Americans living here. Especially not those involved in the American Indian Movement that had been organizing in urban centers since 1968. Wile E. Coyote is closer to Beuys, like his alter ego in trickster form. He chose me, me, Me! Me! Me! a Coyote, because I’m a geeeenius. A European and a self-proclaimed genius, Wile E. is constantly outwitted by the brassily cheerful American Bugs.^[11]

3

Ross Bontempo as Joseph Beuys and Nissa Velez as the Coyote, in I Like Feminism and Feminism Likes Me, 2020, photograph by Maria Rosa, Margaret Smith, Devin Ward

Valerie Solanas, the other character included in our breakfast (but not at the original event), could in theory have dropped by. She had recently been released from prison (after shooting Andy Warhol in 1968) and was purportedly homeless in New York at the time (fig. 4). Solanas was a figure for the women’s rage. Her lines were lifted directly from her feminist tract, The SCUM Manifesto, first published in mimeographed form in 1967.^[12]What are you doing here listening to this biological accident? He’s just an incomplete female, a walking abortion, aborted at the gene stage! To be male is to be deficient, emotionally limited; maleness is a deficiency disease and males are emotional cripples! She shot Beuys at the end of Act I. As a revenge on his memory since he saw Warhol as his nemesis. Just like Andy Warhol, were our Beuys’s dying words.

4

Portrait of Dustin Oriente as Valerie Solanas, in I Like Feminism and Feminism Likes Me, 2020, photograph by Irvin Rodriguez, Maria Rosa, Margaret Smith, Devin Ward

May 2020. The podcast version of Dan Fox’s Limbo haunts me. The book came out last year and he recorded this audio edition (with original music) because the pandemic cast it in an almost prophetic light. There’s something so calmly compelling about it. The expression of an existential condition waiting to find a disaster to fill it. He went on an extended container ship voyage to research the topic in practice. Months in isolation, as if this was a vacation with loneliness itself. A man looking for non-adventure. Now, alone amidst all this death, but not caught up in the direct horror of it is like I’m held in limbo. Not fully, abjectly, and horribly alone, like the man I heard on the radio who lost his mother to covid and had to self-quarantine afterward to protect his family. Not that, not actual tragedy. But it’s something like being cast into a low-rent biblical limbo. The psychological in Fox’s Limbo appears in the external and the intellectual, which, perversely, I really enjoy. It’s so calmingly distant from the body. So foreign to me. It has a quiet unmacho maleness about it, like Anthony Powell, or a cool glass of water that I reach for on my desk while writing. Blood is quietly flowing, body is even, I’m not exactly thirsty, just sustaining life.

I Like Feminism is not a reenactment. This has become something of a subgenre within performance art and the subject of a good deal of critical reflection. Historical reenactments, whether Civil War battles or social practice art—cathect to important historical events through an embodied, affectively charged experience. An important masculine example is Jeremy Deller’s Battle of Orgreave (2001). Deller directs a reenactment of the epic clash between striking South Yorkshire miners and the police during the 1984–1985 miners’ strikes in Britain. The beauty and truth of the work comes through vividly in the TV documentary about its making. The reenactment itself underwrites and confirms the historical significance of the event, which is reinforced in the film in interviews with experts on labor history, notable political figures of the day, as well as in the words and testimony of those present. The affective register is complex and the power of the project rests on the way in which the participants use it cathartically, to work through the emotional pain associated with the slow violence that came after the strike. The miners recount the desolation and depression that resulted from the violent elimination of a working culture, a way of life, and a sense of everyday community belonging. By contrast, the encounter between Beuys and the feminists was not an important historical event for anyone. This is clear from the soundtrack we used for Act II. It was recorded at a panel discussion two decades later in 1995 as part of a week-long conference on the work of Joseph Beuys. Each of the panelists describe their failure to remember much about it at all. In fact, they simply didn’t care. Yet this studied indifference seemed to mask anger and resentment, which brings us back to the difficult feelings associated with scenarios of care. A retired art history professor from the college, Diane Kelder, was also present at the breakfast. When I got in touch with her to ask her about her memories, she repeatedly put me off echoing the same refrain about not remembering. It was clear that she really didn’t want to discuss it at all despite her personal connection to the college and the gallery (she was its first curator).

What does it mean to examine a pedestrian episode in the history of art world sexism? What do we learn from listening to negative affects such as repressed anger and resentment? Teaching feminist art history in a feminist way means highlighting the social texture and interpersonal exchanges that are not included in typical accounts. This means looking at the ways in which everyday sexism relates to and is transformed in the inventive and visceral aesthetic responses of the women’s work. For us to elevate this inconsequential episode to the level of a new work, to bring it into historical recognition, also includes highlighting the missing pieces. This means drawing attention to the ways in which it fails to become recognizable as history. As is often the case with histories of marginalized groups, it does not, indeed cannot claim cohesiveness, but it is patched together out of fragments, incomplete memories, and despite resistance from many quarters. Moreover, as an event borne of ambivalence, it does not rest on the easy ground of authentic experience that is so often invoked in more celebratory creative restagings.^[13] I Like Feminism is also about the complexity of doing feminist historical work that looks beyond the easy narratives of art historical lineage and creative invention to the sore points of human conflict and structural exclusion.

August 2020. I went to MoMA today with my friend J. It took us a while to realize what was different about the experience, why it seemed so familiar and yet so strange. It was just New Yorkers! The tourists aren’t back yet, and the city still seems empty—so many of the middle-class millennials went home to their parents and those with enough wealth to enjoy second homes are still upstate or at the beach. For once the museum feels like it’s meant for CUNY students and their families. It makes me dream of what a truly more egalitarian art world might look like…

In Act II, three actors lip sync to a voice recording of a panel discussion from the weeklong Joseph Beuys conference in 1995 at the New School. The panel on the breakfast featured Marcia Tucker, Mary Miss, and Camille Billops.^[14] While the whole event was recorded for posterity and documented scrupulously for the historical records, the women on the panel are not included in the event program. It is as if they had been pre-erased. Tucker and Billops are played by two Black men in genderfucking drag—women’s clothes and makeup, but tidy beards as well. Miss was played by a lesbian actor, Dustin Oriente, who also played the part of Solanas (the actor has since transitioned to a man). The performance by the three actors is much more muted than the typical world of queer lip syncing, exemplified by the amateur cabaret performer. Yet it nonetheless brings this milieu into view as a point of reference and becomes, as my colleague, Sean Edgecomb, puts it, a form of “queer channeling.”^[15] In our casting, we sought to rewrite the heteronormativity and the whiteness of this event, this non-event in feminist history. The breakfast did not produce feminist nostalgia in those who attended, only “ugly feelings,” to invoke Sianne Ngai’s term.^[16] But this absence opened it up for other potential forms of “channeling” that brought queer, feminist, and Black feminist alliances to light.

Our cast was much more diverse than the women at the original event. We didn’t need to look for students with different bodies, the students who answered the call reflected the population of the college. Their bodies transformed this tawdry past event from another sad episode in the history of art world sexism and racism to an affirmative, inclusive milieu. There were inevitably more students of color in our performance than the tokenism of the original event. This was an intentional challenge to the (still) dominant whiteness of the art world. Faith Ringgold was the only Black woman invited to the Stanhope, she doubled the quota by asking Camille Billops, her friend—the artist, activist, and co-founder of the Hatch-Billops archive of Black cultural figures—to join. Both Billops and Ringgold were outspoken and as a result they became key figures in our performance. Billops had a bohemian Afrocentric style with large afro, beads, and naturally pronounced facial hair that formed a thin but visible mustache (fig. 5). She was a straight woman, and the facial hair was part of her Black feminist rejection of norms of white femininity rather than the gender queer read that we might have now.^[17] But we decided to keep the latter reading open, to invite association with queer communities that were present and active in New York but muted in the artworld and absent from the breakfast. We cast a Black gay man in her role. Christian Nathanial had a camp femininity and a lilting Caribbean Island accent. He had never played with drag but he was delighted to try this for the first time (fig. 6). Another gay Black man, Kaidon Walker, played two white female parts—like Christian, Kaidon was excited to use this as a space to explore gender play. I leant him some heels and he found his own dress. His tidy beard remained in place adding to his genderfucking splendor (fig. 7).

5

Joseph Beuys and Camille Billops at The Stanhope Hotel, January 1974, photograph by Gerhard Steidel/Klaus Staeck

6

Portrait of Christian Nathanial as Camille Billops, in I Like Feminism and Feminism Likes Me, 2020, photograph by Irvin Rodriguez, Maria Rosa, Margaret Smith, Devin Ward

7

Portrait of Kaidon Walker as Marcia Tucker, in I Like Feminism and Feminism Likes Me, 2020, photograph by Irvin Rodriguez, Maria Rosa, Margaret Smith, Devin Ward

November 2020. O. told me about the online reality TV show, Slag Wars. It’s hosted on a gay porn channel and the contestants are all sex workers. It’s sexy, silly, and super camp, but there’s a familiar cruelty bubbling underneath. The contestants are bitchy and undermine each other, but this is part of the genre, yes? I seem to have lost my tolerance for cynicism and cruelty. And it turns out, so has Sophie, one of the show’s hosts. I know it’s a set up, but it’s so wonderfully played! At the end of the first episode, she refuses to go through with the first elimination. Clearly upset, she smashes the trophy and tells everyone that her commitment to positivity means she cannot put someone on the bottom. Then she wants to storm off the set, but she can’t. The outdoor courtyard is covered in gravel and she’s wearing the tallest possible platform heels. This outfit is made even more treacherous by her ridiculous body. She has gravity defying silicon breasts the size of basketballs! Instead of falling on her ass (or tits), she gets down on her hands and knees and crawls out off the set. This is amazing! Her body is a tool for performance, and she wields the humiliations of the body, the exaggerated, comedic hyper-femininity to a different purpose. She debases herself as a statement against cruelty. After this, the rest of the show takes on a completely different tone, it’s as if she’s tenderizedthem with her gesture of submission.

Hannah Wilke, the slender beauty who presented herself—often nude—in her own work and was vilified for it by “fascist feminists” (her term), we cast her with a student whose physical type, on the surface, appears to be the very opposite of Wilke (fig 8). Marisa Albano is fat, unapologetically so. She is confidently and sensuously fat; beautifully fat. Not ashamed of it but delighting in her fatness. An out and proud dyke, she was attracted to the project because of its affective address. (I like feminism and feminism likes me? Hell yeah!) We cast her because of her bristling sensuous energy was like Wilke’s, yet her queer femininity rewrote the heterosexual (and heterocentric) squabbles of the 1970s.

8

Portrait of Marisa Albano as Hannah Wilke, in I Like Feminism and Feminism Likes Me, 2020, photograph by Irvin Rodriguez, Maria Rosa, Margaret Smith, Devin Ward

Michael Morrisey came to his part late in the project. He was a backstage person and did not consider auditioning for a role in the performance. But he stepped in temporarily during rehearsals when the actor playing Faith Ringgold couldn’t come. Michael’s a big guy. Close to 6 ft 4 or 5, large red beard, and he typical wore the sports casual uniform of the Staten Island straight man: ball cap, plaid shirt, jeans, and work boots. As an impromptu understudy, he read the lines of this outspoken Black woman with deadpan accuracy laced with some knowing (self) irony. His was a body out of place, so, we asked him if he would play Caroline Tisdall, Beuys’s translator, assistant, and his number one acolyte. Tisdall was, in our minds, a traitor to feminism, a woman who gave herself over to the charismatic male. So, to have her played by a man in (bad) drag seemed perfect. This type of heterosexual drag is both anti-gay and anti-woman, since both become objects of ridicule for the straight male performer in his clumsily applied make up and blousy clothes. While Christian and Kaidon were delighted to play with drag, Michael wasn’t. But this was also the point of casting him and the awkward discomfort that registered in his body language was pitch perfect for the role (fig. 9). He was a sketch of (failed) heterosexual pantomime drag. With only a Marilyn Monroe style blond wig—an emblem of 1950s nostalgia femininity and throwback to prefeminist days (not Tisdall’s actual style)—he kept his regular bro clothes and became a poignant memory of straight world drag. He was a kind of turncoat to the glorious mimicry of drag, an abject drag queen (without the queer trashiness), like Tisdall in relation to feminism.

9

Michael Morrisey as Caroline Tisdall in I Like Feminism and Feminism Likes Me, 2020, photograph by Maria Rosa, Margaret Smith, Devin Ward

September 2021. Back in Berlin again. Bliss! For the last two months I’ve been swimming in human beings. Not a day without people, people, people. Ah, humans! The Berlin clubs are not open yet, but O. has a friend who knows about an underground party. He was right, it is our kind of scene. I don’t mind doing the Berghain door test performance, but no-one cares here about your appearance. Reality Check—there’s no bar, bring your own libations and mind alterations. Dancing in communal partnership with old friends, new friends, and strangers. We are the music; the music is us. Crackling, sparkling, smiling, glowing at each other. At 5 a.m. the police come. Berlin cops aren’t like New York cops. One of the dancer-organizers tells us all we should leave, walk around the block, go to a bar, and come back in half an hour. So, we do. The party is back on. We go home after dawn to walk the dogs and realize it’s the Berlin marathon. Before breakfast we saw the frontrunners, a group of East Africans, otherworldly in their sculpted grace. A couple of hours later fueled on coffee and croque messieurs, we sit on the curb to enjoy the rest of humanity streaming past. All bodies, all ages, all types of people, and all with their own individual style of running. At the four-hour mark, you see a world of beautiful contrasts. A magnificent white boy has stepped off a Greek vase, taut body in an elegant tick tock rhythm of coordinated limbs, he glides by with a scrawny senior citizen who seems to rattle along like a rusty marionette, but they miraculously keep apace together. A curvy middle-aged beauty in full pancake makeup worthy of a drag queen runs next to a blindman tethered to a running guide. There are plenty of grey faced zombies at this point and at least one Frankenstein. Some are just walking or limping, clutching their sides to suppress a stitch (or worse). Then there’s someone dressed as a pickle! Undoubtedly, everyone has a story to tell. It’s like the dance floor again writ large, now painfully beautiful, but epic in scope.

I was asked to chair a panel discussion (postponed because of the pandemic) with the artists Howardena Pindell, Tourmaline, and the curator Ayeesha Williams of the Laundromat Project. I am honored, but all too aware of being a (white) body out of place. Our conversation followed the screening of Pindell’s searing video Free, White, and 21 (1980) and Tourmaline’s lushly beautiful films Salacia (2019) and Atlantic is a Sea of Bones (2017). It was part of a conference that had originally been scheduled for March 2020, but it was postponed due to the pandemic and now presented in 2021 in the familiar disembodied online format.^[18] The original live event would have been the same week as I Like Feminism.

Pindell was not invited to the Stanhope breakfast in 1974, but she might have been. She was part of the founding artists’ collective for the first all-female run art gallery in New York, A.I.R. Gallery, established in 1972.^[19] As the only Black woman in the group, I imagined that Free, White, and 21 is informed by her experiences there. So, I asked her, and she talked about some of this. Her painful stories, both on the video and in the panel discussion, of racist disdain by a predominantly white art world and hostile white University environment were chilling (she left a job at MoMA to teach painting at SUNY Stonybrook). But more than this, it was the disbelief from her white feminist colleagues that added salt to the wounds. In Free, White, and 21 she dramatizes this dismissal in a provocative staging of whiteface minstrelsy—racial drag in reverse.

The video, which should rightly be seen as a “classic” feminist work, engages with some of the central tropes of feminist video art. Femininity as masquerade is combined with the fracturing of the videoed self in numerous examples including work by Joan Jonas, Lynda Benglis, Martha Rosler, and many others. These ideas are reprised by Pindell in this sharply original standalone tape (she didn’t work again in video until 2020). Pindell plays herself remembering, in the controlled disassociation of a witness statement, various instances of racist dismissal, discrimination, and (epistemic) violence. After each anecdote, we see Pindell as her Caucasian counterpart, “masked” in whiteface, blond wig, and dark glasses responding in patronizing words of skeptical disbelief (figs. 10, 11). Both characters speak directly to the camera, evoking numerous other types of direct address videography, such as Vito Acconic’s Command Performance (1974) and Jonas’ Good Night and Good Morning (1976). As the back-and-forth format proceeds, the Howardena character begins to awkwardly wrap her head in a bandage. This is a reference to, and visual manifestation of the psychical injury that resulted from being a victim of casual racism. Pindell’s use of the bandage also evokes Ralph Ellison’s metaphor of racist invisibilizing, in his classic 1952 novel Invisible Man. This connection is channeled through metonymic association with the B-movie character of the same name. The invisible man of the movie (assumed to be white, although we don’t ever see him) can only appear when his body is bandaged.

10

Howardena Pindell, Free, White, and 21, video still (08:02)

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Howardena Pindell, Free, White, and 21, video still (01:40)

Pindell’s more than forty-year struggle with hostility and dismissal in a white dominated artworld and academy seemed to mark a generational shift when compared to the two younger panelists. Williams and Tourmaline present narratives that celebrate black love not pain, their approaches bring the politics of care to the forefront. However, I don’t think the difference is simply generational, but it’s one of milieu and also of affect. Pindell described surviving in toxic white dominated environments and the younger women seemed to understand this all too well. But the milieus that defined the creative lives of Williams and Tourmaline were majority Black and the institutions that sustained them were steeped in a long and necessary history of Black care.^[20] Tourmaline spent her formative years working at the Sylvia Rivera Law Project (established 2002) dedicated to advocating for low income and POC transgender, intersex, and/ or gender non-conforming youth. A Black transgender woman herself, she worked closely with, and was sustained in solidarity and love by her queer-mother Miss Major (a key trans figure in the Stonewall Riots). Tourmaline’s art, personhood, and values are grounded in the affirmation and positivity nurtured by Major and others, and this radiated like an aura even over the zoom screen (fig. 12). Likewise, the Laundromat Project, where Williams works, now open in a permanent location in Bushwick, Brooklyn, brings artists together with their neighbors. With an emphasis on artists of color, the mission is to support, “sustained investments in growing a community of multiracial, multigenerational, and multidisciplinary artists and neighbors committed to societal change.”^[21] Williams also spoke eloquently about the project’s centering of self-care and black love.

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Miss Major (left) and Tourmaline, photograph by Mickalene Thomas on the cover of Out, 12 February 2019

These community spaces of art and legal advocacy, as well as the queer relationality performed in Slag Wars, have long been the intentional pioneers of a complex politics of care. This is forged from the experience of injury and indifference and is necessary for survival. The work of poor curating also finds itself occupying an embattled place in which care-work is fraught. “Caregiving,” as Maggie Nelson reminds us, is “historically and psychically interwoven with disintegration, failure, inequity, and coercion.”^[22] It’s not the labor of selfless maternal giving, of self-sacrifice, but a negotiation of our desires and needs with those of the other. I Like Feminism and Feminism Likes Me, was one experiment in this kind of affective labor. Both its failures and successes were part of the work of poor curating.

October 2022. It’s been months since I saw M. and her daughter A. So long that 6-year-old A. doesn’t remember me, but she knows I am part of her mom’s life, of her life. When I leave, I hug M. tightly and A. pushes her way in. It’s a girl hug, she tells us. Driving home I am catapulted back to the girl gangs of my past. Before adolescence, the gang was ruled by a girl bully. These were bad years. The girl bully doesn’t draw blood, she manipulates, pitting one against the other. We managed to break free of her reign moving up to high school. Things got much better, which is good, because they also got a lot worse. We had fallings out and shifting alliances, but no one was in charge. We taught each other to be feminists. Feminism was the only antidote to rape culture, the dawning realization of the extent of our insignificance, and so much projected shame. Long before it was an academic subject or an art historical method, it was just how we raised ourselves. And yes, there were lots of girl hugs.

It was a pleasure to work with Oskar Korsár on writing the script and directing the performance in the fall of 2019 and the spring of 2020. This project would not have been possible without this exciting, challenging, and inspiring collaboration. I’m grateful to Sean Edgecomb, Nish Gera, Wendy Lee, Vered Maimon, and Mickela Sonola who read this text in various stages and offered their insights, suggestions, and encouragement.