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...
Previous
