Slide-writing as Site-writing: A Performative Reading of the Women’s Art Library Slides

Abstract

The artist’s 35 mm slide consists of a photographic image framed by a slide mount she inscribes with writing and symbols that direct the slide’s future use. In this article, I consider how these artists’ writings that are held, suspended, in the WAL slide collection are a vibrant reading material that performs the slides as a feminist text. In my joint role as curator and researcher, I explore how I used photography to initiate a performative reading of the slide collection that politicizes the work of image reproductions.

Keywords:

• artists’ slides
• feminist organization
• collection digitization
• self-representation
• site-writing
• performative reading

Notes

1 Noted as Flick Allen, Pauline Barrie, Gillian Elinor, Pam Job and Elizabeth Shepherd in the exhibition guide for the first WASL exhibition Women on Women, Battersea Arts Centre 1982.

2 The Newsletter was renamed from issue number 13, October 1986 until issue number 36, September/October 1990 when it became Women’s Art Magazine

3 ‘The World’s Women On-Line!__Muriel_Magenta’, accessed March 3, 2014, http://wwol.is.asu.edu/collab.htm.

4 The CD-ROM did not gain sufficient financial backing to go into production although a sample CD-ROM was produced from artists’ slide files A-H.