RE:CIRCULATION 004 — A DIFFERENT FEMINISM
Justice Howard. Lydia Lunch. Kathy Acker. Susanne Bartsch.
Four women working across photography, writing, publishing and nightlife. Four different relationships to sex, spectacle and control.
Placed together, the objects describe a feminism rather less orderly than the one that tends to survive in retrospect.
Not anti-sex. Not particularly interested in respectability. Frequently suspicious of anyone deciding what women should or should not be allowed to see.
The point is not to make them agree.
They don’t.
What connects them is the apparatus.
Who controls the image?
Who controls the language?
Who decides what may be seen?
Who gets into the room?
LYDIA LUNCH
WHAT MAY BE SEEN
On 14 February 1989, Lydia Lunch wrote the introduction to Robert Williams’s Visual Addiction.
Her subject is censorship.
Lunch attacks religious conservatism and government restriction, but she also turns on what she describes as “bogus feminist misinformation” when feminism itself becomes another mechanism for controlling what may be seen.
Her position is deliberately difficult.
Williams’s work occupies an underground vocabulary of sex, violence, fetish, vulgarity and exaggerated bodies. Lunch does not attempt to make that imagery respectable before defending it. Instead, she insists upon the individual’s right to encounter information and arrive at their own conclusions.
Then, at the bottom of the page:
Photo by Annie Sprinkle.
A text by Lydia Lunch defending sexually transgressive imagery, accompanied by a photograph by Sprinkle, printed inside another artist’s book.
Pornography, feminism, underground publishing and censorship occupy the same sheet of paper.
No consensus required.
JUSTICE HOWARD
WHO CONTROLS THE IMAGE
Several years later, Justice Howard is no longer defending the right for such an image to exist.
She is making one.
Horns. Leather. Harness. Boots. Skull-and-crossbones. Open legs. Direct gaze.
Howard had occupied the position of the photographed body before moving behind the camera. The visual vocabulary remains sexualised. What changes is the position from which it is produced.
Turn the postcard over and the spectacle becomes administration:
© 1996 JUSTICE HOWARD
SOHO GALLERIES
1218 Valencia Street
San Francisco
Then the ordinary lines for an address and stamp.
One side performs excess.
The other prepares it for circulation.
The image becomes correspondence.
Lunch argues for the right to look.
Howard takes the camera.
KATHY ACKER
WHO CONTROLS THE LANGUAGE
Kathy Acker approaches the same problem through language.
Her writing repeatedly absorbed material that already existed: mythology, pornography, canonical literature, autobiography and other people’s sentences.
Authorship became unstable by design.
On the back of Eurydice in the Underworld, one line announces the territory immediately:
“a rose is my cunt.”
Acker’s feminism rarely arrives as an exemplary image of female liberation. Her bodies are compromised, desiring, literary, appropriated and frequently impossible to separate cleanly from the structures acting upon them.
Rather than stepping outside those structures, she writes through them.
If Howard takes possession of an existing visual vocabulary, Acker performs something comparable with literary language.
She does not request a different canon.
She enters the existing one and rearranges it.
SUSANNE BARTSCH
WHO CONTROLS THE ROOM
The article began with the other side of this object.
Now turn it over.
SUSANNE BARTSCH INVITES YOU TO OUR CHURCH.
Co-hosted by Monsignor Kenny Kenny.
Master of Sermon: Larry Tee.
Saints include Ladyfag, Theodora, Kim Aviance, Julie Atlas Muz and Dirty Martini.
Mother Superior:
Amanda Lepore.
The language turns nightclub organisation into an ecclesiastical hierarchy.
Host. Saints. Mother Superior. Gatekeepers.
Bartsch’s particular authority operates differently from Howard’s camera or Acker’s page.
She constructs the situation.
Fashion, drag, performance, nightlife and queer social worlds are assembled temporarily in the same room. The invitation is not simply an advertisement for that room. It records the system through which the room is produced.
Bartsch’s name appears at the top, but authorship disperses down the card: hosts, DJs, performers, image maker, set designer, producers and gatekeepers.
This is another form of control.
Not control over the representation of a body.
Control over the conditions under which bodies become visible.
FOUR APPARATUSES
Howard: the image.
Acker: the language.
Lunch: what may be seen.
Bartsch: the room.
They do not amount to a single feminist position.
That is precisely what makes the objects useful together.
Each sits close to arguments surrounding pornography, censorship, sexual representation, desire and the question of whether the meaning of an image changes when women participate in producing, directing or distributing it.
The objects do not solve those questions.
They keep them open.
A woman can be simultaneously subject and producer.
Sexual representation can remain problematic and still be claimed.
Freedom can include the right to encounter material one dislikes.
Authorship can mean writing, photographing, publishing, organising—or determining who gets through the door.
Not feminism purified of contradiction.
Feminism operating inside it.
IN CIRCULATION
The surviving objects are modest.
A postcard.
A page inside a book.
A paperback.
A party invitation.
Each carries a different distribution system.
Howard’s photograph is prepared to travel through the post.
Lunch’s argument enters circulation inside another artist’s publication.
Acker’s writing passes through commercial publishing.
Bartsch’s invitation moves through a temporary social network in order to assemble a room for one night.
The photograph is taken.
The text is printed.
The party happens.
The room empties.
The paper remains.
SOURCE OBJECTS
Justice Howard
Photographic postcard
Soho Galleries, San Francisco
1996
Lydia Lunch / Robert Williams
Introduction to Visual Addiction: The Art of Robert Williams
1989
Photograph by Annie Sprinkle
Kathy Acker
Eurydice in the Underworld
Arcadia Books
1997
Susanne Bartsch
Our Church Halloween
Invitation
Avalon, New York
31 October 2006
Different objects. Different forms of control.