ABSTRACT
I think that the reason our performances in Fresno and at Womanhouse created so much tension, excitement, and response was that we told the truth about our feelings as women in them. Because performance can be so direct, because we were developing our performances from a primitive, gut level, we articulated feelings that had simply never been so openly expressed in artmaking. Although many women in the arts have struggled to give voice to their experiences as women, their forms, like mine, have been so transposed (into the language of sophisticated artmaking) that the content could be ignored by a culture that doesn’t understand or accept the simplest facts of women’s lives, much less subtle and transformed imagery. We learned a profound lesson about aesthetic perception (particularly in men) when in Fresno, the chairman of the art department, a sophisticated, liberal man, came to visit our studio. He saw an environment by Faith Wilding, a piece that dealt with the sacrifice of the female by male culture. It was a religious piece, implying crucifixion, death, and destruction, and the symbolism’, I was very overt. Hanging around the walls were bloody Kotexes, which he perceived as “white material with red spots,” so disassociated was he from the ability to perceive content or to recognize anything that did not grow out of his cultural experience. If a man like that, educated in art language, cannot recognize a bloody Kotex, or understand a not very subtle work of art, how can he be expected to respond to any art work that relates in any way to female experience or differs from male cultural references to any degree?
