Column

Writer

Contemporary Feminisms

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Painting

An obituary for American artist Gerald Ferguson is presented.

Obituary: Gerald Ferguson, 1937-2009

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Artists Books

Multiples

The article previews several information resources including the book “Public Arts in Canada: Critical Perspectives,” edited by Annie Gérin and James S. McLean, the catalogue “Gardens of a Colonial Present/Jardins d'un Present Colonial,” by Ron Benner, and the foldable cardboard multiple for the miniature contemporary art gallery from John Marriott.

Noteworthy: Contemporary Feminisms 

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Editorial

It is with great excitement that I introduce this issue, which could not be timelier for many reasons. In recent years, there has been what seems like countless exhibitions dealing with feminist practices in contemporary art, including but not limited to the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art’s touring show _WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution_ (plus responses by local galleries to wack! when it was mounted in Vancouver, such as Artspeak’s _Persistence: An Archive of Feminist Practices_ and VIVO Media Art’s, _THE AFTER PARTY_); the Brooklyn Museum’s _Global Feminisms; Shared Women_ at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions; _The F-Word_ at Vancouver’s Western Front; _Martha Wilson: Staging the Self_ at the Dalhousie Art Gallery in Halifax; and Allyson Mitchell’s _Ladies Sasquatch_, exhibited most recently at the Art Gallery of Lethbridge. While all of these exhibitions either explicitly or implicitly suggest a need to pause and consider the current state of feminism and feminist art practice, it may be a daunting task to authoritatively describe and represent such a diverse set of movements. With this difficulty in mind, this issue of _C Magazine_ instead attempts to further expand the parameters of how we might talk about and understand contemporary feminisms.

Two of the feature essays in this issue engage art and cultural practices that are inflected by both feminist and queer politics. In Jen Hutton’s “God and the Gaze,” about Lady Gaga and feminist camp performance, the writer references Gaga’s televised dedication of her MTV Video Music Awards trophy to “god and the gays.” While Hutton describes an important parallel between Lady Gaga’s fluid gender identity and exaggerated femininity, and the camp femininity of gay male performers, by no means does she suggest that this signals a return to oppressive gender norms. As hyper-feminine, Gaga inhabits this position in such a way that, as Hutton argues, she is not just an object of sexual desire, but is a desiring subject. Paradoxically, through her performance of what might normally be understood as a straight identity, Lady Gaga invokes a spirit that is distinctly queer.

Similarly, Emily Roysdon’s image-text project _Ecstatic Resistance_ is deeply engaged with both feminist and queer politics. However, she attempts to move beyond existing theoretical models of identity and of the political that limit what can be understood and achieved. In her theses on ecstatic resistance, Roysdon outlines “a positionality of the impossible” through which to rethink sexual difference, and articulate new relationships between the imagination and the body. Concerned with a larger reorganization of the cultural imaginary, she argues for the invocation of what is unspeakable, unthinkable and unimaginable, as a strategy by which to undermine a phallocentric and Eurocentric way of organizing the world.

Roysdon, and Helena Reckitt in her essay “Who Was that Woman?,” further propose an engagement with history and temporality that is carefully attuned to gender and sexual identity. Among other images, Roysdon includes a film still from Ulrike Ottinger’s 1981 movie _Freak Orlando_, which presents a mythological history ofthe world based, in part, on Virginia Woolf’s _Orlando_. Reckitt, similarly, examines some of the ways contemporary feminist artists have engaged with women artists of previous generations, as a way of destabilizing hegemonic narratives of history and excavating unrealized possibilities from the past. This examination functions as a form of what Elizabeth Freeman calls “temporal crossing”: identification across generations, or even epochs, akin to gender crossing.[^1]

The cover of this issue depicts a public art project by Jeanine Oleson called The Greater New York Smudge Cleanse (2008), where a ten-foot long sage smudge stick was used to ritualistically cleanse areas of New York City including Greenpoint and Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn, and the West Village in Manhattan. The performance shown on the cover, a response to the anxiety that followed the stock market crash in the fall of 2008, and the growing condemnation of US economic imperialism, was held at Wall Street’s Federal Hall, the site of George Washington’s presidential inauguration, the day before the 2008 American presidential election. By invoking the past as a symbolic reference point, while simultaneous engaging the present, this project works as a form of imaginary crossing, an act of ecstatic resistance that aims to cleanse Wall Street and George Washington. These ideas of real and symbolic transformation are further extended with an artist project by Onya Hogan-Finlay, who inserts a queer presence into the rural landscape through her drawing practice. Her work, however, contrasts 60s and 70s feminisms, which attempted to describe a universal experience of women through the alignment of their bodies with nature, primarily through reproduction. Onya Hogan- Finlay’s centrefold is irreverently and ecstatically engaged with back-to-nature feminist imagery and recognizable Canadian icons.

In conjunction with this print edition, our website, www.cmagazine.com, will be featuring additional material, for those seeking further information, as well as for students in specialized art programs who are using _C Magazine_ in their studies. These resources include study guides for Jen Hutton’s “God and the ‘Gaze’: A Visual Reading of Lady Gaga,” and Emily Roysdon’s “Ecstatic Resistance,” and a list of readings and and exhibitions related to this issue’s theme.

As we are about to go to press, we are aware of the magnitude of what there is to say and write about this topic. There was much that we simply could not fit into this issue of the magazine. However, feminism isn’t simply an isolated concern. As this issue reveals, it informs many other movements, practices, and discourses, and importantly, it does not speak to or include only one gender. Contemporary feminism is relevant to every issue of _C Magazine_, and as a subject for critical writing and practice, it doesn’t end here.

[^1]: Elizabeth Freeman, “Packing History, Counter(ing) Generations.” New Literary History vol. 31, no. 4, (Autumn 2000), 727–744.

Amish Morrell is Assistant Professor at OCAD University, where he teaches Criticism & Curatorial Practice, and Visual and Critical Studies.

Editor

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Feminism

Sexuality

Gender

The article discusses various reports published within the issue, including one by Jen Hutton on singer Lady Gaga, another by Emily Roysdon on feminist and queer politics, and another by Helena Rickett on history attuned to gender and sexual identity.

Editorial: Contemporary Feminisms

Feature

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Music

The article focuses on 2009 MTV's Best New Artist Stefani Germanotta, better known as Lady Gaga. Lady Gaga is the third artist to earn three number one hit singles from a debut album.Lady Gaga has been incessantly watched not only for her disco-and glam-rock melodies but also for her outrageous fashion.

God and the "GAZE:" A Visual Reading of Lady Gaga

Deborah Root writes on cultural politics and the arts.

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Politics

Location

International

The article focuses on Turkish artists Hale Tenger and Mürüvvet Türkyilmaz, both from Izmir, Turkey. It notes that Tenger's works project narrative of the evolution of Turkey as a nation from Islamic to a secular state and genealogy of style, whose famous works include Never, Never Land, Strange Fruit, and Portrait of a Woman. It notes that Türkyilmaz's installations are site-specific but complex personal meditations of people across space and time such as The Face of Placement in 1997, Point of View in 2000, and Fence in 2003.

Istanbul: Hale Tender and Mürüvvet Türkyilmaz

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Activism

The article focuses on the different expressions and implicit representations of Ecstatic Resistance. It presents images of resistance which expresses the author's understanding and desire to connect ideas in terms of the impossible, imaginary, plasticity, pleasure, and communication. It notes that Ecstatic Resistance postulates the positionality of the impossible, creates the necessity of the imaginary, and asserts the centrality of plasticity. It aids the great feminist thinkers to unbound the sexual difference in the imaginary and change the rule that the woman has a different body from a man.

Ecstatic Resistance

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Women

Identity

The article discusses the different artistic ways of Danish artist Pia Rönicke and Dutch artist Manon de Boer in reconstructing richness and complexities to the lives of women who have been stereotyped, reduced, and erased in society. It states that Polish artist Paulina Olowska and German artist Susanne M. Winterling enact a more intense identification with their subjects. It notes that the four women artists position themselves as pedagogical students of their new adopted mentors. It adds that revisiting the female past of the forgotten artists can restore the potential of their artistic work.

Who Was that Woman?

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Chris Lee is a graphic designer and educator based in Buffalo, New York and Toronto. His research explores graphic design’s entanglement with power, standards and legitimacy. Chris is an Assistant Professor at the University at Buffalo SUNY.

Designer

Publisher

Artist Project

Artist

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Canadian

Drawing

Features Onya Hogan-Finlay, a curator and interdisciplinary artist who co-founded the exhibition of artists books, zines and independent publications in the MOBILIVRE\-BOOKMOBILE project that toured North America in an Airstream trailer from 2001 to 2005.

O.H.F + U.S.A= M.F.A and Positive/Negative Space

Review

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Installation

History

Myth

The article reviews the exhibition “Iris Häussler: He Named Her Amber” at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, Ontario.

Iris Häussler: He Named Her Amber

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Collecting

The article reviews the exhibition “Yvonne Singer-Random Objects: Random Thoughts” at the Gallery of Akau Inc. in Toronto, Ontario.

Yvonne Singer - Random Objects: Random Thoughts

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The article reviews the exhibition “Francis Alÿs: Fabiola” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in Los Angeles, California.

Francis Alÿs: Fabiola

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Photography

Landscape

The article reviews the exhibition “Lorraine Field: Vanishing Point” at the Saint Mary's University Art Gallery in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Lorraine Field: Vanishing Point

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The article reviews the exhibition “Ars Memoriae: Eve K. Tremblay's Book People” at the Galerie Donald Browne in Montreal, Quebec.

Ars Memoriae: Eve K. Tremblay's Book People

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Sculpture

Family

Pop culture

The article reviews the untitled exhibition of Colette Whiten at Susan Hobbs Gallery Inc. in Toronto, Ontario.

Colette Whiten

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Travel

The article reviews the book “The Importance of Being Iceland: Travel Essays in Art,” by Eileen Myles.

The Importance of Being Iceland: Travel Essays in Art, by Eileen Myles

The article reviews the book “The F Word,” by Alissa Firth-England, Candice Hopkins, and Karen Henry.

The F Word, Essays by Alissa Firth-England Candice Hopkins, Karen Henry, and an interview with Lisa Steele by Firth-England. Artists' works by Lisa Robertson and Kristina Lee Podesva.

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Publishing

The article offers information on the fourth annual New York Art Book Fair, which was held at the P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in New York City on October 2-4, 2009\. The event featured around 200 exhibitors and several special project spaces, with the Canada as the featured country.

Report on the New York Art Book Fair

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Issue 104