Adrian Piper and Trinh T. Minh-Ha - Brief Article

I feel privileged to have gone to school at a time (School of Visual Arts, 1981-85) when women artists were key figures. Barbara Kruger, Cindy Sherman, Laurie Simmons, Sarah Charlesworth, Sherrie Levine, Louise Lawler, Mary Kelly, and some others who perhaps didn't fit into the mainstream (white) world, like Adrian Piper and Trinh T. Minh-Ha. Feminism was everything then; it was cool and accessible, and women weren't the only ones talking about it. Photography was a tool, a material way to attack, critique, and demand. It was very empowering to be at panel discussions, and most of the participants were women. In fact, it was something I soon took for granted. Watching Carol Squiers and Richard Prince, who essentially agreed with one another, argue about the cover of Madamoiselle was as MTV as the art world got. Feminism was what drew me into art making--the idea that one could take a politic and blow it up and shout an opinion into the white cube. For me, it was a continuation of the education I received reading my mother's Ms. magazines. But the feminism of the eighties as it pertained to the art world also disturbed me. Like any ism, it did not fit everybody like a glove. The discussion between us and them or you and me, in, for example, Kruger's work (in all of them in less obvious ways) always revolved around a male dominant. It was as if all this energy was feeding into the male ego. Part and parcel of the psychological burden of fighting a gender that most of those artists were wed to, I felt as though women never discussed each other, but rather, they defined themselves by the battle with men. (We had this joke then in school that all these political women were really home talking on the phone, flipping through Vogue, whining about boyfriends. The lucky ones got to go to Comme des Garcons.) But that was fine, because the lack of a "homosocial" (not exclusively homosexual) discourse was what instigated my own work. I really just started to make art because I felt like no one was talking to or about me.

Of course, this changed in the nineties. I think it is the duty of every young artist to battle their inheritance. Usually, if you're lucky, you still have a few idols standing when you hit thirty. I also realized that one never "works it out" in one's lifetime. You chip away at ideas and build something, but that something is never the total answer. For me, my work started out being very didactic. I used the tool of appropriation and tried to personalize it by collecting handwritten texts from friends. The work introduced in the advertising-driven works of Prince and Kruger a depiction of homosexual dialogue, particularly revolving around the notion of a second adolescence to replace a closeted primary one. Now it is an open road. If gender contradictions were the focus in the late eighties, presently it is about how the character moves, not what their make-up is. I'm more interested in national than sexual identity, particularly in the case of Germans and Jews. I don't pretend to provide an answer, but rat her to pull at the questions.

What feminist theory I had when I was in school has slowly evaporated. I remember that I thought Craig Owens was smart, but I also remember straining in his class to understand some of the inside theory and art historical jokes that went over my nineteen-year-old head. I would say that someone like Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, who has become a bit of a cliche, has made reading dense texts more attractive. But I suspect in part this is because she riffs off literature, which I have always leaned toward, rather than art history. Now I make and talk about my work more intuitively. The joy of building on your own visual vocaboualry is almost intoxicating. And it is the real reward of keeping at it for an extended period.

I once heard a story about a very well known female artist of my generation who was not happy identifying herself as a feminist. Perhaps she found the label limiting. For me, I just assume if you're a woman and you have a brain, you're a feminist. Why wouldn't you be? But perhaps, I would not be considered a good feminist by some people, among them ex-students of mine, who might have found me too overbearing, sacrilegious, and not nurturing enough to be a good feminist. I have come to realize that each generation has a different relationship and claim to and with the term. For me it feels nostalgic in a really good and positive way.

Collier Schorr is an artist and writer living in Brooklyn and Swabisch Gmund, Germany. She is Editor-at-Large for the British arts magazine, Frieze, and has also written for Parkett, Artforum, and Harpers Bazaar. She is represented by 303 Gallery.

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