Painting as Amy Sillman¹

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Notes

¹This essay began as a paper for a graduate seminar taught by Carol Armstrong at Yale University in 2010, “Art and Feminism.” I am deeply indebted to her and to David Joselit for their support. I would also like to thank Amy Sillman for her generosity with both time and conversation, and to Darby English, Izabel Gass, and Barbara Mundy, for their thoughtful responses to my work.

²For examples of this alignment, see Nelson and Norden.

³Helen Molesworth offers a wonderfully lucid disassembly of this pairing in her essay “Cleaning Up in the 1970s: The Work of Judy Chicago, Mary Kelly and Mierle Laderman Ukeles” (Newman et al.). See also Molesworth's “House Work and Art Work” (Molesworth 71–72).

⁴The flashlight itself holds an important symbolic place in Sillman's oeuvre (her spring 2010 exhibition at Sikkema Jenkins Gallery is called Transformer (or how many light bulbs does it take to change a painting)). The zine accompanying her most recent show is dedicated to images and clippings of flashlights and light bulbs beloved by Sillman, including Jasper Johns's 1960 sculpture, Flashlight.

⁵And both works most likely take Duchamp as a precedent. Though Johns's light bulbs are actually slightly earlier than Duchamp's 1964 readymades, apparently Johns took an important lesson away from Duchamp's three erotic objects: “The impact of his three small works perhaps was to confirm that works of modest size could be full, complete, accurate, impressive sculptures. The ‘obscurit’ of the Duchamp forms was, of course, very different from the ‘obviousness’ of my own” (qtd in Krauss 111).

⁶Aruna D'Souza helpfully summarizes the achievement of Part Object, Part Sculpture. It suggests that a “truly feminist writing of history might in fact look radically unlike a ‘feminist art’ show … the exhibition wasn't limited to artists who define themselves as feminists or to women artists; it didn't define ‘feminist art’; it didn't have explicitly feminist content. But it reoriented the history of modernist sculpture according to terms that, at their core, destabilize definitions of masculinity, femininity, hetero- and homosexuality, and so on. Or it rewrote that history according to ‘the problem of cross-identification … where masculine/feminine break down, where they cohabit and intersect, where they lose their discreteness.’ Most exciting was both the possibility of claiming artists such as Duchamp for a feminist rewriting of history—whatever their political or gender identifications—and the demonstration that destabilizing these categories leads to a different writing of history” (D'Souza 38).

⁷Both definitions are redactions of the Oxford English Dictionary's two entries for scrapping.

⁸Extrapolating Greenberg's critique, Thomas Crow has linked “homeless representation” to the ‘lower genres,’ especially photography. Crow notes its connection to ‘new contexts, from the sub-artistic markets for decorative kitsch to the ad hoc impulses of [artist Jim Shaw's] thrift-store underground’ (Crow 107).

⁹That is to say, misogynistic because it advocates a painterly mode seen to be at odds with a feminist politics. Griselda Pollock offers a characterization of this particular modernism: “Modernism [is the] dominant ideology [and its] of the artist is inevitably masculine. … Modernism is structured around sexual politics but these are displaced by the manifest content of modernist discourse, the celebration of creative masculine individualism.” Anne M. Wagner instantiates a helpful line of questioning in response: “Even if we grant that the final phrase offers an adequate view of the content of modernist discourse, why should we then conclude that the celebration of creative masculine individualism ‘displaces’ sexual politics, rather than instances them? Why should displacement be involved at all, as opposed to blatant demonstration?” (Wagner 14–15).

¹⁰In this way, her tactics recall Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit's statement in a very different context that “the very notion of [a] form distinct from color may be a way to control the communication of colors, a communication that is essentially a process of de-differentiation” (Bersani and Dutoit 116).