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Sonya Rapoport I never felt I was a woman; I knew I was an artist. When I received my M.A. in art, my professor said it was a shame that all this was wasted because soon I would have children. Art was Art and I accepted my place in the traditional art world just as I accepted my place as a wife and mother --entangled in genes that that were embedded within the social context of genetic essentialism. Within these parameters I worked hard. I was driven. Fifteen years later I became a member of the John Bolles Gallery in San Francisco. I participated in group shows, some held at the San Francisco Museum of Art, the Oakland and de Young Museums. The California Palace of the Legion of Honor was a venue for a one-person exhibition. Each step, taken on my own, with no colleagues to help, was very difficult. Nevertheless, I was content and even grateful. I took no part in the support of the emerging feminist palette of autobiographical anedotes that were without formal art structure. As I approached middle age, I was told, much to my surprise, that my five-foot long black braid was no longer a sexual threat. Maybe that was one reason why I had had such a hard time. Yes, in one way or another, gender had played its discriminating role. However, in the 70's I started working on computer assisted multi-media projects. According to sociology theory when there is a new wave the gates are opened and there are new gatekeepers. Opportunities for exhibiting my new media works were extended to far-out and far-away places. Jock Truman, former director of the Betty Parsons Gallery, had opened his own cutting edge gallery and promoted my computer orientated productions. The Peabody Museum at Harvard exhibited this work. A collector gave a piece to the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. This was the beginning of a new freedom and a new confidence. At the same time it was distancing me from an external control. Eventually, I became my own agent on the web. Contiguously, feminist theory has been making headway. I now view the clustered cries of early female art expressions as necessary revolutionary breakthroughs. Eventually gender label distinction will dissolve into a body of art that includes the life of the art that energizes it. Will it emerge as a test-tube fetus with no challenging gender contradictions?
Responses:
From: Nancy Paterson I've always wanted to tell you that you are a pioneer in this field and as such it's good to hear you articulate that 'eventually gender label distinctions will dissolve into a body of art that includes the life of the art that energizes it.' In answer to your question 'will it emerge as a test-tube fetus with no challenging gender contradictions' - we'll be facing other more immediate and important contradictions - slavery, issues of identity, bio-technology...in this sense and on this scale, gender won't matter.
From: Anne-Marie Schleiner Date: August 9, 1999 In response to "Eventually gender label distinction will dissolve into a body of art that includes the life of the art that energizes it. Will it emerge as a test-tube fetus with no challenging gender contradictions?" This brings to mind some of the "entities" I have encountered through net.art venues, beings who seem neither female nor male and also both. Gender does not only reside on the flesh body but is also engraved in speech patterns and language... however in some of these instances new languages have been developed, pidgeon fusions of "upper level" human speech and programming code which seem to effectivly elude and encompass either catagory (or catagories), even the unmarked generic gender catagory.(ie male) The "poetry" emitted from these entities (for example the common language developed on the 711 list and the utterings of creatures like jodi, meta and antiorp) recalls the sort of beings common to science fiction, rampage AI's that defy human gender catagories and also escape the notion of a fixed core individual identiy yet display emotion and intellegence as multifareous forms. (I am thinking of cyberpunk fiction by authors like Pat Cadigan and Niel Stephenson.)
From: Marjorie Franklin In the early 1960's, when I was 19, I got my 1st programming job working on the Apollo progect. I was handed a FORTRAN manual and an engineering problem and told to create a program to solve the problem. I did so with some help from fellow members of the programming unit I had joined - most of whom were women - most of whom didn't have an engineering degree. This was before one could major in computer science. One was taught on the job. Fifteen years later I re-entered the field after a ten-year absence. I was the only female in my programming unit - and the only member with a non-computer science degree. Somehow after the field was raised in status and computer science became a degree separate from electrical engineering, women mostly stopped being programmers. Now I teach at the University of Minnesota and am setting up an Electronic Art area of concentration within the Art Department. Many universities are hiring faculty to do something like this now. Sonya is a pioneer in this field. Will it be harder for other women when computer based art is recognized and codified in to academia? Much has changed since the 1960's, but sometimes I get depressed at how much has stayed the same.
From: Sonya Rapoport Marjorie, How I envy any computer/engineering training that you and other women have had. In 1984, in spite of a horrendous experience of auditing an electrical engineering graduate course on geometric modeling at Berkeley, I thought there was future hope of a convergence and emergence of tech and art. Now I find these elements largely separating into "tech" productions manned by large crews. of men? of women? I do not know the gender percentages but this is how I am reading your "codified" computer based art in academia. Keep it up Marjorie, we need your (female) help to keep the art in balance.
From: Carolyn P. Speranza "I never felt I was a woman; I knew I was an artist." Here is my question, "Do our uteruses dictate how women make art?" How much does our biology influence who we are and what we do? A doctor friend of mine says "the body speaks." We could contradict that with "mind over matter." Which will it be? Does art come from our body or our minds? I love having a uterus. If I had a penis, I am sure I would love having that too. What happens if in the future, as one Startrek episode would have it, we are all androgynous beings, stripped of gender, birthing our kin in pods. Where would we be without the joy of pregancy and impregnation? Would we finally be at peace about gender differences if there were none and what would we lose in this sea of sameness? And likewise, do we define art by our tools or how we use them?
From: Carolyn Guertin Is art not the process of making new tools? I have spoken with a number of hypertext authors about this and we all agree that every new project we undertake is not backed up by existing software. Every new hypertext that we write requires us to play with the technology in new ways, to find methods of realizing our vision with approaches never intended by the software designers. How many women among us have formal computer training? How many of us are self-taught hacks that use our fight with our own lack of expertise as a way of expanding the possibilities of the new media? Is this not the essence of the artistic process? Using the limitations of the medium to open new horizons?
From: Anna Couey Mulling Carolyn's question, "Do our uteruses dictate how women make art?" and the ongoing thread here about doing we want the eradication of gender difference...I think the key with feminism is not eradication of gender difference, but the eradication of oppression, in whatever form it takes...as Nancy alludes to when she says, "..slavery, issues of identity bio-technology...in this sense and on this scale, gender won't matter. It's hard for me to imagine that gender difference will erode...as Carolyn points out, our bodies are ourselves. Judy can write in Forward/Anywhere about what it feels like to walk into an office for an important meeting and realizing that one's tampon is overflowing (paraphrasing here, so I may have the details slightly off!)...women know what that is. And I do believe art comes from experience. But does the uterus dictate? Last summer when Judy asked me to write an intro paper on telecommunications art by women, I spent some time trying to decide whether there was a female aesthetic in the medium. Any category I came up with, I could find men who had done similar work. Ultimately, it seemed more important to look at what women were doing, and what they said about what they were doing, and to situate their work in the historical and political contexts of gender, oppression, and mass media.
From: Carolyn Guertin Anna Couey raises an interesting question: what is a female/feminist aesthetic? Can we define one? Or, perhaps more importantly, is defining one useful? Cyberfeminist Sadie Plant performs historical reclamation to define technology as always already female. Catherine Richards cautions that nostalgia is inherent in defining virtuality and/or technology as female. Donna Haraway calls for women to seize the tools of the makers and to use language as the one truly revolutionary tool. Sandy Stone and Katherine Hayles want the body reinserted into virtual information spaces. Rosi Braidotti sees cyberfeminist aesthetics as a liminal space for re-locations of cultural practices that embrace contradiction. Is any one of these cyberfeminist stances more right than another? Is it not more useful to speak of multiplicities of aesthetics? Do not all of these flights of thought have merit? In my studies of hypertext, I have often wrestled with difference. "Do women use hypertext differently from men?" is not a question that I have ever been able to answer, nor am I certain that it is a distinction that I want to make. Like Anna Couey, I too could name men who had used similar techniques in most approaches. However, I have found broad-based tendencies born largely of feminist politics and projects. M.D. Coverley's (Marjorie Luesebrink's) CD-ROM hypertext novel Califia gives the reader choices, multiple entrance points, nomadic methods of investigation, and lines of flight through the narrative. The reader is also invited to look upwards, to navigate by the stars, to enjoy the spinning constellations overhead, to soar free of the earth, of time, place and history. Michael Joyce's Twilight, A Symphony is positively claustrophic in contrast. The sky is used a ceiling, something that is constantly closing in and pinning the reader and the characters to the earth. The reader is constantly reminded that s/he needs to look up--but only in order to duck. Joyce is known for his guard fields (among other things), which deny the reader access to parts of the text until they have read other parts in sequence. As an undisputed "master" of the form, Joyce's mastery does not put trust in his reader in the same way that Coverley (or Sanfield or Malloy, etc., etc.) does. Tim McLaughlin, on the other hand, uses a nomadic approach much more like Coverley's in his 25 Ways to View a Photograph or in Notes Toward Absolute Zero. Is it useful, I wonder, to talk of gender distinctions in art? Is not the politics that inform the form and the project the point at hand? Collaboration, for example, seems to be one of these politics or aesthetics that women are much more likely to undertake than men. (Surely this is a difference in approach that we would still find desirable even if women's work were included in all of those anthologies about men in new media?) Judy and Robert Atkins raise this point elsewhere in this dialogue: "Isn't collaboration the essence of our dawning digital age, which has blurred every disciplinary--and other sort of--boundary?" Just look at the work that Judy Malloy has done with others--Cathy Marshall, Sonya Rapoport, to name two--or at the work that Jeannette Lambert (JeanNet) and Raquel Rivera have done. Could or would men have ever attempted dialogues like these--or like this online panel--and, if they had, how different might it be? Cyberfeminism's main goal is the blurring of boundaries, and collaboration is a key means of undermining notions of a unified self or a monolithic voice/author. Interactive art which incorporates the interactor as a part of the piece--where the piece is the subjective experience--involves relinquishing control and trusting the participant, allowing them to define the work of art for themselves. Can we gender trust--or control? Like Anna Couey, it is most important to me to find out what women are doing, rather than define differences in praxis.
From: Anna Couey Good questions! On the subject of collaboration, at least in the context of telecommunications art, it is difficult to draw a clear gender line. My first exposure to the medium in the early 1980s, was through the work of men. Roy Ascott was writing about collaborative work and altering hierarchical structures as inherent to telecommunications -- and he produced a number of collaborative works. Robert Adrian established what to my knowledge was the first international computer communication system for collaborative telecommunications art. In an interview I did with Sherrie Rabinowitz, she makes connections between feminism and collaborative art, but cautions against reading into it more than is there. She and Kit Galloway formulated their collaborative work together. It's complex...women in the white US culture I know best are typically more readily collaborative in daily life than men, and I think, more able to share power. Another kind of distinction, which Karen O'Rourke identified, is that women often work in what are traditionally thought to be "lesser" art forms -- teaching, photography...etc. I would add to that that in women's work, the lines between art making and life seem to be more tightly interwoven. In the text I am writing about telecommunications works initiated by women, the theme of sharing power is the common thread.
From: Carolyn Speranza
What type of collaboration would you two characterize as being male or
female? Here are some options: Frankly I find the stereo type of women being sharing and giving in collaboration wearing thin. In the arts, there is no telling how someone will behave to get the carrot. In my personal experience with telecommunications collaboratives, men introduced this medium to me. If I were to generalize, I would say, true, women are prone to gossip and "horizontal" style communication, but men love to set up networking structures to enable that style of communication. As we move towards, androgyny, trans and cross gender worlds, when will we leave the stereo types behind? and celebrate these new, hard to define, hybrid ways of being and communicating? and won't that be damn refreshing?
From: Judy Malloy
When I was at Xerox PARC working in the PAIR program -- the basis of which was collaboration -- an expert on the subject (don't have her name in front of me) spoke on the subject of different kinds of collaborations. She emphasized that no one kind of collaboration was "better" but also she laid out structures that she identified as typical in male/male collaborations; male/female collaborations; female/female collaborations; female/male collaborations. Cynthia Duval who was also at PARC at that time, is also very knowledgeable on the dynamics of collaborations.
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