Conclusion

The conclusion foregrounds the claim that the artists whose artwork is the focus of Addressing the other woman – Adrian Piper, Nancy Spero, and Mary Kelly – deployed texts and images of writing to create an address that calls to viewers and asks them to participate in the project of deconstructing the sign woman. The conclusion also underscores that this artwork not only attests to the attention women artists paid to visual and textual appearance language in the late 1960s and 1970s, but also suggests feminism’s wide and rich historical impact. The writings of Angela Davis, Valerie Solanas, and Laura Mulvey help to highlight this impact, as they provide detailed historical frames for seeing the artwork’s interventions. Pointing to the work of psychoanalyst Juliet Mitchell and feminism’s struggles against the longevity of patriarchy, this last chapter argues that the artists’ and writers’ shared attention to language underscores the possibility and difficulty of reconfiguring the sign woman in the linguistic structure of the patriarchal unconscious..

Feminist desires and collective reading in the work of Laura Mulvey

Chapter 6 focuses on Laura Mulvey’s theoretical writings on film and her essay film Riddles of the Sphinx (1977), which it reads in relation to the feminist collaboration between Kelly and Mulvey that took place at the height of Women’s Liberation in Britain. Like Post-Partum Document, Riddles of the Sphinx creates a hieroglyphic aesthetic that mines the feminist possibilities of repressed maternal desires and draws out their connections to British colonial history. Replete with images of writing, the consistent attention to text in Riddles is the means by which Mulvey represents the pleasures of the maternal bond and transfers them into a form of fetishisation that opens onto collaborations between women that move across the lines of race and class. By placing the hieroglyph and the colonial extractions for which it figures in the context of women’s atomised struggles with reproductive labour in late capitalism, Riddles writes collective feminist reading practices that might allow women to correspond across the divisions created by colonial, racial, and class hierarchies and therefore create what Mulvey identifies in ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ (1975), as a ‘new language of desire.’

Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto and the texts of aggression

Focused on the infamous SCUM Manifesto (1967), chapter 4 examines how Valerie Solanas deployed language as a weapon capable of ‘cutting up’ patriarchal authority and demonstrates how her history as a feminist lesbian of the 1960s helps evoke a historical milieu that brings the stakes of Codex Artaud into relief. Solanas wrote at western feminism’s most violent edge – and was perceived to be a monster for doing so. Reading Solanas as both an icon of the feminist lesbian but also the ambitious writer of a tightly crafted manifesto, this chapter traces how Solanas wrote to reject the expectation that women renounce their aggression. An Artaud-like figure who also embodies madness, Solanas’s attempted murder of Andy Warhol demonstrates that this rejection can take a dangerously literal turn. More subtly, her murderous rage reveals the insanity that came from sustaining a protest alone, bereft of feminist collectivities or images that mirror the value of women’s transgressions. Drawing upon Mary Harron’s well-researched film I Shot Andy Warhol (1996), this chapter highlights Solanas’s history as an unruly feminist lesbian who, with connections to Warhol, Pop Art, Marilyn Monroe, and the typewriter, exemplifies the risks and possibilities of refusing to become an image of feminine submission and sexual availability..

Writing the drives in Nancy Spero’s Codex Artaud

Chapter 3 is devoted to Nancy Spero’s Codex Artaud (1971–72), an epic artwork in which she orchestrated typewritten texts and painted images to seize the monstrosity attributed to white women if they do not stay within patriarchal constraints. The chapter analyses Codex Artaud as a feminist claim to women’s aggressive capacities and all they connect to: sexuality, disorder, insanity, and protest, but also the capacity to represent oneself as other. The reading focuses on Spero’s conflicted engagement with Antonin Artaud’s writings and the fact that though he was insane, he was able to command the patriarchal orders of language to create a mobile range of self-representations. Spero’s engagement with Artaud’s texts produced a form of writing that both emulates and critiques the masculine privileges that make such self-representations of otherness possible, thereby revealing the aggression from which women in western culture have been traditionally barred. To evoke the psychic mechanisms that enforce this exclusion, the chapter turns to Sigmund Freud’s definition of sexuality in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905) and his articulation of the expectation that women should not indulge in the pleasures of aggression, but should instead create aesthetically pleasing images devoid of shame and disgust..

Letters from an imaginary enemy, Angela Davis

Chapter 2 analyses Angela Davis’s written reflections on her transformation into the ‘imaginary enemy’ of the US nation-state. A spectacle in the most consequential sense, the iconic images of Davis telegraphed across American visual culture in the early 1970s, many of which highlight her Afro, demonstrate that the black female body is perceived to be a malleable ground upon which fears and fantasies of racial and sexual difference can take visual form. Beginning with the FBI’s ‘Wanted’ poster of her, this chapter tracks the images of Davis that circulated through the American media and came close to inscribing the accusation of her criminality into legal truth and commonly held belief. I argue that Davis’s ordeal demonstrates that visual culture serves as a site where the pathologies of racism and sexism compound each other and force black women into positions of subordination, and that it therefore offers a powerful context for understanding the stakes of Piper’s textual interventions into the iconicity of the black female body. Reading a range of Davis’s writings (her autobiography, her letters to George Jackson, her own defence statement) in relation to Piper’s artwork, this chapter shows that Davis also deployed language to contest the legacies of ‘ungendering’ and undo the visual logics that have determined black women’s visibility..

Rewriting maternal femininity in Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document

The subject of chapter 5 is the installation Post-Partum Document (1973–79). The chapter traces how Mary Kelly’s engagement with the visual appearance of language became a tool to deconstruct idealised myths of maternal femininity. By taking material desires – so often pathologised – as her aesthetic subject, Kelly challenged white ideals of maternal femininity as an identity women naturally assume. Crucial to this challenge was the psychoanalytic argument that through pregnancy and the first months of infant care, women re-experience their psychic lives before their negative entry into the Oedipus Complex. Kelly shows that mining the feminine pre-Oedipal for its affective and aesthetic plenitude opens up the feminist possibility that women can do more than serve as the ground for patriarchal losses; they can actually compose their own forms of fetishisation, a ‘language’ capable of writing women’s desires into cultural visibility. Kelly draws upon the visual language of the hieroglyph to represent this fetishisation. And with elegant hieroglyphic forms, Post-Partum Document touches upon the legacies of British colonial history and its manifestations as metropolitan racism in the London of the 1970s. As Kelly demonstrates, this structural racism was consolidated through the naturalisation of maternal femininity that Post-Partum Document puts into question.

Adrian Piper’s textual address

Chapter 1 begins by analysing Adrian Piper’s engagement with the textual dimensions of Conceptual Art in the late 1960s and the ways in which it aligned with her work in Kantian philosophy to develop the aesthetic and perceptual conditions that allow for an encounter with what she identifies as the ‘singular reality of the “other.”’ The chapter then turns to the artwork Piper produced after 1970, a year of political upheaval in which she began to work with text and writing to expose the visual pathologies of racism and sexism, which she identifies as ‘defensive rationalizations’. By tracing the transformations of her oeuvre across the 1970s, this chapter demonstrates how Piper’s artwork enacts the ways in which racism and sexism call black women into narrow forms of visibility while also exposing the historically entrenched habits for projecting fears and fantasies on to black women’s bodies. To bring the black feminist stakes of Piper’s artwork into relief, I read it through Hortense Spillers’s (1987) concepts of ‘telegraphing’ – the means by which iconic images of black women have been transmitted across American culture – and ‘ungendering’ – the specific form of abjection inflicted upon black women in the transatlantic slave trade that reverberates into the present..

Introduction: addressing the other woman

This chapter introduces the importance of text and images of writing for feminist art practices in the late 1960s and 1970s. Beginning with the 2008 exhibition WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, it demonstrates that an engagement with language was a significant part of women artists’ efforts to resist the ways in which late-twentieth-century visual culture reinforces the idea that women should serve as the other of patriarchal culture. The introduction presents the three artists who are the focus of the book – Adrian Piper, Nancy Spero, and Mary Kelly – and argues that the ‘writerly’ qualities of the artwork they produced in the 1970s undermines the visual dominance of spectacle culture and the production of woman as a sign that represents passivity and sexual availability. The introduction also makes a case for pairing the artwork of Piper, Spero, and Kelly with the writings of Angela Davis, Valerie Solanas, and Laura Mulvey. In aligned historical contexts, these writers also addressed the limited range of images through which women were allowed to appear, and thereby suggest what it means to receive the artwork’s call to other women to collaborate on the project of creating a feminist imaginary.