Identity

Throughout her remaining two years in Halifax, Wilson continued to peer into cameras, mirrors and monitors to focus on the vicissitudes, incongruities and linkages between the identity and appearance of the self. In Composure: Misery (1972), Wilson intended to compare the difference between facial gestures made with and without the aid of reflective surfaces such as a mirror or video monitor. Although her textual proposition assumed that the gestures made before the mirror would enable her to see herself more "objectively, and thus compose my features so they are congruent with the image I want to project," in executing the piece she realized that the gestures made without "feedback" were more expressive of the emotion she wanted to convey: "Thus, my features are more responsive to internal "mirrors" than to real, external mirrors. . . . To have composure is to be one's own mirror."39 Wilson's statement suggests that she saw her unreflected gestures as more natural or true expressions of her "subjective awareness of [her]self." This conclusion strikes a contrast to the approach to subjectivity of someone like Butler, who argues against the very possibility of an innate (gender) identity. Though I have endeavoured to show that the symmetry between some of Wilson's ideas about identity and those current in postmodern discourse should admonish us not to relegate her work (nor that of many of her early feminist peers) to the dustbin of "essentialism," this incongruity points to the limitations of the historical/theoretical parallels. Early feminist artists like Wilson were able to make acute diagnoses of how women's cultural positioning denied them even the possibility of the coherent selfhood promised to the male subject, but this does not mean they were necessarily disposed to seeing this as a critically advantageous position. As Nancy Miller noted, for women who had just begun to discover the political grounds for claiming an agentic subjectivity, "the condition of dispersal and fragmentation that Barthes valorizes (and fetishizes) [was] not a condition to be achieved but to be overcome."40

This duality, of both seeking and problematizing the humanist ideal of selfhood, should be seen less as a contradiction within than as a condition of this early phase of feminist praxis. As Linda Hutcheon has argued in an article on Canadian feminist art and literature, this duality arises from a condition of marginality which has created in women what Alicia Ostriker has called a "divided self, rooted in the authorized dualities" of culture.41 Although the "splitting images" or "double-talking ironies" Hutcheon identifies as characteristic of feminist art are closely associated with the critiques of representation prevalent in the 1980s, Hutcheon traces them back to Joyce Weiland's work of the early 1970s. From early days to the present, feminist art has consistently used ironic displacements to respond to the "colonized mentality where one's self-image is split between imposed traditional patterns and authentic experience."42

In 1973 Wilson employed such "double-talking ironies" in three performative pieces which enacted the shifting perceptions between subjective experience and objective appearance. In Alchemy, she underwent a chemical transformation by dying her hair three shades of gold, while in Redhead, she alluded specifically to the intersection between social and personal expectations caused by the physical transformation of herself into a "stereotype." In Stigma, she objectified herself even more forcefully by appearing throughout Halifax with her face painted red. Although the accompanying text described how Wilson felt treated like an outcast for confronting the public with her art, these works were done at a time when she was finally beginning to gain some credibility as an artist. In 1973 Lucy Lippard, who was a supportive critic of conceptual art, and had also begun to write about women artists and the politics of sexism in the art world, visited the College. Wilson's encounter with Lippard was both an affirmation and a revelation. Lippard confirmed for her that not only was what she was doing "art," but there were women across North America engaged in similar activities.43 Lippard not only wrote about Wilson's work in two of the essays in From the Center, but included her Breast Forms Permutated in c.7,500, an exhibition of conceptual art by women which opened at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, California in 1973.44

Wilson was also invited in April 1973 to do a performance at Project Inc. in Cambridge, Massachusetts. For this performance, titled Selfportrait, Wilson simply posed on a stool in the gallery space. A textual proposition describing the premise of the performance was printed on note cards distributed to the audience, inviting them to write their responses:

Credibility equals reality, so that "self" depends not on who you think you are, but on who others think you appear to be. In the space below, write you impressions of me, and return the slip to the box at the door. In so doing, you are creating me, and subverting the meaning of the term "selfportrait."

Audience reactions ranged from the bland "Good Performance," to the inquisitive "I would like very much to find out who you think you are," to the more openly critical "Drop the scrutiny of appearance and become something born and not made. I'm as unsure of you as you are of yourself," and "I think you're pretty self-centered and you seem to be on a pseudo-intellectual trip."45 In stating that the "self" consists only of how it is perceived by others, and in soliciting her audience to become active participants by "creating" Martha Wilson through their responses to her performed presence, Wilson seems to have been evacuating the very premise of subjective identity, and, by "subverting the meaning of the term 'selfportrait'," destroying also the premise of artistic agency.

By asking the audience to "create" her, Wilson's Selfportrait suggests that identity is neither self-defined nor projected, but rather interactively negotiated. This reading is in keeping with Amelia Jones' thesis in Body Art: Performing the Subject that body artists since the 1950s have contested and de-mythologized our cultural assumptions of coherent selfhood by making the self contingent upon the other in order to instantiate "a new experience of subjectivity" she describes "as embodied rather than transcendental, as in process, as engaged with and contingent on others in the world, and as multiply identified rather than reducible to a single, 'universal' image of the self."46 There can be no dispute that the critique of subjectivity has been crucial to the feminist project, but what I have tried to argue, and what Jones has not sufficiently acknowledged, is that the postulation of a decentred subjectivity, with no origin or location, must have been met with a certain ambivalence among women artists just coming to speech and agency. And in Wilson's case, this ambivalence seems most evident in the oscillating duality of her own "splitting images."

At this time Wilson was introduced to the work of Jacki Apple, who had also exhibited in c. 7,500, and who shared Wilson's interest in questions of identity and transformation. They began a correspondence, and in August 1973 Wilson and Apple met in New York.47 This encounter was crucial for Wilson because it was a lifeline out of her isolation in Halifax and because Apple's appearance forced her to submit some of her own presumptions to a more rigourous feminist critique. Wilson wrote:

I was shocked when I saw her: She looked professional all over, eye makeup to high heels. I thought artists weren't supposed to look like that. A sexist belief, something inherited from Gertrude Stein, a woman has to be un-pretty to be taken as seriously as a man.48

Part of Wilson's shock seems to have come from the realization that, as much as she had engaged in a critical investigation of the tenuous relationship between appearance and identity in her art, she was ill prepared for a real-life encounter of such jarring dissonance. Recognizing that she had perhaps inadvertently been isolating her investigations within the safety of the artistic construct, Wilson began to perform herself in a series of self-parodies which exposed her own fears and "sexist" presumptions. In Posturing: Age Transformation, she posed as a "twenty-five-year-old artist trying to look like a fifty-year-old woman trying to look like she is twenty-five," which elicited grave anxiety about "how much fear I have of 'past thirty' status in society."49

Between November 1973 and March 1974, Wilson produced a series of works, essentially variations on a theme, which cut even closer to the bone around the question of female desirability. Beginning with Images of my Perfection/Images of my Deformity, she catalogued parts of her body according to what she perceived as their degree of attractiveness or unattractiveness. Presented with all the formal rigour of the conceptual mode, the lists and photographs document the basis upon which value or its lack is inscribed on women's bodies. In Makeover, Wilson shifted her attention to the face, that most public locus of both identity and the prescriptive ideals of feminine beauty. The outcome of the makeover, however, was a lurid, clownish mask that made a mockery of these ideals. The makeover process was elaborated further in a set of paired photographs entitled I Make Up the Image of My Perfection/I Make Up the Image of My Deformity. In these photographs, and in the subsequent video by the same title, Wilson used makeup, the quintessential tool of feminine perfectibility, to mimic femininity itself, and to re-present it as a facade of tenuous and conflicted fragments unable to coalesce into an ostensibly integral and authentic whole.

Wilson's play with representation in the Perfection/Deformity series visualized and embodied what several feminist scholars have theorized as the transgressive potential of mimicry and the masquerade. Mary Ann Doane, for example, defined female masquerade in the context of cinema as a hyperbolization of femininity which resists patriarchal positioning by creating a distance between the woman and her image, and thus denying the immanence or closeness of femininity to itself.50 In contrast to Doane, who extolled the female masquerade as a subversive strategy, Luce Irigaray argued that it exacerbates women's double alienation because, in positioning her as an "object of consumption or of desire by masculine 'subjects,'" it reifies her as a non-subject alienated from language.51 For Irigaray, mimicry was a more effective way for women to "convert a form of subordination into an affirmation, and thus to begin to thwart it."52 Mimicry, or as Irigaray would later describe it, "hysterical mimicry," allowed women to pass from "imposed mimesis"--in which the female is positioned as mirror to the male, reflecting and thus confirming the truth of his centrality--into a female miming that has no recognizable referent.53 Such mimicry shatters the illusions of the equivalence between mimesis and truth by "showing the show" through which such truth-claims are staged and thus revealing the "divisive effects of the patriarchal Self in a body that is not the Same."54

Wilson explored these "divisive effects" in February 1974 in a video performance entitled Psychology of Camera Presence. Using the video camera and monitor to demarcate the point of separation between the cognitive self and the immanent body, she begins by saying:

In the presence of a camera I split from my body, I see myself from the outside. My watching myself now on the video monitor symbolizes this state of split awareness. My objective in this piece is to disappear psychologically, to be aware only of my absence, not of my awareness of my awareness.

After describing how she will do this by moving her body in a repetitive, rocking motion until it disappears from the edge of the monitor, Wilson asserts that "The absence that is left is not a negative; it is a positive." Wilson's experience of this absence as positive seems prophetic of Rosi Braidotti's suggestion that "The myth of Woman is now an empty stage where feminist women can experiment with their subjective becoming." As Braidotti notes further, however, this is not a site from which the category of gender has been evacuated, but rather a site of contradictions which must be confronted "instead of rushing headlong, prompted by the desire to escape from the 'essentialized feminine' toward a point supposedly 'beyond gender'."55

Braidotti's observation informs upon the dualities and paradoxes I have underscored in Wilson's work. Though Wilson focused persistently on the fictive appearances and perceptions of the objectified self, these mutable effects were always counteracted by her own assertions of self-definition and artistic agency. Wilson's play with representations thus led not to the dissolution of subjectivity, but to the conclusion that "artmaking is an identity-making process. . . . I could generate a new self out of the absence that was left when my boyfriends' ideas, my teachers', and my parents' ideas were subtracted."56 Clearly, her thinking differed greatly from that of radical poststructuralist like Butler, who argues that the very notion of an interior subjectivity "is itself a publicly regulated and sanctioned form of essence fabrication."57

At the same time, however, Wilson's notions of gender and identity were too fluid to be conducive to certain modes of early feminist thinking committed to discovering a shared "female experience" or "sensibility." In fact, when Wilson presented her work at Cal Arts in 1974 as part of a performance series held at Womanspace in Los Angeles, Judy Chicago denounced it as "irresponsible demagoguery." In Lee Rodney's view, this conflict stems from their divergent approaches to representation: Chicago's quest was for the singular monument that stands in for the hitherto unrepresented women's history, while Wilson denied the singularity of representation, and the related assumption that the real and the representation are directly connected.58 This conflict reveals some interesting points about the larger context of feminist art, thought and politics then and now. While Chicago's hostility to an artist whose work ran counter to the prevailing assumptions of her particular brand of West Coast feminism suggests on whose side the putative "demagoguery" more closely resided, her accusation that Wilson's work was "irresponsible" also reveals how high the political stakes were during feminism's early period of coalition building. But as important as the need for political solidarity was at the time, this conflict testifies to the fact that feminist art in the 1970s was not a monolithic project.

Composure: Misery [RETURN]

Selfportrait [RETURN]

Posturing [RETURN]

Perfection/Images of my Deformity [RETURN]

39. Explanatory text from Composure: Misery. [RETURN]

40. Nancy K. Miller, "Changing the Subject: Authorship, Writing, and the Reader," in Feminist Studies/Critical Studies, ed. Teresa de Lauretis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 109. [RETURN]

41. Alicia Suskin Ostriker, Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women's Poetry in America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986), 11; quoted in Linda Hutcheon, "Splitting Images: The Postmodern Ironies of Women's Art," ReImagining Women: Representations of Women in Culture, ed. Shirley Neuman and Glennis Stephenson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993), 257. [RETURN]

42. Coral Ann Howells, Private and Fictional Words: Canadian Women Novelists of the 1970s and 1980s (London: Methuen, 1987), 184; quoted in Hutcheon, "Splitting Images," 257. [RETURN]

43. Wilson interview. [RETURN]

44. During this period Lippard organized a series of exhibitions where the numerical title corresponded to the population of the city in which each one originated. [RETURN]

45. These audience responses are cited in Rodney, "Deflecting the Blind Spot." [RETURN]

46. Jones, Body Art, 11, 197.[RETURN]

47. See "Correspondence between Jacki Apple and Martha Wilson, 1973-1974," Heresies 2 (May 1977): 43-7. Apple also noted the affinity between their work, and lamented that most of the other women in c. 7,500 had simply adopted the "boring" and "bland" formulas of conceptual art rather than attempting "to present a different perception--a female perception through female experience," 43. [RETURN]

48. Martha Wilson, "Correspondence between Jacki Apple and Martha Wilson," 43. [RETURN]

49. Explanatory text from Posturing: Age Transformation. [RETURN]

50. Mary Ann Doane, "Film and the Masquerade: Theorising the Female Spectator," Screen 23.3-4 (1982): 74-87. [RETURN]

51. Luce Irigaray, "The Power of Discourse," in This Sex Which Is Not One , trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 84. In Doane's subsequent reworking of her concept of masquerade, she drew more directly on Irigaray's theorizing of it in terms of women's relation to language, ultimately concluding that masquerade designates "the impossibility of a stable feminine position." See Mary Ann Doane, "Masquerade Reconsidered: Some Thoughts on the Female Spectatory," Discourse 11.1 (1988): 49. [RETURN]

52. Irigaray, "The Power of Discourse," 76. [RETURN]

53. Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, 54. [RETURN]

54. 54 Elin Diamond, "Mimemsis, Mimicry, and the 'True-Real'," in Acting Out: Feminist Performance, ed. Lynda Hart and Peggy Phelan (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), 375. [RETURN]

55. Rosi Braidotti, "Of Bugs and Women: Irigaray and Deleuze on the Becoming Woman," in Engaging with Irigaray: Feminist Theory and Modern European Thought, ed. Carolyn Burke, Naomi Schor and Margaret Whitford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 134, as cited in Rodney, "Deflecting the Blind Spot." [RETURN]

56. Martha Wilson, quoted in Lippard, "Making Up: Role Playing and Transformation," 106. [RETURN]

57. Butler, "Performative Acts and Gender Constitution," 412. [RETURN]

58. Rodney, "Deflecting the Blind Spot." [RETURN]