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

Trauma, performativity, and subjectivity in art practice

Abstract: This is a practice based PhD of predominantly video works/installations which seek to examine, alongside the accompanying reflective writing on these works, a particular dynamic set up between the artwork and the spectator which allows a rethinking of the model of the subject's relation to the 'other'. This investigation which is lead by my ongoing practice (presented as six artworks) is informed and underpinned by feminist theoretical concerns seeking a way out of the deadlock of Lacanian thinking which characterises the feminine as problematic (the other of the other). Though I make reference to psychoanalytic theories (as well as the writings of Deleuze), I will not give accounts of this background (though I will footnote key terms); I am therefore presuming a certain knowledge of these theories by my reader. The thesis (as practice and dissertation) explores more enabling accounts for the construction of identity which move beyond the fixed, traumatic model to propose that the encounter with the artwork enables more positive accounts of the self as fluid and open to change. This shift which now proposes a more productive relation to desire and otherness has been opened up, particularly by Elizabeth Grosz and Rosi Braidotti, through a consideration of Gilles Deleuze's notion of 'becoming' as a creative flow, an active force of connections and relations. This challenge to dominant accounts (both psychoanalytic and philosophical) that characterize desire negatively as a longing for something lost (tragically and impossibly), allows me to propose (theoretically and practically) the artwork as allowing us to 'become' by creating affect, where, immersed in a creative ongoing flow of connections and relations we 'become-hybrid' through an encounter with the other. As my contribution to knowledge and understanding, my thesis explores this affirmation of a new subjectivity through a sense of self as interactive (mobile) in the process of viewing; an inter-subjectivity which allows a freeing of the subject from the impulse to complete the self, allowing an engagement that does not set the subject against itself but produces new possibilities especially in a consideration of sexual difference. My practice argues for an engagement and creative response which allows for a dialogue of difference as non-oppositional; sensuous and expansive, the artwork proposes a new relation to gender, as beyond hierarchical (traumatic and fixed) oppositional accounts of the self. This shifts from an account of sexuality as problematic (or not) to one where the viewer is open to a renegotiation with questions of otherness and difference that underpin any notions of identity) to become productive of fluid accounts of the self

Mermaid

Mermaid is a video work, exploring the relation between the human/animal/machine. It proposes that this relationship can be understood as multiple. The mermaid in this image (as artificial) is in morphing and conjoining with various animal/fish forms not in order to secure meaning that characterized animal symbolism in the 19th century, but ‘serves to resist or displace fixed meaning’ as Steve Baker puts it in his book ‘The Postmodern Animal’. The work does not merely represent animal forms but uses the animal as a creative space to generate hybrid sensibilities in-between the human and the animal. These in-between sensibilities are not imitative, but sites of ambiguity generating empathy and affect. The encounter between the human and animal form in this video allow for ‘non-human, non-pedestrian movement in the strange imaginative spaces of the animal’ (Baker) which transforms unitary identity and dismantles the perspective of human mastery over the animal. This video aims therefore to produce for the viewer a movement towards the animal in a more empathetic mode and at the same time provoke them to question the boundaries that constitute the relations between one form and another. This research is informed by the process described by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari as the ‘becoming-animal’. They state that a ‘becoming’ is neither one nor two, nor the relation of the two; it is the in-between (Deleuze & Guattari, ‘A Thousand Plateaus, Capitalism and Schizophrenia’). Here Throp describes an mythical underwater world as fluid, charming but disturbing. This work is part of Mo Throp's ongoing research into subjectivity and identity informed by feminist theory, particularly that of Luce Irigaray

Configuring Desire

Configuring Desire was a presentation by Mo Throp to the BreadMatters III Forum, in West Cork, Ireland, as part of the Bread Matters series. BreadMatters is a platform for exchange and collaboration, a medium for bringing together professionals from various disciplines, communities and cultural backgrounds to question and debate across a range of disciplines, focusing on contemporary issues such as migration and emigration; the construction of identity; power, globalization and equality; historical legacy; ritual and symbolism in contemporary life; connectedness and communion. BreadMatters thus explores the social, cultural, historical, philosophical, political, and theological issues around bread

Performance Dinners No. 8: The Bankorgs

The Performance Dinners are an ongoing series of collaborative group artworks organised by the Subjectivity & Feminisms Research Group. This No. 8 in the series took place in Athens, Greece with performances from 20 invited artists. The artists were asked to respond to the title of the event 'The Bankorgs', with subtitle: 'Donna Haraway's 'The Cyborg Manifesto'; to creatively comment on the meaning of the cyborg, a mutated humanoid, compared with the hypothetical mutation in 'bankorg', an organisation that is transformed by the prevalence of banks at multiple sociopolitical levels. The event lasted 2-and-a-half hours in front of an audience of 200 in one of the most prestigious alternative arts venues in Greece: BIOS, Athens. The event was made in partnership with Maria Paschalidou in Athens

Cosey Complex Reader

Mo Throp contributed to this publication. COSEY COMPLEX Reader was produced as a discursive intervention produced in the ICA's Reading Room in the weeks leading up to COSEY COMPLEX at ICA, London on 27 March 2010

To Demand & To Receive

A performative presentation of text and video which addresses the issues of power, equality, desire and the construction of identity. The text reads like a litany, a poetic address to the audience, in order to explore demands for satisfaction as both psychic and political in construct

The Performance Dinners

This book was edited by Mo Throp

Love Stories

Love Stories is a two-screen video installed in the West Gallery of the Wallace Collection, London. It explores questions of romantic love as an impossible desire for the other. Using clips from movies, it explores how love-stories continue to define the contemporary subject in culture. The process of sexuation enacted in the artwork is related to desire, fantasy and jouissance and remains disruptive of the social order in the context of this artwork. It is purely libidinous and works outside the economy of procreation (capitalism and the family); it opens up the gap in the symbolic, accentuating the fact that phantasy is always at play; to produce for the viewer an experience of the self that is in flux and not submitted to the law