Against "Women's Art"

on women artists & chris kraus' I LOVE DICK

“To be female still means being trapped within the purely psychological. No matter how dispassionate or large a vision of the world a woman formulates, whenever it includes her own experience and emotion, the telescope’s turned back on her. Because emotion’s just so terrifying the world refuses to believe that it can be pursued as discipline, as form.”

— I Love Dick (1998), Chris Kraus

Last year, my record was reviewed by a male music journalist who panned it on the basis that “relentless guts-spilling isn’t necessarily any more creatively worthy or valuable than simply making stuff up.” Earlier in the review, the male critic characterized Joni Mitchell’s legacy as one that encouraged young women artists (the word he used here was artists, but all the artists listed were women) to enter into a competition “to see how much brutal diary-entry detail can be squeezed into one song.”

The male critic argued that, for women (let’s do away with the facade of pretending we’re just talking about “artists” here), detailing one’s own “annus horribilis” has “clear commercial advantages.” The male critic notes that, under a more charitable interpretation, “such bold truth-telling offers catharsis, communion and comfort.” The best women artists can hope for, apparently, is to be a warm blanket for other similarly disturbed girls to crawl beneath. In Chris Kraus’ words, “as if the only possible reason for a woman to publicly reveal herself could be self-therapeutic.”

My art has often been called vulnerable, diaristic, and raw. When this happens, I wonder how critics assume I go about making my work. In the midst of mix-editing my second record, I am struck by just how much time one must spend with each individual song. You must listen hundreds of times in hundreds of ways — and that is after listening hundreds of times in hundreds of ways while creating it. It would be impossible to send a tear-stained journal entry straight through production without scrutiny, never mind the fact that art-making, for me, is not something I would describe as a “therapeutic” process. It is work and it behaves like work. I am detail-oriented and incredibly specific in my vision. The music is not my baby, because I am critical of it in a way I would never subject a living being to. I am capable of making more things with my body than children.

“Why is female vulnerability still only acceptable when it’s neuroticized and personal; when it feeds back on itself? Why do people still not get it when we handle vulnerability like philosophy, with some remove?”

— I Love Dick (1998), Chris Kraus

The male critic notes that not everything about my record is so maudlin: “Elsewhere she has a knack for framing the sore stuff in more interesting ways, using shifting viewpoints, irony and humor.” He respects the work more when there is an obvious distance between myself and the emotion, and perhaps it is difficult for him to reconcile how one could remain both deeply feeling and deeply critical — interested in and capable of transmuting not only emotional but philosophical truth.

Towards the end of the book, Kraus quotes artist Hannah Wilke: “If women have failed to make “universal” art because we’re trapped within the personal, why not universalize the “personal” and make it the subject of our art?” I’d like to believe men are smarter than they’re behaving these days, when they talk about art made by women (I have a particular revulsion to the term “women’s art” as of late — Kraus wonders “why every act that narrated female lived experience in the 70’s has been read only as “collaborative” and “feminist.” The Zurich Dadaists worked together too but they were geniuses and they had names”).

Is it really so that the pain of women stops men in their tracks so entirely, such that they neglect to investigate how and why the pain has been chosen to be expressed?The presence of a woman’s pain seems to dull every other attempt at communication — no matter if the pain is a vehicle to understand beauty or love or more fundamental questions about existence. For women, the pain is the pain is the pain. And, of course, this is somewhat the point. How dangerous would it be to believe that women are capable of transmuting their pain, transforming it, to represent something beyond that which is simply done to us.

Every woman artist will have the realization: to most men, your work will be an expression of the female experience instead of the human one.

“Whenever someone makes a breakthrough into honesty, that means not just self-knowledge but knowledge of what others can’t see. To be honest in a real absolute way is to be almost prophetic, to upset the applecart.”

— I Love Dick (1998), Chris Kraus (quoting David Rattray)

As though the safety of women throughout history has not depended on our ability to keep some secrets to ourselves. As though we have not been trained how to behave and in front of whom, as though our very lives do not depend on this ability. As though we cannot exist both within and without the emotional world, enough to feel and translate it effectively, simultaneously.

Thankfully, I’ve never found it terribly difficult to produce my work independent of how men might perceive or fail to perceive it. I know that they would never understand what happens in those spaces where women talk amongst each other, those spaces where pain functions as a doorway, where experience is expansive. They may believe that we’ve locked ourselves away to wallow together, offering comfort and delusions to patch over the pain. But we know that the pain is the point — it is the meeting of feeling and interpretation that cracks open every other thing. And, unlike them, we are not afraid to understand it.