Essay

Have it all

 

 

Jo Bragg (Takatāpui, he/they pronouns, Ngati Porou Iwi)

 

When women¹ make art, the assumption is that the work is about gender. What this assumption fails to reckon with is that an artist’s gender category is only a starting point, not a conclusion. The work is about the world, about labour: belonging, autonomy and power, (or the lack thereof). We need a multitude of voices, perspectives and genealogies of Feminist/Queer and Trans-history in order to sort through the overlapping political projects that see us arriving in the 21st century.

The first wave of Feminism, the suffragette movement, emerged in the United Kingdom and lasted from the mid-1800s until the early 1920s, focusing predominantly on legal equality: securing women’s right to vote, access to education, and ownership of property. The second wave, the era in which this essay is primarily concerned, spanned the 1960s to the early 1980s and aimed to sustain this progress. The third (mid 1990s – mid 2010s) and current fourth wave (2010s – current day) both emphasise the importance of intersectionality, reclaiming femininity and challenging societal norms around gender and sexuality. At multiple points throughout its history, Feminism has been proclaimed dead. The goals of the third and fourth wave were accused of being directionless; mere lofty ideals, in contrast to the concrete wins of the suffragette movement.

As someone born during the third wave, I have lived Feminism as infused with mainstream culture. Feminism as popular culture: a mostly tacit, empty image fueled by what feels like collective amnesia. An experience which led Feminist scholars Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards to suggest that in the year 2000 Feminism had become “like flouride…it’s simply in the water.”² Initially, Feminism becoming popularised in the mid 1990’s didn’t ring any alarm bells, in fact it was a sign of progress.

This progress has, conversely, both expanded and eroded the fourth wave. Replaced by an online replica, surrounded by the rise of the trad-wife online, we must now be careful to remember that the first signs of a rise in fascism are disillusionment and historical erasure. Rushing to find a replacement for Feminism, while not accounting for the history of it, will only cause the movement to fracture. To protect equality and progress the rights of women and Queer people, we must mobilise and move forward in unison. In order to do this, we must, first, understand the history.

Having it all, all, all presents select works by nine influential international artists: Martha Rosler, Nil Yalter, Christa Schadt, Hannah Wilke, Howardena Pindell, Yoko Ono, Ana Mendieta, Pipilotti Rist, and Janice Tanaka. Spanning the 1960s to the 1990s, these select video and performance-based works have come to be associated with the second wave, inviting a renewed relevance in contemporary discourse.

Martha Rosler’s (1943 USA) Semiotics of the Kitchen³ is a striking introduction. In this brief yet poignant work, dressed in frock and apron, Rosler delivers a decisively dead-pan performance directly to the camera, lifting up and naming various kitchen utensils. Though distinct in their approach, the absurdist use of objects, actions and language in Semiotics of the Kitchen are not dissimilar to Nil Yalter’s (1938 Turkey/France) The Headless Woman (Belly Dance)⁴ and Harem,⁵ as all three works lead the viewer to question the important role that language plays in shaping the world as gendered. Drawing parallels to daytime cooking shows like that of Julia Child and Martha Stewart, Rosler herself and the work are pointedly critical of the traditional roles generally prescribed to women at the time of its production. In a contemporary context Semiotics of the Kitchen intercepts with the recent rise of trad-wife content online. Content creators like Hannah Neeleman (Ballerina Farm) and Nara Smith position themselves in stark opposition to Rosler’s critique, presenting the role of the traditional wife and homemaker as “aspirational”. This thinly veiled elitism and conservatism seems to be a real thorn in the side of fourth wave feminism. It is useful, here, to introduce art historian Amelia Jones’s use of the term Para-feminism.⁶ The prefix “para” is often misinterpreted to simply mean opposite or counter to. However, the etymological root of “para” is shared with the word parody and parallel (in Greek meaning to sit beside/alongside). Para-feminism as a mode of analysis allows for a very useful, critical distancing between online content, video art and their assumed associations with Feminism. While it is important to acknowledge that some women actively choose (to film and monetise) the role of traditional wife and homemaker, for many women this role is not a source of income or an “empowered choice,” let alone a choice at all. Though, the framing of traditional wife and homemaker as a “lifestyle” is suspect at best. Para-feminism allows for a more measured view of how the media surrounding a work of art comes to inform it, and why not everything created by women is inherently Feminist or about Feminism.

Parody, as a facet of Para-feminism, provides a powerful critical tool for addressing injustice or pointing out contradictions. Much like Rosler’s second work in the show: Martha Rosler Reads “Vogue,”⁷ Christa Schadt’s work Stand by Your Man⁸ parodies stereotypical gender roles, beauty standards and their relationship to advertising. Schadt’s video simply shows a flexing, sculpted torso, set to the 1968 classic song Stand by Your Man by Tammy Wynette. The work inverts Laura Mulvey’s ‘Male Gaze,’ a concept which has come to define how we understand the representation of women in cinema and art. As a goal shared by Rosler and Schadt alike, “it is said,” postures Mulvey, “that analyzing pleasure, or beauty, destroys it.”⁹

The commodification of gender roles and beauty standards also proved fertile ground for Hannah Wilke’s (1940-1993 USA) lifelong career. Pertinent to her performance work So help me Hannah¹⁰ was, and still is, that the work generated an ouroboros of critique. Meaning, what the work purported to critique – namely power dynamics and gender-based violence – it was perversely accused of simply being. A critique leveraged at many Feminist artists whose work is considered “graphic,” in its use of language or nudity, or both. While I maintain that it is important to apply a critical lens, we should remain vigilant to how works that feature nudity are discussed. As the discourse all too often and too quickly blatantly reinforces the denigration of women’s bodily autonomy. Featuring the artist brandishing a gun, shadowed by two camera men, nude but for a pair of high heels, So help me Hannah investigates the tension between artist, audience and critic. The (sometimes) indiscernible difference between being viewed and being judged.

Important to So help me Hannah is that it was performed at A.I.R (Artist in Residence) Gallery: the first not-for-profit, artist-directed and maintained gallery for women in the United States. Notably, it was co-founded in 1972 by Howardena Pindell (1943 USA), an artist also featured in Having it all all all. As the co-founder of A.I.R and in her work as an artist, Pindell was dedicated to making space for voices formally overlooked by the art world. Pindell’s own work Free, White and 21¹¹opens with a perfunctory shot of Pindell in whiteface, wearing a blond wig. This character who is seemingly Free, White and 21 as the title suggests, re-occurs throughout the video only to discredit Pindell’s own experiences of racism with statements like, “you won’t exist until we validate you” and “you really must be paranoid.” The work is a raw account of Pindell’s experience as an artist and as a woman of colour living in America, who was already 21 in 1964, when the Civil Rights Act finally passed.

In an essay titled White Psycho Dream Girl (2019), Nayuka Gorrie writes on the connection between misogyny and racial prejudice and the ways in which this combination limits who can express what emotion, when and how. With deadpan humour and wit, Gorrie draws on contemporary filmic examples of the White Psycho Dream Girl trope. Think, Angelina Jolie in Girl, Interrupted, Kirsten Dunst in The Virgin Suicides, Sarah Michelle Gellar in Cruel Intentions (all 1999) and Rachel McAdams in Mean Girls (2004). Gorrie writes with enough self-awareness to point out that the word “psycho” is, itself, a loaded term. The point still stands, however, that Gorrie just wants the privilege of expressing their emotions freely, without the ambient threat of incarceration and without the burden of being perceived as threatening or dangerous.

To further elucidate their point, Gorrie writes on Beyoncé’s use of Pipilotti Rist’s (1962 Switzerland) performative action in Ever is over all. ¹² Notably, the original work by Rist features a uniformed police officer who walks past the performer (who has just fashioned a red hot poker stem from ornament into weapon) and smiles. As the protagonist in the music video for “Hold Up”, Beyoncé’s use of Rist’s signature “smiling rage” signals not only the complexities of expressing hurt, but a refusal to accept and stay silent about it. Skipping down the street in a radiant yellow gown, baseball bat in hand: every car window smashed by Beyoncé holds up a mirror – if only for a second – to state and interpersonal violence. Here she reclaims both joy and rage for women of colour.

Cut Piece¹³ by Yoko Ono (1933 Japan/USA) was my initial introduction to video-based performance work in art school. It is as compelling to me now as it was then. The work raises further questions around femininity, gender and race, as well as masochism and spectatorship. Contemporary discourse around Cut Piece is, as all artworks are, subject to being mediated by the concerns of our time.

First performed exactly ten years prior to Marina Abramović’s (Belgrade, Serbia, 1946) indelible work of performance, Rhythm 0 (1974),¹⁴ Ono sits on stage at Carnegie Hall with a pair of scissors. Conceived as one of Ono’s event scores or instruction pieces, included in her 1964 book (and early example of conceptual art) Grapefruit.¹⁵ Audience members approach the artist, who remains motionless, and cut off small sections of her clothing to take away with them as souvenirs. Cut Piece is, crucially, staged in the year that the Civil Rights Act finally outlawed discrimination based on race, religion, sex, or national origin in America and at the height of America’s involvement in the ongoing war in Vietnam. Writing on Cut Piece, gender theorist Jack Halberstam states that the work is best read through the lens of “radical passivity”, as an act of resistance. Considering Ono never conceded the meaning of the work, as it is, no doubt, pluralistic, Halberstam asks viewers to consider “what is the self that comes undone in 9 minutes for an audience and is it feminist?”¹⁶ If we take “radical passivity” to mean resisting what is both desirable and mandatory—to adhere, to participate and to act—Cut Piece can be read as an important work of Proto-Feminism¹⁷ performance art and as an anti-war protest, in direct opposition to the demands of the world at the time of its production.

Ono’s work is not unlike Ana Mendieta’s (1948-1985 Cuba/USA), concerned as it is with far more than just its meaning to the Art World. In Mendieta’s Silueta Series (1973-1980) as in Ono’s Cut Piece, both artists take a pioneering approach to the mediums of performance, video and photography. By using their body and (its) absence, notably so in Mendieta’s work Fundamento Palo Monte: Silueta Series (Gun Powder Works),¹⁸ we come to understand that both artists make use of the immaterial in their work to negotiate various forms of social in/visibility. Both seek a return to something bigger than themselves, to something spiritual. In Mendieta’s case, a return to her homeland of Cuba. Mendieta’s use of found organic environments and matter allows for a connection to emerge: that of place and displacement, and the artist’s desire to belong. To return, both physically and spiritually, home.

Themes of home, belonging and safety reoccur in Feminist art throughout the second, third and current fourth wave. The beginning of more intersectional feminist thought began to emerge during the second-wave, with women of colour, like Howardena Pindell, bell hooks, Angela Davis, Audre Lorde and collectives such as the Combahee River Collective, the Third World Women’s Alliance (TWWA); and many others speaking out. As the prior lack of intersectionality was addressed, the ultimate goal of overcoming patriarchal culture propelled the need for all women to unify, allowing for relevant movements to co-occur and break ground, such as the fight to destigmitise and decriminalise sex work and the fight for Queer rights and Trans-liberation. Intersectional-Feminism posits that factors such as race, class, religion, sexuality, age and able-bodiedness are recognised for the different role each has to play in the lives of every woman, as an individual. Going beyond the category of “women” as a monolith, it seeks to question the ways in which Feminism is taught, learnt and engaged with on a daily basis, if at all, in order to build a community based on understanding, rather than patriarchal control. As such, the definitions of what home, belonging and safety mean to women, are, naturally, expanded beyond the limitations of the domestic sphere. As in Janice Tanaka’s (1963 USA) Duality, Duplicity¹⁹ we see family portraits interlaced with a painterly approach to moving image making. Tanaka’s signature use of abstraction throwing into question not only the artist’s familial bond, but her own self-concept and sense of belonging. The abstraction in Tanaka’s work speaks to a depth, a rich inner world that emancipates the artist and invites the audience alike to imagine a world beyond isolation and confinement.

As artists present during the second wave, Martha Rosler, Nil Yalter, Christa Schadt, Hannah Wilke, Howardena Pindell, Yoko Ono, Ana Mendieta, Pipilotti Rist, and Janice Tanaka have come to define how we speak, write and think about the world today. From the use of parody in Rosler’s Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975), to abstraction in Tanaka’s Duality, Duplicity (1980), each work in Having it all all introduces a new concept; a new way of being in the world. The works presented build a strong case for solidarity and for the continued fight for equality to include even broader voices, perspectives and genealogies to better imagine strategies for liberation. For Feminism to have a future, we must fight to lift the sites of greatest exploitation first.²⁰ In the fight for equality, there is always work to be done and to be made. By taking the strategies deployed by each artist in this show as a starting point for understanding how to move forward, I have no doubt, we can and will have it all.

 

¹A term used throughout this essay inclusive of all who identify as women

² Baumgardner, J & Richards, A. Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism, and The Future. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, (2000).

³ video, sound, 6m 33s, (1975).

⁴ video, sound, 23m, 41s, (1974).

⁵ video, sound, 54m, (1980).

⁶ Jones, A. It’s Time for Action: on Feminism. Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst: JRP Ringier Kunstverlag, Zürich, Switzerland, (2008).

⁷ video, colour, sound, 25m 22s, (1982).

⁸ video, sound, 5min 18sec, (1981).

⁹ Mulvey, L. Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. Screen, 16, 6-18, (1975).

¹⁰ video, colour, sound, 29m, (1982).

¹¹ video, colour, sound, 9m 52s, (1980).

¹² two channel video, colour, sound, 4m 7s, (1997).

¹³ 16mm film, black and white, mono, 8m 27s, (1964/1965).

¹⁴ Performed in Naples, Rhythm 0 (1974), was a six-hour endurance performance piece. The work involved Abramović standing still while the audience was invited to use any of the 72 objects she had laid out on a table as they wished. The objects included scissors, perfume, honey, bread, grapes, wine, scalpel, nails, a rose, a feather, a metal bar, a gun, and a bullet.

¹⁵ Ono, Y. Grapefruit. Wunternaum Press. Tokyo, Japan, (1964).

¹⁶ Halberstam, J. The Anti-Social Turn in Queer Studies. Graduate Journal of Social Science – Vol. 5 Issue 2 pp. 140-156, (1975).

¹⁷ Predating the broader feminist movement in performance art.

¹⁸ film, colour, silent, 5m 56s, (1980).

¹⁹ video, colour, sound, 6m 10s, (1980).

²⁰ Chua, Lynette J., and Timothy Hildebrandt. Negotiating In/Visibility: The Political Economy of Lesbian Activism and Rights Advocacy. Development and Change 48, no. 3, 5-10, (2017).

 

References

Baumgardner, J & Richards, A. Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism, and The Future. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, (2000).

Chua, Lynette J., and Timothy Hildebrandt. Negotiating In/Visibility: The Political Economy of Lesbian Activism and Rights Advocacy. Development and Change 48, no. 3, 5-10, (2017).

Gorrie, Nayuka. White Psycho Dream Girls — Kill Your Darlings, accessed January, (21/03/2025).

Halberstam, J. The Anti-Social Turn in Queer Studies. Graduate Journal of Social Science – Vol. 5 Issue 2 pp. 140-156, (2008).

Jones, A. It’s Time for Action: on Feminism. Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst: JRP Ringier Kunstverlag, Zürich, Switzerland, (2008).

Mulvey, L. Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. Screen, 16, 6-18, (1975).

Ono, Y. Grapefruit. Wunternaum Press. Tokyo, Japan, (1964).

 

Further Reading

Armstrong, E. Marxist and Socialist Feminism. Study of Women and Gender: Faculty Publications, Smith College, Northampton, MA, (2020).

Gordon, H. Why I Don’t Talk About ‘The Body: A Polemic. Monday Journal 4 (n.d.), accessed 12/02/25

Illouz, Eva. Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism. Cambridge, England; Malden, Massachusetts: Polity, (2007).

Jennifer Doyle, Hold it Against Me: Difficulty and Emotion in Contemporary Art. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, (2013).

Koyama, E. The Trans-Feminist Manifesto. Catching a Wave: Reclaiming Feminism for the 21st Century Northeastern University Press pp 244-259, (2003).

 

This text response was commissioned by Gus Fisher Gallery on the occasion of the exhibition Having it all, all, all, 2025.