CAN DO: Photographs and other material from the Women's Art Library Magazine Archive

Curated by Mo Throp and Maria Walsh, this collection of mainly black and white photographs from the Women’s Art Library Magazine archive has rarely been seen outside the confines of its black boxes in the Special Collections at Goldsmiths University library. The photographs are one of the material remains of a dynamic independent art publication dedicated to the debates and documentation of women’s art from 1983 to 2002. The magazine began life in 1983 as the Women Artists Slide Library Newsletter, acquiring, over the course of its 20-year run, the titles: Women Artists Slide Library Journal (1986); Women's Art Magazine (1990); and make: the magazine of women’s art (1996). Artists submitted photographs of their work for publication, some images were printed in the magazine, most were not, but all were carefully stored in the library stacks at Goldsmiths where the curators were (re)introduced to them by Althea Greenan, curator of the Women's Art Library in Special Collections at Goldsmiths as they researched material for their recent book, Twenty Years of MAKE Magazine: Back to the Future of Women’s Art (I.B. Tauris: 2015). Taking this photographic h(er)story out of the archive, this exhibition speaks to a present fascination with women’s art of the recent past. What memories, what future can be intimated from these photographic fossils? As well as the photographs, which have been organised into thematic sections entitled: Performance, Portraits, Body, Installation, Protest, the exhibition is comprised of other materials from the archive, including artist’s originals commissioned for the covers and pre-digital layouts and includes a vitrine of objects from the collection selected by Althea Greenan. Source: http://www.chelseaspace.org/archive/can-do-info.htm

Designing a recovery-orientated system of care: A community operational research perspective

Theory suggests health focused Community Operational Research (COR) projects and their participants can benefit from balancing a “glass half empty” concern for deficits, problems and weaknesses with a “glass half full” concern for identifying health assets and bringing them into use. We present a COR systemic intervention in the care of persons with addiction and substance use/ misuse problems in Clydeplace, Scotland (anonymised). Our research reveals how the Whole Person Recovery System is situated within a wider General Community Recovery System that offers a variety of health assets that can be mobilised to create and increase recovery capital. The project involved 20 semi-structured interviews, two asset mapping workshops, a certificated “health issues” course completed by seven “champions”, and action planning and implementation. In the interviews participants found gaps were more easily identified than assets. During the workshops participants identified 388 discrete assets and gaps, prioritised these using a simple voting system and developed a series of actions to mobilise health assets including bringing into use local facilities and amenities and involving a number of individuals and groups in local events and activities. Our study suggests that even in the impoverished system of Clydeplace, a “Community Catalyst” in the form of a Community Operational Researcher can act to stimulate the co-development of health assets, build relationships and enable the creation of social capital. It is not clear though when such systems become “self-catalysing.

Transmogrifications

The exhibition is part of the ongoing research here explored collaboratively with Dr Maria Walsh through curating other artist’s work. The research project sets out to explore the artwork as proposing new possibilities for sexuality and subjectivity in the experience of the encounter with the artwork. The works were selected as innovative and generative of new possibilities for these issues. The ideas allow a shift away from the traumatic and problematic account described for the subject by traditional accounts (particularly those of Jacques Lacan) both psychoanalytic and philosophical. The research explores new possibilities of the subject by proposing more enabling accounts of the self which are informed by Deleuzian thinking particularly made possible through the writings of Rosi Braidotti and Elizabeth Grosz. In Transmogrifications we claim that the exhibition allows a possibility for the viewer to occupy a space of transformative possibilities. This process enables a liberation from static, finite ideals of a fixed notion of the self and generates possibilities for new connections to emerge, allowing the viewer to make links with their own imaginary repertoires. These transformative processes of fantasy are evidenced within the actual materiality of the works themselves and move us beyond our specific self-identities. The affects and intensities of these works act as mediators that allow the spectator to engage in an endless process of transmogrification

Machinic Alliances

This is an exhibition of contemporary artist’s work exploring a space in-between the categories of human and animal. It was co-curated by Mo Throp, Maria Walsh and Danielle Arnaud. The exhibiting artists were Reiko Akatsuka, Liz Arnold, Edwina Ashton, Marcus Coates, David Cotterrell, Lucy Gunning, Jaki Irvine, Paulette Phillips, Kate Smith, Mo Throp and Clara Ursitti. This exhibition explores the Deleuzian idea of the ‘machinic’ – as a process that expresses our capacity as humans to form alliances with non-human forces – these might be animal, insect, plant, virus or machine. The works selected for the exhibition explore possibilities for the viewer to experience difference as a positive relation rather than one in which the human co-opts and dominates that which it is not (i.e. animal, plant, machine). Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of becoming animal proposes that there is a more enabling relation based on alliance and assemblage, relations that subsume neither the one nor the other. The works explore relations between, as sites of transformation and opening to new possibilities for identity; they allow the viewer to question the boundaries that constitute the relations between one form and another. "The artworks in this exhibition perform unholy alliances between categories of human/animal/technological. Thrown to the wind is the plot of an original wholeness and purity. Instead, machinis alliances scramble and graft singular identities, creating perverse formations that escape the Oedipal trap of filiation (Donna Haraway). These machinic alliances have no father (like Frankenstein) and eschew anthropocentric identification. In their multiplicity, they push against the limits of understanding. Categories are undone. Awkward couplings arise. Inhuman differences emerge. But paradoxically, it is here in the space of machinic encounter that we can learn how to live differently. The ‘new’ alliances explored in this exhibition do not reproduce the antagonism of one self against another self, but generate a bestiality of possible selves, liberating us from the alienating problematics of narcissistic recognition. In the spaces made possible by the works in this exhibition we are propelled to imagine wacky and wonderful possibilities for our identities. Disturbing, yet pleasurable, these post-gender creatures produce encounters that acknowledge the difficulty of difference, yet relish in the production of anomalous differences that exceed categorization." --Mo Throp and Maria Wals

Stories That Matter: Feminist methodologies in the archive

The symposium explores whether feminist methodologies make a difference to the kinds of stories that can be told using archives in the expanded sense: actual archives, virtual archives and/or other concrete sites of encounter which generate historiographical work. In this work, a tension has often existed between the desire to establish feminist epistemologies and at the same time to attend to feminist ontologies - in other words between knowledge and experience. This is nowhere more so than in the archive which has traditionally been considered as a repository of the past that affords a ‘true’ construction of it. However, this traditional idea has also been the basis from which women have been occluded from history. Added to this, it also maintains the subjectivity of the researcher/historiographer as neutral, thereby hiding the ideological assumptions that underlie this kind of work. In this symposium, we follow feminist interrogation of these assumptions by adopting Donna Haraway’s methodological approach to research as ‘situated knowledge’. Essential to the convening of this symposium has been Pollock’s concept of the virtual feminist museum as a ‘becoming futurity’, Hemmings’ emphasis on citational practices and textual affect, Tamboukou’s concept of archival research as intra-actions between phenomena. We ask what differences these new affordances allow for accounting for the past or reactivating its memory in the present? How do feminist pasts engage future readers? An unlikely feminist, Guy Debord, in his infamous Society of the Spectacle posits the question: what would a living archive be as opposed to the archive as the custodian of the dead time of history which merely administers it rather than makes it available for use? Do feminist methodologies in the archive (as museum, publication, or documented record) provide methods for resisting the administration of history? How might we ‘break open’ the archive to listen to and disseminate its contradictory voices so that they may resonate with the present thereby making it available for use for contemporary generations of feminists, men and women? Walsh and Throp curated this half-day symposium at the ICA, and additionally gave a paper and contributed to the panel discussion

Double Acts: Oscillating Between Optical and Haptic Visuality in a Digital Age

In ‘Double Acts: Oscillating Between Optical and Haptic Visuality’, a co-written chapter for Revisiting the Gaze: The Fashioned Body and the Politics of Looking, my colleague Dr. Mo Throp and I explore the dynamic between optical and haptic visuality in relation to digital art practices by female artists. Taking our cue from Laura Mulvey’ s 1975 essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ and from the phenomenon of the first cam girl ‘lifecaster’ Jennifer Ringley, we construct a dialogue that reflects on questions such as: how is female subjectivity and agency structured beyond the constraints of optical visuality; how might feminist artists’ interventions enabled by digital technology open up new kinds of relations between female subjects and their viewers; how can the female subject’s desire for recognition avoid objectification? In considering how artists’ works might strategically disrupt this structure of recognition, we deploy the feminist theorising of philosopher Elizabeth Grosz that questions the worth of the subject/object structure of desire elaborated by Mulvey after Freud and Lacan. Grosz challenges us to ask: why wait to be recognised by this system of desire rather than making something new which will enable us to recognise ourselves on our own terms? We trace the possibilities and dilemmas inherent in this challenge by engaging with artists who use their own body, or images of the body, to simultaneously incite and repel the look. Our case studies are works by artists such as Laurel Nakadate, Ann Hirsch and Lucy Clout. We propose that these artists’ performative use of the gaze and technological framings of the female body resist fetishistic objectification and generate new spectatorial relations that productively oscillate between optical and haptic visual pleasure

Introduction

During the 1970s, adding 'women's' to 'art' was a powerfully political act. Fuelled by the momentum of the women's liberation movement, artists, art historians, critics and curators began to explore the women's art practice, as distinct from men's, and to challenge its invisibility in the established art world and historical canon. In the 1980s, they continued to creatively critique representations of female sexuality, and in the 1990s, some began to embrace the 'post-feminist' idea of difference and the performance of gender. Throughout this pivotal period, the MAKE magazine offered a unique platform for academics, artists and arts professionals to critically engage with women's art. Though the need to talk about 'women's art' seemed to lose some of its political urgency in the early 2000s, many artists, art historians and art students are now once again explicitly engaging with feminist art histories and art practices as possible models and precedents for resistance. Now is the time to revisit the past, in order to understand and galvanise the energy of the present.Gathering together the work of eminent writers such as Griselda Pollock and Marina Warner, on celebrated artists such as Helen Chadwick, Sarah Lucas and The Guerrilla Girls, this unparalleled anthology of material from the MAKE archive allows us to trace the lineages and links between then and now. Maria Walsh and Mo Throp wrote the introductory chapter and also edited this book

The impenetrable power of the phallic Matron: the Sarah Palin syndrome

A performative event with 25 participating artists, including students. Chelsea College of Art and Design, Green Room

The MAKE Archive: Re-contextualising Recurring Themes

Co-presented paper based on research on the MAKE Magazine archive based at Goldsmiths University Special Collections

Subjectivity and feminisms: peepshow project

Investigating the manipulation of the act of viewing, Peepshow will deny the public access to Project Space 11 with the intention of arousing curiosity of what lies within it. Presenting a small peephole well above eye-level, viewers will have to climb a small set of steps outside the spaceʼs shutter to view the work. This act of looking will position the viewer raised on a platform, highly visible to the other market users. However, with only one person being able to view the work at a time, this highly public scenario will also be a potentially private and intimate one. The project could make reference to the notion of voyeurism (Hitchcockian motifs, ʻrubberneckingʼ, Soho peepshows etc), or more formally address the gender politics that are connoted by the peephole-viewing construct (for example Bergerʼs notion of ʻthe gazeʼ)