Coming Round the Mountain (A conference on feminist geographies at the Austrian Cultural Forum, London)

At a conference programmed to coincide with the exhibition Mons Veneris: Female Geographies at the Austrian Cultural Forum, female artists, curators and theorists gathered to discuss the role of feminist art. How, they asked, can it resist the culture industry and its seemingly universal ability to assimilate and neutralise? And, what is the significance of the waning interest in funding feminist practice?

Held in conjunction with the Mons Veneris: Female Geographies exhibition at the Austrian Cultural Forum, Coming Round the Mountain was a panel discussion that addressed itself to the divergent histories of feminist art practice in Western and Eastern Europe, and also to the slightly contentious 'feminine subjectivity capable of resisting the traditional structures of art production and reception' cited in the Mons Veneris press release. The panel comprised five women judiciously sifted for optimum geographic mix: Marina Grzinic, an academic and independent curator from the University of Lubljana; Katy Deepwell, editor of international feminist art journal n paradoxa; Kathy Rae Huffman, an American video curator currently Director of Visual Arts at Manchester's Cornerhouse; Anca Daucikova, a video artist whose work is included in the show and a lecturer at the School of Fine Arts in Bratislava; and the moderator, Sally Tallant, who runs Education at the Serpentine.

The discussion was as wide-ranging as the premise would suggest, but the following key problematics emerged time and again: What is the role of feminist art as an oppositional practice when its critique is eroded by the frictionless mutability of the culture industry and while the historical evidence of dissent moulders in de-funded archives? What were/are the differences between the Anglo-American feminist tradition and the Eastern European one, bearing in mind the totalising tendencies of both those referents? (Here, the impact of continental, principally French, feminisms was strangely ellided, returning only in Gzinic's account of nascent feminist political consciousness in Slovenia heavily informed by readings of Lacan, and in Daucikova's video, in which back projection through an open zip in a pair of men’s trousers enacts the phallus as empty signifier.) What is the strategic potentiality of the term 'feminist,' loaded as it is with poor brand perception across political divides? And do you have to call yourself a feminist to be making feminist art?

An asymptote became evident, though not quite enunciated, as the discussion went on, between the discursive strategies pursued by Marina Grzinic and Katy Deepwell – the two panellists who had the most to say. That is, an asymptote that seemed to meta-mimic the East/West split anchoring the curatorial remit. While Deepwell happily vitiated her self-stated socialist credentials by lamenting the parlous bind of women’s art resources such as Make and the Women’s Art Library as victims of blinkered arts funding and by reciting statistics on proportional representation of the non-Western subject in this year’s Documenta, Grzinic was always steering the discussion back to a structural and political analysis, nimbly eviscerating truisms like ‘resistance’ and ‘visibility’ and claiming only to be interested in the power mechanisms that operate to licence and silence, and not just in the institution or gallery.

‘Space’ and ‘non-space’ were the terms she used both to diagnose the ‘pathological’ economy of Cold War-era socialism – where dissent was parallel to the official machine, and neither troubled the other – and the ‘cannibalism’ of the market economy, where all dissent is sooner or later recuperated. She also called on parallelism to explain the development of Slovenian feminism, which she located as happening in the same temporal and critical space as western feminism, but under a completely different set of conditions – “it didn’t start with the fall of the Wall.” Grzinic was also careful to situate Slovenian feminism in the context of other social struggles, such as the gay and lesbian movements and punk. Overall, there was a trenchant effort to move beyond the pessimism of Deepwell’s rights-based ‘economic censorship’ and to emphasise that it was not a matter of making things available – the view that everything is there; empowerment is in knowing how to read it.

As, late in the game, the discussion was turned to the floor, a small debate was activated by several audience members around how much funding really matters. Although the availability of funding for some activities and not others is a clear reflection of policy decisions, and these policy decisions are far from arbitrary, as some critiques would have it (loss of access to archives acting as a tacit wiping of inconvenient history, disingenuously justified in market terms) there was a danger of fixating on these symptoms, and losing sight not only of the larger picture, but of the small interventions that operate beyond the radar of the institution. It could be argued that by doing this, we are allowing the logic of the institution to set the boundaries for debate, but in a sense so could refusing to engage with the institution at any level. The format of the panel discussion was itself interrogated as perpetuating this purblindness to phenomena on the ground, framing a contingent division between practitioners as a gap between audience and experts.

Overall, the discussion came to epitomise a quandary which Katy Deepwell articulated at one point: what is the status of feminism in the post-identity, neo-liberal era? In other words, has feminism as such really kept up with the exigencies of Empire? Feminism loomed large thematically, but the panel seemed to be drawn more to deploying a feminist optic to recount and reconfigure what political space could look like today.

Mons Veneris: Female Geographies is at the Austrian Cultural Forum, 28 Rutland Gate, London SW7 1PQ, until 6 December 2002. Monday–Friday 0900–1700h. Coming Round the Mountain was held on 26 October, 2002.

http://www.austria.org.uk/art/archive/mons_veneris/mons_veneris.html#coming