Women are very winning

[imomus]

I really adored my trip to the Venice Biennale on Sunday. Perhaps I'll talk about it more later in the week (and there's more stuff about my Venice trip in my latest Wired column). But one of the things I liked least was the Guerilla Girls piece in the first room at the Arsenale. The chandelier made of tampons was witty, but the jokey, ugly agitprop banners, made with the same kind of bad graphics you can see on their website, and telling us things like "Less than 5% of the artists in the Modern Art sections of the Met are women, but 85% of the nudes are female", seemed like relics from a long-vanished era, an era when it was a big deal to be a woman in art, and when being a woman in art meant you had to make art about being a woman in art. This drawing-attention-to-gender hardly hastens the arrival of the day when gender is "a difference that doesn't make a difference". The feminism that played the first time (1971, says this blog) as tragedy is playing the second as farce. Gender hardly seems like an issue in today's art world. It's not that one expects to see exactly the same numbers of men and women represented, or that one demands male nudes to "make up the numbers". It's just that everywhere you look, women are winning.



This year's Venice Biennale was curated by two women, Maria de Corral and Rosa Martinez. A Venetian woman artist, the 40 year-old Monica Bonvicini, has just won the Preis für junge Kunst in a show at Berlin's Hamburger Bahnhof. (I was personally rooting for Angela Bulloch. I normally like John Bock, another finalist, but thought his new performance, in which he gets thrown through a window made of ice, was a bit smartypants and show-offy.)

I'm delighted to announce that Noriko Shibutani's film BAMBI♥BONE, for which Emi Necozawa and I made a soundtrack back in 2002, has just won the Special Jury Prize at the 27th Pia Film Festival. After showing in Tokyo, the festival travels to Nagoya, Osaka, Sendai, and Kita Kyushu. BAMBI♥BONE, shot on video, is a disturbing story of child abuse and tenderly-observed, quirky delinquency, as two eleven-year-olds run around shitamachi district Shishibone spattering each other with mud, riding bronze deer statues, and wearing polythene bags over their heads. The film received its international premiere on October 3rd at the Vancouver International Film Festival.

On Monday the winner of the UK's Man Booker Prize for fiction is announced. I'm rooting for Ali Smith, who was in my creative writing class at university (we graduated with matching firsts in English the same year). I was somewhat smitten with Ali, whose talent was pretty clear even then, and sent her a number of embarrassing poems, love letters and notes. I even paid the parking tickets she used to get on her Citroen 2CV. She's the "Sweet Alison" in the song "King Solomon's Song And Mine" on my first album, Circus Maximus, dedicated to "all those who did and did not requite... and those who still might". Well, it turns out Ali didn't requite because, like me, she loved women. Fair enough, they are very... winning.

Comments

[reggie-c-king.livejournal.com]

Nick, not to be a pedant, but the Prize is announced on the 10th is it not. A slip of the finger, probably.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Ah, right you are, it's on Monday! Tip o' the hat!

[reggie-c-king.livejournal.com]

And a fine titfer it is too.

[turkishb.livejournal.com]

I was rooting for Bulloch too -- I'm booned to hear you mention her. :) Her works often seems synchronous with yours. Her color light arrays recall to me immediately parts of Otto Spooky.

Ne frustra vixisse videar" (May I not seemed to have lived in vain).

[darthkronos.livejournal.com]

Is Momus Tycho or Kepler?

[jluke.livejournal.com]

Things to consider...you and I will never know what it is like to be a woman making art.

[framework.livejournal.com]

Yeah, but I know, and he's right!


I mean, in the 70s, the women who were old/accomplished enough to be making art were few and far between. It's much less that way for people my age and, say, 15 years older.

[(Anonymous)]

saw the guerrila girls last week at school. didn't care much for it, either. really rather annoyed me in fact. i'm all for women's rights, equal rights...but i'm sure what the girls were getting at with the masks and all. more power to them though, i suppose.

Perhaps a name change might help freshen up their act...

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

Crunchy Monkeys?
Second-wave She-beasts?
Venuses in Furs?
Kinko's Angels?

[kojapan.livejournal.com]

This is a really great post. I think it's a positive thing the Guerilla Girls are outdated and tacky. It's a sign that the times are changing. I'm very happy for you that BAMBI♥BONE has finally reached a wider audience in Vancouver. It sounds like a very sensitive and intriguing film. I hope it comes out on DVD soon...

African Gorillas!

[(Anonymous)]

What's with the Africa sign? How can they relate the "absence of art in Africa" to the absence of women in the artistic community. That is quite an ignorant assumption! The creation of art in African communities is not intended solely for public consumption, or judged for "authenticity". Nor is it produced for longevity. All members of the community are "artists", and art is produced in any way or form at all moments of a person's existence. It isn't studied, it is a way of life...so much so that the word "art" doesn't exist in the vocabulary of most African languages. This eternal "now" is the path that these feminisists should perhaps seek.

Re: Perhaps a name change might help freshen up their act...

[anglerfish96.livejournal.com]

Haha!

It would be nice to have more women as cinematic directors in the mainstream, though. It does appear the indie scene is improving the situation gradually.

Re: African Gorillas!

[cerulicante.livejournal.com]

Art is only useful and valuable when it can be used to create a bubble of bohemian exclusivity that only the literati of the liberal thinkhaus can use to prove that they are visionaries.


Dirt and mud and native art aren't really...in fashion right now.


(that was sarcasm!)

[cityramica.livejournal.com]

are there tracks available online for the BAMBI♥BONE soundtrack?


i don't like the Guerilla Girls. I learned about them around the same time I was being force-fed Judy Chicago who I also don't care for. yeah i guess her/their work had a time and place but ugh too many tampons, etc. a lot of feminist works that i've seen lately [and there are a lot in SF] have left a bad taste in my mouth.

but um, women are cool. i like being one.