Lesson 2, part 3

The final part of this lesson, looks at 4 short manifestos by women artists.

These four involve different forms of parody and voice. They are all exercises in writing, rather than exercises in making art.

Read the manifestos and the additional information provided.

What do these 4 manifestos share?
A love of language?
A critique of the limits of identity placed on women as artists?
The putting forward of a philosophical position as women artists?
The use of language to express artistic vision or ideas?

Lily Bea Moor, aka Senga Ngengudi
‘Lilies of the Valley, Unite! Or NOT’ (1998)

Lily Bea Moor, aka Senga Ngengudi, ‘Lilies of the Valley, Unite! or NOT’ (1998) is in the ebook and on the artist’s website:-
http://sengasenga.com/images/gallery/poetry/lilies.html

‘Lilies of the Valley, Unite! Or NOT’ is a parody of communist manifesto which used the banner of “Comrades / Workers , Unite!” However, Ngengudi’s manifesto is also an appeal for Unity, for recognising common goals in creativity and understanding about the importance of creative processes.

Lily Bea Moor is Senga Ngengudi’s persona as a poet, as a painter she presents herself as Harriet Chin and as a photographer she is Propecia Leigh. Her name is part of the meaning in this work: “be more”, and don’t be a “shrinking lily”, or a “lily of the valley” (part of the crowd, perhaps?).

What does the presentation of her artistic self under multiple names achieve?

In addition to her sculptural performance practice, she has invented a variety of personae such as the photographer Propecia Leigh, painter Harriet Chin, and the writer Lily Bea Moor to explore, ‘what’s in a name’, to subvert stereotypical expectations raised by an ‘ethnic’ artist name and generally to reflect the great significance of naming in black culture.

http://www.reactfeminism.org/entry.php?l=lb&id=259&e=t

“In Black culture naming has great significance. We have been “called out of our names” so much that controlling that aspect of our lives with a B’rer Rabbit sensibility is important. Each name has personal significance. But more importantly I wanted to explore the fact that many of us fall into the trap of what an artist’s work “should” look like related to their ethnicity. An ethnic name attached to an artwork assumes us to an unconscious short hand way of understanding the style or subject matter with expectations of what the style and subject matter should be.”

Senga Ngengudi quoted in Amelia Jones ‘Lost Bodies: early 1970s Los Angeles performance art in art history’ in Peggy Phelan (ed) Live Art in LA: Performance in Southern California, 1970-1983 (Routledge, 2012).
https://sengasenga.com/statement.html

What do you feel this manifesto says about hard work and pleasure as an artist, action and passivity, being recognised or rendered invisible, being an artist and not being seen to exist as an artist?

This manifesto plays with who is the “I”/eye of the artist, with what are minimal/conceptual ideas about art, with projections about art projects as grandiose production of “Art”, instead of the act of naming an object as art (the readymade).

The language of this manifesto is prose poetry but each phrase is written in a precise way. Each stanza contains different reversals within it, stating one idea and then offering its counterpart: switching constantly between naming the actions of other people in contrast with her own.

How do you feel about the appeal to join her, or not, at the end?

Rhanie Lee Remedes ‘SCUB Manifesto’ (2002)

The text is in the ebook and online at LTTR, where it was first published.

The SCUB manifesto has an ironic relationship with Valerie Solanas’ well-known SCUM Manifesto. It owes a debt to the original in its title, borrows a little of its form, but it is not a parody of the latter’s argument. The SCUM Manifesto is a much longer argument.

If you haven’t read Valerie Solanas’ SCUM manifesto, you can find it here.
SCUM was often seen as an abbreviation of Society for Cutting Up Men. However, Solanas does not use the term in that way in the manifesto.

The Society for Cutting up Boxes is a clear reference to how we might tackle the problems of categorising and labelling people, literally enclosing them in categories or boxes. Resisting the SCUB is the main argument of Remedes’ manifesto.

The same wordplay can be found in the title of the journal, LTTR, which Remedes also took part in as a contributor:

“LeTTeR.  sprinkled into this text we find many opportunities to imagine ourselves. LiTTeR. many moments to perform our symptoms for each other and create the space to question our development as artists workers and thinkers. we’re here to reconstitute a new teram under an old threat. to embrace our historical birth into feminist sexes and to move with the brilliant bodies languages identities and arts that this long walk has produced. but this lesbian we speak of, I find him as ambiguous in nature as in verse. I find her over and again.”

Emily Roysdon, LTTR editorial, 1, September 2002 quoted in Helena Reckitt ‘—ifesto: Feminist Art’s Shifting Ground’ C: International Contemporary Art (Summer 2006) 90-95

Rhani Lee Remedes is a sparkly rascal who was raised on psychic televangelists and riot grrrl rants. Her writing has appeared in That’s Revolting; Queers Strategies For Resisting Assimilation, LTTR, BTFA, MGMT, ETC, She is the author of the S.C.U.B. Manifesto and was the front woman the band Veronica Lipgloss & the Evil Eyes. She currently makes posters and plays with the band Bangs of Hunger in Sandy Francisco.

Rhani Lee Remedes as described by LTTR – www.lttr.org

How does this manifesto express its positives, about improving the quality of life, about a future creative life ?

What ideas or “boxes” is it rejecting?

What kind of liberation is suggested?
Is it personal or political?

Silvia Ziranek ‘Manifesta’ (2013)

Silvia Ziranek’s Manifesta is a light, but serious, attempt to summarise the stakes for artists in making art, even under difficult conditions.

This is a manifesto which needs to be read out loud, following the punctuation as a guide to how to read it.
The exclamations indicate that there is not one kind of art. Like Lily Bea Moor, there is always “Art” with a capital “A”, a definition which has had different content at different times.

Will the answer to the question what is ‘ART?’ be only seen through producing ‘MORE ART’?

Will the solution for women artists be: ‘MORE QUALITY THROUGH FEMALE QUANTITY’?

Who will ‘DO THE MAKING, DO THE MATHS, DO THE DO’?

These questions can be seen as response to what was a common and frequently expressed prejudice voiced by museum directors, gallerists (as well as critics) against women artists, namely that their work was not of sufficient “quality” to merit a show. But given that there are many women artists, is it really a question of quality or quantity?

Will this problem simply be solved by ‘MORE ART’?
Will production of more art by women be a vindication of quality for women artists?
Is it making art, a question of BEING or DOING?
Will the criteria of value/quality in women’s art production change when it’s ‘JUST OUR ART’ ?

Silvia Ziranek is the subject of another e-book by KT press:

Silvia Ziranek:Wall Works: Selected Writings and Performances (2013)

If you want to find out more about this performance artist, please consult her website: https://www.silviaziranek.com

Or listen to her lecture (2009) where she also reads from different parts of her work.

‘The Z of How’ Lecture at Glasgow School of Art, 13 March 2009.http://www.gsa.ac.uk/life/gsa-events/events/s/silvia-ziranek/?source=archive#Silvia%20Ziranek%20Video

Fabrika Nadyonii Odezhdii, FNO (The Factory of Found Clothes)
Natalya Pershina-Yakimanskaya and Olga Egorova, respectively known as Gluklya and Tsaplya
‘Manifesto of Factory of Found Clothes’. (1995)

Founded in 1995 in St Petersburg, FNO have used installation, performance, video, text and ’social research’ to develop an operational logic of ‘fragility’ as subjectivity antagonistic to that which is the state of things – be that the repressive social and political climate of Russia or the reflexive futilities of international art scenes….With this negative-utopian, rather than affirmative-ironic version of the subject of participatory aesthetics, something akin to Wittgenstein’s “the subject does not belong to the world, it is a border of the world”, FNO’s approach puts an interesting swerve on the ‘relational turn’ as enunciated in Western art discourse.

Tsaplya: When we say that art should be on the side of the weak, we mean weak in the broadest sense. Not only on the side of the oppressed, but in solidarity with those that resist so-called ‘strength’: power and money. Art needs to be dedicated to what is often, especially in Russia, known as ‘weakness’: tenderness, compassion and humanity. Everything that opposes what is supposed to be ‘strong’.

Gluklya: Our concept of fragility is related to compassion, because ‘fragility’ is that sensitivity that an artist needs, in the broadest sense of the word, to perceive people and events.

If a person retains a sense of fragility against everything that acts to brutalise their perception of the world, then that person inevitably arrives at the idea of art as compassion.

INTERVIEW WITH MARINA VISCHMIDT FOR THE “UNTITLED” MAGASIN /LONDON 2009/11/29 http://gluklya.com/publications/interview-with-marina-vischmidt/

‘FFC defines itself as an unusual example of a female and feminist collective which, while looking at gender questions (in an attempt to try out new and radical forms of male-female interaction) extends its discourse to broader concepts, traditionally associated with the female sphere, such as weakness and emotions.’

https://www.museoreinasofia.es/en/actividades/fno-factory-found-clothes

Do you agree with FNO’s gendered characterisation of art?

Does their use of ideas about art as “on the side of the Weak” and emboding fragility, sensitivity and compassion make sense as a counterpoint to Western Capitalism’s aggressions and systems of exploitation which demonstrate a lack of care towards different marginalised people?

FNO emerged and developed in relation to the Cyberfeminist Club in St Petersburg, run by Alla Mitrofanova, Irina Aktuganova and Olesya Turkina (You can read about their ideas in volume 2 of n.paradoxa (1998)). 1995 is post-Glasnost, post-Perestroika and post-Socialism (after 1988) and in the midst of a period of “Wild Capitalism” in Russia. The historical context of this manifesto is important as these two artists creatively sought different kinds of engagement with challenging gender stereotypes and the new realities of life around them, while advocating democratic and socialist alternatives.

Similar ideas about a weak avantgarde emerge in a much later article, already referenced in Part 1 of this lesson: Ewa Majewska ‘Feminist Art of Failure, Ewa Partum and the Avant-garde of the Weak’
Widok. Teorie i praktyki kultury wizualnej 16, 2017

You can also read my interview with FNO :

This is one of the broadsheets produced by Chto Delat. The two artists who form FNO are also part of Chto Delat. This broadsheet reuses many tropes and features common to the rhetoric of early Soviet history and to the 1930s. The contrast with the work of FNO should be apparent, if you chose to take a closer look at the arguments presented. The FNO manifesto is presented within these pages.

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Part 1, Part 2

Summary