RV-075 Harmony Hammond
I don’t know if this book was especially chosen for me or if the selection was random, but the book I received in the mail was Representing Women by feminist art historian Linda Nochlin. I had read a lot of Nochlin’s insightful writing, but had not read this particular book examining how women were represented in the work of Gericault, Courbet, Degas, Seurat and Cassatt, four men and one woman, as well as a chapter on the myth of the woman warrior and a chapter on the image of working women. The back half of the book was missing—sliced off at the spine after page 160. This was the chapter entitled “A House is Not a Home: Degas and the Subversion of the Family.” It felt so violent to me. The intentional cutting of the book (women's writing), the cutting of images of women, and by extension, women’s actual bodies. I read the book. But the violence remained. Nochlin’s analysis was rigorous but the images hardly risqué or threatening by today’ standards. Did our vandal sit down and read the book? Why was it vandalized? For the text? For the reproductions of 19th century paintings of women? Were these words or representations of women that threatening? Or was it just the title? I felt I needed to make the book whole again. I knew that the art project allowed me to take the book apart, and reconfigure it any way I wished. I could go large up to six feet square. Normally I work large, but here I found I wanted to keep the book format, to reconstitute the book whole, to (re)present women and women’s bodies whole again. I made a new cover out of flesh-like latex rubber pages stained with red ochre/blood. The word “erasure” cut into the front cover, functions as writing on the body and therefore bodies, referencing the intentionality of the vandalism. Black electrical tape echoes the original binding and the new title Represent Women: A Primer echoes both the original title and the fact that Nochlin had taught the first class on women and 19th and 20th century art in 1969. Nochlin and I become collaborators (she unknowingly, I knowingly), as the original book takes on a new form, or as they say, life of its own...
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