The Hypertext of HerMe(s)

By Judy Freya Sibayan

This ebook is Judy Freya Sibayan's artistic autobiography exploring 39 years as visual artist, curator and editor of Ctrl+P. Inspired by Hélène Cixous, the figure of HerMe(s) is invoked for a new kind of artistic autobiography, hyperlinked to the internet and a practice, evident in major works like Scapular Gallery and Museum of Mental Objects,

• Language: English
• Publisher: KT press
• Release date: Dec 19, 2014
• ISBN: 9780992693404

Book preview

Judy Freya Sibayan cover

The Hypertext of HerMe(s)

Judy Freya Sibayan

KT press, 2014

This project is supported by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, New York

KT press publishes books and n.paradoxa: international feminist art journal to promote understanding of women artists and their work

The Hypertext of HerMe(s)

Judy Freya Sibayan

Notice of Rights

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. For information on getting permission for reprints and excerpts, contact [e-mail]. The right of Judy Freya Sibayan to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyrights, Design and Patents Act, 1988.

Copyright © 2014 by Judy Freya Sibayan

All images copyright © to named artists, reproduced courtesy of artists.

ISBN: 978-0-9926934-0-4

Publisher: KT press, 38 Bellot Street, London, SE10 0AQ, UK

Website: http://www.ktpress.co.uk

Ebook series editor: Katy Deepwell

To report errors, please email: [e-mail]

Every effort was made to contact all copyright holders, if there are any errors or omissions to the captions or credits, please inform the publishers of the oversight.

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of the URLs for any external or third party internet websites referred to in this book and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is or will remain accurate or appropriate.

Front cover image of Judy Freya Sibayan. Photo: Armin Linke.

1. Theory of art: Contemporary art 2. Philippine art: 21st century 3. Feminist theory 4. Performance art 5. Autobiography 6. Hypertext

I. Sibayan, Judy Freya. II. Title.  

Dear Reader

October 3, 2013

Dear Reader,

This letter takes the place of the preface to The Hypertext of HerMe(s). In this preface I discuss the reasons for this autobiography being written as a hypertext and its scope and limitations as a hyper-textual self-writing on my lifework. Through the 390 hyperlinks within this ebook, I am able to better contextualize my art making within the field of cultural production or more specifically within the art world (or the art institution) which sociologist Pierre Bourdieu refers to as a field of struggles where agents — artists, critics, curators, dealers, collectors, academics — engage in competition for control of interests and resources, and where belief of the value of the work is part of the reality of the work. Bourdieu understood the work of art as a manifestation of the cultural field as a whole, in which all the powers of the field, and all the determinisms inherent in its structure and functioning are concentrated.1

Bourdieu concludes that art production is therefore an intertextual (or interdiscursive) enterprise. But unlike intertextuality as conceived by Bahktin and Kristeva, for Bourdieu, texts are not only related to other texts (or artworks related to other texts and other artworks) but ‘must be analyzed both in relation to other texts and in relation to the structure of the field and to the specific agents involved’2 thereby making intersubjectivity a more appropriate term for this condition of artists struggling in relation to other social agents in the cultural field for positions that will establish them in the art world. Thus, as a universe of belief, the art world is a self-perpetuating sphere where the value of the work (its symbolic value) is sustained by an extensive social apparatus incorporating museums, art galleries, art histories, art studies programs, biennales, cultural centers, libraries, art publications, art institutes and colleges peopled by, in addition to the agents mentioned above, historians, scholars, teachers, publishers, editors, librarians, architects, art writers, art patrons, art administrators, etc.

By cross-referencing my writing on my art production to the archive of all archives — the Internet, I am able to make evident the shape, density and the expanse of the field of cultural production or more specifically the universe of belief in which I engage to realize my art; with this universe making possible and sustaining my art production. Thus, by cross-referencing my art production within and to the Net, I am able to evoke the art world as a powerful cultural site where my work materializes as art and where I materialize as an artist, thereby demonstrating art production’s condition as an intertextual and intersubjective activity. Hyper-textualizing this self-writing is a fitting and efficient method to do just this and more. As an intersubjectively constituted subject, I have engaged in a de-centered art practice in the sense that my work of 39 years developed from art done at the Center of the Philippine art world (the Cultural Center of the Philippines) to the eventual moving away from a dependency on formal institutional support and valuation toward a reliance on the scale of mostly my own everyday life resources. As a process of de-centering, this practice was a response to the failure of the avant-garde with the institutionalization of this failure becoming the condition of another practice, that of Institutional Critique. For the past nineteen years, I have been doing Institutional Critique which I posit is the work of the ex-centric. A subject position locating the artist off-center of the art institution, Institutional Critique is a praxis that problematizes and changes this institution but does not affirm, expand or reinforce the artist’s relationship to it. To have left the center/Center was the only tenable response to a situation I found deeply problematic as an artist whose trajectory is to make critical art, that is, art that problematizes the making of art. A term Linda Hutcheon coins in her book A Poetics of Postmodernism, the ex-centric, a post-modern subject, questions, contests, and problematizes, with the aim to change but does not destroy, ‘centralized, totalized, hierarchized, closed systems... part of its questioning involves an energizing and rethinking of margins and edges, of what does not fit the humanly constructed notion of the center’3 — a stance that positions the ex-centric paradoxically both inside and outside. Given this position as an ‘inside-outsider’,4 the ex-centric expediently uses parody as its mode of critique for the genre’s ‘essential reflexivity, its capacity to reflect critically back upon itself, not merely upon its target’5 (italics my emphasis). In doing mainly parodic performances, I am able to mock and transform, undermine and renew the art institution thus putting parody’s critical function ultimately in the service of the re-creation and continuity of the institution of art and thus ultimately in the service of expanding this particular field of cultural production. I believe, Institutional Critique, for the artist is an ex-centering process of art production.

Leigh Gilmore writing on autobiography postulates that self-writing has everything to do with the ‘constructive dimension of representation’6 and in particular the construction of self-identity. She adds, ‘Autobiographical selves are constructed through writing and therefore cannot reproduce exactly the selves who lived’.7 So that in its overt acknowledgement of its intertextual condition, my self-writing is less about self-truths and the ‘process or unfolding of life events but rather makes the writing itself an aspect of the selfhood the writer experiences and brings into being’.8 Further, Mark Freeman has proposed that in autobiographical discourse, ‘narrative is itself the source of the self’s identity’9 thus making identities not separate ‘from how they are represented’.10

Therefore, the process of cross-referencing my art production in and to the Internet in this autobiography de-centers and expands the autobiographical self as it is constructed networked in the Internet. With hypertext, I interrupt, break, and violate the linearity of writing a traditional manuscript as I modestly take advantage of what hypertext provides me: a non-linear, multi-valenced, unbounded, non-hierarchical decentered form of writing. Within five sections of this ebook are embedded about 390 hyperlinks; and a book linked to endnotes that are often several paragraphs long. Barbara Page in her essay ‘Women Writers and the Restive Text, Feminism, Experimental Writing, and Hypertext’, observes that:

Among contemporary writers, women are by no means alone in pursuing non-linear, anti-hierarchical, and decentered writing, but many women who affiliate themselves with this tendency write against norms of realist narrative from a consciousness stirred by feminist discourse of resistance.11

Page prefaces this observation with the work of Ellen Friedman and Miriam Fuchs who ‘trace a line of authors who subvert what they see as patriarchal assumptions governing traditional modes of narrative’. Friedman and Fuchs write:

Although the woman in the text may be the particular woman writer, in the case of twentieth-century women experimental writers, the woman in the text is also an effect of the textual practice of breaking patriarchal fictional forms; the radical forms — non-linear, non-hierarchical, and decentering — are themselves, a way of writing the feminine.12

Page considers this claim as ‘itself radical’,

namely that such women writers can produce themselves — as new beings or as ones previously unspoken — through self-conscious acts of writing against received traditions... For some writers of this tendency, hypertext seem to provide a means by which to explore new possibilities for writing... For all these authors, restiveness with the fixity of print signifies something more than a struggle going on under a blanket of established formal meaning. Their aim is to rend the surface of language and to reshape it into forms more hospitable to the historical lives of women and to an aesthetic of the will and desire of a self-apprehended female body that is an end unto itself and not simply instrumental.13

Thus, in writing in hypertext, my autobiography is linked to and networked in the Internet, which as the archive of all archives, can threaten to let loose my writing from its site — from its moorings. I will have no control over my reader who may wish to leave to go somewhere else in virtual space bringing my own writing farther and farther away in this network as links upon links are found and visited. It is thus a de-centered form of writing as it disperses the autobiographical subject hyper-textually, as it goes outward in search of other voices, other texts, other ideas, for the purpose of gathering them to construct a self and in turn inscribe or represent a self not as a unified, solid, coherent, autonomous, and whole individual but as a fluid, inter-dependent, fragmented, de-centered socio-culturally constructed subject.

In conclusion, by writing this autobiography as a hypertext, the writing itself becomes decentered for the purpose of contextualizing my being an agent in the art institution as the shape, density and expanse of this art world is made evident by hyperlinking the autobiographical-self in the Net. Therefore, by hyper-textualizing my autobiography, one will get a sense of the cultural institution to which I belong but an institution I have been necessarily problematizing. Simply put, a hyper-textualized self-writing befits a de-centered art practice and a decentered autobiographical self

As an autobiography that is less about self-truths and my life events, this self-writing focuses on my life work for the same reason the institution of art functions similar to that of the institution of autobiographical literature. Both institutions are powerful sociocultural discursive sites through which I have materialized as a culture-producing subject. Hence, I claim this autobiography as my geography-of-self, whose genius loci serves me well. For in this space of self-creation, this self-writing and its object, my art making — aside from being both discursively constructed, coincide on the basis of their being both acts of auto-inquiry and self-reflexivity; self-construction and self-determinism; institutional critique and cultural critique — making them both privileged sites of subject formation and critical agency.

As this self-writing is a work-in-progress, presently it is cross-referenced only to things in the Internet and to a few images of my art. What is not referenced is all of my personal archive, a trove of photographs, letters, artworks, images, journals, art catalogues, posters, exhibition invitations, and hundreds of printed emails. The future of this autobiography therefore can only be a more expanded version in the sense that it might be extensively linked to materials in my self-archive. Only a few of my self-writings are quoted in full and only a few of my major works are presented. Any future version should have as its appendices all of my published writings and the writings of others about me; documentation of all my other major works: all of which might also be hyperlinked to the Net. In addition, all events — conferences, symposia, dialogues, keynote-paper events, workshops, speaking engagements and exhibitions I curated and participated in as an artist should also be documented and again cross referenced to the Net. This book includes a chronological curriculum vitae, but perhaps a future version would be inspired by the biography in Roland Barthes’ radical anti-autobiography, Barthes by Barthes — a chronological listing of key persons and events in his life starting from birth.

Welcome to The Hypertext of HerMe(s). Click on any section of this autobiography to begin, use the chart at the end of each section or section headings to navigate back and forward. All footnotes and the majority of images have been hyperlinked into the main text. You can return from the footnotes to the main text where you left off, just by clicking on the number of the footnote. You can return to the text from the images section by clicking on the links in the captions.

Sincerely,

Judy Freya Sibayan

The Hypertext of HerMe(s)

Copyright

KT press books

The Book of HerMe(s)

The Book of HerMe(s) 1

ex-am, ex-Amen

an intertextual meditation on one’s lifework 2

The text of her body 3

Out

of

line 4

N i g h t d r e a m s d a y s

5

When did I learn to invoke you? Ah, but you have always come unbidden, even before I learned to divine the Divine without and within me! You have come and gone as you pleased always, as if to serve your selfish ends.

You have traversed, impregnated, pierced me with your tricks, your paradoxical synchronistic gifts, upsetting those who refuse your great gift of life-death-life; upsetting the world of linear causality.6

But you have been more than generous with your gifts of dreams, all providential (pro vide, pro life). When I was in turmoil about love, you came to me with a crazed woman, hands tied behind her back, she ascends a mountain. Her hands free, she descends to the sea, by its shores, near a cave, early eve, a lit fire warming her gently warning her, ‘Forget about love for when you do love will come’. That one enigmatic contraction I hear as simultaneous pauses: ‘For when you do forget about love, love will come/For when you do love, love will come’.

But it is in my life of art that you have been truly generous. Embodied in one of your names (for you have many names, Ananse, Loki, Cayote, Eshau, Ictinike, Maui, Mercuria)7 is this book I am writing!

Your second gift as I ‘come to writing’8 is a dream: ‘You will not bathe, for the waters will not flow’, say my father and my neurosurgeon brother (also my surrogate father). And they add, ‘For she who bathes and is aggrieved will prevent the waters from flowing’.

I protest and declare, ‘But I will be aggrieved, will aggregate these coming days’.9 The next day, in the afternoon, you let me meet through Hélène, Clarice who wrote: ‘She would be fluid all her life’.10 Another gift! Which I know is not mere coincidence. And I was proud to tell you that I have recently been drunk with water, for it has made my dry skin of more than fifty years smooth and flowing.

These two men/dreams are my fears that try to deceive me, who want to silence me: ‘Do not come clean. Do not write! Do not be fluid!’ The father removes me from the living room which he appropriates as his working space and directs me to the kitchen-dining room as my writing space. He is kind enough to move the stereophonic turntable to my space.

But I am upset; for every time my family needs to eat, I will have to remove all my writing things. But I need not worry. For in your delight to frolic with symbols, in your mercurial speed to speak to me through Psyche,11 you guided my family of me(s) or as Hélène puts it, my ‘multiple Is’,12 to speak/sing/write through a nourished body. And I will be surrounded with song. I hear, I come close to Hélène’s song through you, Her(Me)s through Psyche, through Toril: ‘I was eating the texts, I was sucking, licking, kissing them’.13

I need not worry. You, HerMe(s), merely wanted to remind me again that in brewing your stories outside the Logos, you can only be grasped with the whole of our lived being.14

The night after, invoking you to guide me to begin ‘to come to writing my body’,15 I kept dreaming of only two words: Dedans La!16 Simultaneously I heard and said them over and over in a sing-song way — Dedans La! Dedans La! Dedans La! Inside Her! Inside Her! Inside Her! And awoke with Clarice Lispector inside my mouth, guiding me back to Hélène to Clarice’s O Lustro: ‘I like a book that begins like this. It begins inside, in the body’.17

Not only did you guide me to start writing from inside my body, you and Hélène urged me as instructed through two of her writings Dedans (inside) and La (her and the musical note la) to write singing and playing with words and to begin writing starting with my ‘first separation or individuation’,18 my active self-birthing as the heart of my story. And to go to the point-where-I began to enable myself with art that ‘militates against bourgeois commodity-art and any ideology connected to it’.19

One last symbolic delight before I inhabit this space of writing: a visitation! You spoke to me at dawn today through a black Vulcan alien named Tuvok, the chief security officer of Starship Voyager, a spaceship abducted from the Alpha Quadrant by a sub-space entity called the Caretaker, which leaves the ship lost in deep space in the Delta Quadrant of the universe. Tuvok and the ship’s crew try to find their way home to Earth.20

This Vulcan, in addition to being extremely logical in his ways, has the capacity to mind-meld. Hélène’s and your way of calling me, urging me to stay close to your forging fire so I can write in the instant, and burn with passion21 in this critical time of my coming to writing...

the call sets me on fire, the fire is calling me.22

I want fire! fire!

I demand fire! I implore it, I suscitate it. I suplicate it to explode in my dreams, in my thoughts, I flee it. All my books rest on fire. All those I love walk on fire.23

This Other (black and alien) of logic is lost in outer space (indeed life is a journey to the stars, the stuff we are made of!) within the deposited sediments at the mouth of deep flowing space. What a joy to unravel your gift-dream! The flow of life will not be accessed if one were to have a life of pure Logos. Further, if one were to think that one is safe (deposited) even if we take an oath in writing (to depose, and again an oath within the Logos, the Law) in this kind of life, an entity that cares will remove us (depose us) from what we think is a place or position of power (Alpha, the brightest, main star in the constellation, a place of first order) so we can begin the real journey home to ourselves. This sums up the process of individuation, a process where we take leave of our socially constructed selves and where you, HerMe(s), play a key role. It is also the story that is at the heart of Hélène’s writing: ‘Writing is both a search for a social freeing and a writing out of a personal situation of imprisonment’.24 This in sum is my story, our story, the story that you wish me to write!

Back to my dream, Tuvok raises his left hand, his index finger pressed to his thumb, his little finger to his ring finger, and greets me, ‘Live long and prosper’. Ah, you and your economy of signs! You spoke through someone whose name Tuvok means precisely to speak, two speak, you speak as in the French tu.25 Then you gift me prosper and not proper! The Realm of the Proper Hélène considers abominable in that it is ‘proper to the male. Proper — property — appropriate: signaling an emphasis on self-identity, self aggrandizement and arrogative dominance’.26

‘Live long and prosper.’ You want me to live, to be alive in my difference.27 You usher me into The Realm of the Gift.28 This is your tender way of preparing me to be fundamentally one with the Good Mother, whose eternal white milk will surround and protect the writing woman. Within her, I will ‘always and everywhere feel deeply secure and shielded from danger; nothing will ever harm me, distance and separation will never disable me’.29

This is your way of ridding me of my fears, of not being able to steal away to take flight from language conscripted in the service of the father. This is your benign way of enabling me to begin writing my body. I must steal away, fly away with my own body language: voler. I must be a voleuse!30

So I will say this to you HerMe(s) — Trickster, Soul-Guide, Messenger of the Gods, Bestower of Good Fortune,31 my Great Mother, my Good Mother, divining you, surrendering to you, living through your gifts, are as close as I can get to regaining paradise.

I have learned to pay heed to and be grateful for your guidance appearing in the transition of things, or when not too aware of your presence in medias res. In so doing, I will always be with the desire to keep myself and others ‘alive and different’.32

§

Death in the middle of things

One day you HerMe(s), sat deep within the pit of my belly, in the middle of all my things,

Coinciding with the first stirrings of discord, of dis-ease, of things seeming out of sync in my life

A life weight, made heavy only because of the fierceness of your terrifying love for me,

An unmovable radiating mediating force, summoning all the nerve endings of my body (now entombed in the ways of the socially constructed),

to turn outside in.

For this is the time when nothing in the outside would matter. This time of great learning, of infinite f/light down, deep within the abysmal sacred center of birthing my true self.33

This time, determined to finally bring me home to divine the Divine within me, you planned that nothing in my outer world would animate me. Even if you needed to bring death to all of them — friends, lovers, work, family, my art.

You orchestrated events and people to conspire to remove me from the high of my work and my art from the center. Betrayed and abandoned by my young Burmese lover, devastated by the betrayal of everything and everyone I held true to all that I had become, to all that contained my heart, I was undone, became a babbling unbearable dark woe-man, screaming, crying in helpless silent rage, ceaseless within her undifferentiated body. A devastating betrayal of everything and everyone I held true to all that I had become, to all that contained my heart.

HerMe(s), still unaware of your benign loving intentions, I had no ears for your presence, and around me, all were deaf to my inarticulate grieving self. I longed to be set right again by and within the very same reality that conspired to betray me. And having disavowed the old sources of life that you pulled from under me, now without any language or ideas or even any notion of how to grasp this unknown, I thought, and this was the problem, (all the disembodied circuitous thinking) that the physically engaged busy-body in another profession, a new lover, another art form, would move me forward, pull me out of this slowly dying self.

I went back to the grind. Three years of refusal to put to work my ears, my skin, my broken heart, my feet, my nerve endings all prepped waiting at your command to work with me in abandoning myself only to myself.34 But you have set into motion that not a single thing in my outer old world be attracted to my now weary-worn terrified heart.

And not until I learned to surrender to your void, generous as ever with your infinite patience, did you allow me with great resistance (difficult travel visas to obtain) one last forced outer journey; you allowed me to physically flee as far as I could from myself, to flee to another source, to journey to the old world and study an art form using an ancient medium (silver) that had no resonance whatsoever to my being.

But these undertakings never brought me anywhere near that past secure self. I would be back in the same empty meaningless space that I thought I was leaving. There was nothing there that gave me refuge from my pain, that gave me answers to my ill-formulated questions, that would give form to my now very fragile, formless, fearful self.

Unmoored from all that was formerly known as safe, having lost my senses, now a stranger to my body, I fell ill — a visitation from the wolf (systemic lupus erythomatosus) from an old chronic disease of being allergic to myself! I was my own toxin! This was your last loving synchronistic event to stop me cold in my tracks to total destruction. Like all your gifts, this was a paradox. To put a stop to my own self-destruction, it was not enough that everyone and everything that I considered critical sources of my life were rendered non-vital. I had to be brought to the precipice of bodily death to be lovingly pushed down into the womb of the sacred source. You pushed me into a terrifying free fall via negativa landing me not too gently into the pit of my own belly.

Scathed, wounded, howling in agony, there I was in that same pit where you waited for three years rocking yourself away on your winged feet. This pit, this fount which has no center, which has no beginning nor ending, just openings, apertures to states of new self-being, unchartered flight paths to self-places with no borders. Here, the finding/founding of the authentic self is done not amongst people or for others but with and within one’s deep self and for oneself alone. But what did I disavow in exchange for this dark dark night of the soul? For this perilous but inevitable and necessary deepening, quickening in the middle of all my things?

§

From my Father I received two books. One, a non-all inclusive systematic, systematized source of definitions and pronunciations of all named things (words) and the usage of such words in the language the book was written; this book, written not in my mother tongue, but in my second language refers to me as man in the sense of a collective mankind or humanity.35

The other book, made up of a series of books also written in my second language, is another sourcebook that has commanded, prohibited thou (you, man) ten things in order that thou be a good human.

In the first book my Father gave, I am conveniently trapped36 in the term man as in an individual human but made invisible in the word itself. But I know that I am not being referred to in these commandments as a member of thou, for suddenly in one of these prohibitions, I am referred to only as an object that can be coveted as wife to some male neighbor.

In this same book, it is written that this thou, this man was created by a male god and is created in this transcendent god’s image, ‘in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them’.37

And unto this man he created, this God gave this man dominion:

over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves the ground. I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food. And to all the beasts of the earth and all the birds in the air and all the creatures that move on the ground — everything that has the breath of life in it — I give every green plant for food. And it was so. God saw all that he made, and it was very good. And there was evening, and there was morning — the sixth day.38

Further in this same book, this God is the Word. ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the word was with God, and the Word was God. And the Word was made flesh’.39

§

From my Mother, who out of necessity left me home alone so she could go to work, I was given a pair of scissors, flour paste, a shoe box, images to cut and make into a circus diorama; play things to fend off, at age five, the sense of being left alone by myself (with my self). Mother would come home and swoop me in her arms, press me to her breasts, sincerely pleased with what I had created, her joy also from her relief that I was able to keep myself safe all alone by myself. Out of a deep knowledge and love for her child, Mother gifted me the essential things to bring out a certain kind of self-reliance, a germ of a most profound sense of self.

I discovered and learned a few things that day. I was able to make things with my hands that pleased me and in turn pleased others who loved me. I felt a kind of self-worth in the circle of their embrace. Making things out of play-sure speeded up time and blotted out an outside that if I were really acutely aware of would have created in me a sense of fear of things not being right. That is, a sense of being abandoned, of being separate. I did not feel abandoned. I was not abandoned. I was just without someone else.

And in my Mother’s absence of fear for having left me alone, in her confidence that I could keep myself safe, I learned no fear of being left alone. I was not alone. You who created many things the first twenty-four hours of your birth, you HerMe(s), the Fool, the Trickster, were playing with me. We created one of your homes, a circus with many clowns. Play is your soup where self-discovery and enjoyment of one’s capacities, possibilities, and limitations happen in the here and now.40 At play, I was with myself, fully engaged in my imagination. So Hélène writes to us, ‘In the Imaginary mother and child are part of a fundamental unity: they are one’. Cutting away, pasting, tearing, smoothening, folding, tracing, drawing, pounding, pressing, with my tiny hands, my tiny little fingers, birthed from her womb, I could not possibly be separated from Her.41

And again from Mother, I was bestowed the blessing to free myself at age seven from the dis-ease of being in an all-girl Catholic school and transfer to a secular both-sexes school.

From Mother, the two events provided me (again pro vide, pro life) at an early age sound passage to a future lifework that required an understanding, an openness and a love for deep solitude; and a recognition of a self that can speak her mind, to will what she bodily and psychically sensed was fitting for her. All these were given by Mother who nurtured my self-birthing not from within her or ‘through her’42 but by providing me the prima materia (the time, space, tools for self-directed activities, the love, the trust to be fearless alone) to trust the child and in the future child-woman to create.

From my Father, I received long letters from his travels abroad. And instruments to measure light, write with light. Photography was his recreation. There were also records of music created and performed mostly by male master artists. Beethoven, Wagner, Teleman, Chopin, Mozart, Mahler, Verdi, Rubinstein, Bruno Walter. And books also by male authors. Absalom! Absalom! Faulkner, Conrad, Hardy, Lawrence, Hemingway, Melville, Heart of Darkness, James, The Golden Bowl.

Word. The Word of God. Logos. The expressed or manifested mind and will of God.

Order, Command. Don’t move until I give the word.43

Art. Archaic. Second person singular. Present indicative of be. Used with thou.

Art . The conscious use of skill and creative imagination especially in the production of aesthetic objects. An innate, personal, unanalyzable creative power.44

§

From Father I received commandments that I grow being a receptacle of received ideas. To grow within the Logos.

From Mother I was gifted to have my own sensing/birthing of a body-self that could endow itself with the choice to create/give from within her solitary Imaginary.

Father signalled that I was without.

Mother embraced me in my fullness.

§

I bathe your body, relieve your armpits of summer’s heat. Night. With water of just the right coolness. You sigh in gratitude. Our bodies know this exact temperature. It soothes you to dream. I soap your belly grown round from all the eating and sitting all day. It hints at what will be mine.

I let this liquid flow of sleep cascade down your breasts, one mound taken away from cancerous growths; then down to your now useless arms, useful until you were eighty-nine. They carried, held your children away, far from the death of a world war; with you, running towards life, always towards life, in caves, by the rivers, in hospitals, in other people’s homes, wherever there was refuge for your aching terrified but courageous body and foremost, always foremost for your children, your reason to fly to life.

You and I have come full circle in our enhancing exchanges. Embracing you in your illness of lost memory, of synaptic nerves gone awry, I whisper to you in a sing-song, Mommy-oh, Mommy-oh, Mommy-oh, as if to call you back, to keep you in the present. Your humor intact, you whisper back, ‘Ah! mother and child’, with the corners of your mouth lifting ever so lightly to a knowing smile. I have not lost you. You have not left me.45

In the middle of our writing, blood pain flows from my womb.

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Inside the Center

Her (His) art required that she receive ideas from, and practice art based on a specific art tradition that was not necessarily hers. She was never to doubt the truth nor the necessity of these ideas and praxes. Nor doubt this was her only absolute source of art. To practice this tradition meant to take on the quest for quality based on the ‘concepts of progress, continuity, totality, mastery and the universal claim to history accepted as true’.46 If she desired entry into the center of the Art world, this was its basic premise.

A corollary: she had to have the smarts about where she was coming from. This way she avoided the pitfalls of being called dumb as a painter. She was a mimic of thinking artists. She exhibited enough originality to keep her male mentors interested in her art but did not stray too far from the artists they believed in. Mostly men from North America: LeWitt, Italo Scanga, Stella, Smithson, Christo, Rauschenberg, Lichtenstein, Judd, Snow, Rothko, Pollock, Yves Klein, Bochner, Buren, Kosuth, Serra, de Maria, Beuys, Cornell, Flavin, Andre, Reinhardt, Oldenburg. Some women: Agnes Martin, Diane Arbus, Lynda Benglis, Judy Chicago, Eva Hesse, Helen Frankenthaler. And of course her mentors’ god, Duchamp. Who became hers too. She knew her lineage well.

She gained a certain notoriety for performing art, installing it and most of all for conceptualizing it. Art forms that did not require great manual skills but to her mind required a certain craft of thinking which to her was more engaging. All ephemeral, there were hardly any remains of her work once performed, installed, conceptualized. She had no substantial material proof of her art. She had documents, press releases, photographs, posters, letters, working drawings, scripts, other peoples’ writing on her art. A growing archive.

Her (His) art required extreme exposure.

But extreme exposure only within one specific physical space. A walled space, with all its walls painted white. Outside this space, this white cube, her art may not be perceived as art at all.

Before sleep comes, when she dreams of making art to be exposed in this space, she sees herself pacing its polyurethane finished floors; measuring the space, taking note of its corners, its posts, sensing its scale. Almost like a hermetically sealed box, there are no windows. There is only one door. And not so strange, in her dreams, this white cube never suffocates her.

When day comes, she visits this empty white gallery. This time she will bodily research what the space requires of her art. She paces its polyurethane finished floors; measuring the space, takes note of its corners, its posts, senses its scale. Almost like a hermetically sealed box, there are no windows. There is only one door. It does not suffocate her.

Empty of her (his) art, still to be created, inside, she takes refuge in the cool conditioned air; she takes naps on its floors, eats her packed lunch, makes small talk with the guards, tests the lights, recalibrates them, observes the accidental viewer come in, writes in her journal, draws and redraws the floor plan, reads on art and its objecthood. Some days she turns off most of the lights, sits in a corner, closes her eyes and waits it out. She has the stamina to wait it out inside this now grey box. Waiting, waiting for its walls to press in on her, making her see what needs to be placed on them, installed within them.

Her (His) art is never outside the dictates of the inside of this white cube. Inside, she imagines the objects she will create. She is already creating at this instant. Conceptualizing the art inside the space is the critical event in her process. She does not birth the work, she conceives it. The white now grey cube is never a womb for birthing but a cold geometrically axes-ed space more akin to a mind for ideation. Inside this space, as she closes her eyes, she holds all of this space within her mind’s eye, walks inside this space inside her mind, and with her eyes wide shut, sees a future object on the wall, one on the floor, from the ceiling – sees all the future objects within the inside of the white cube, inside her head. She opens her eyes, quickly writes down what she saw inside her head.

A line of painted yellow wood running across the entrance wall, a flat blue rectangular surface suspended from the ceiling lights, a larger flat surface of ochre placed parallel to the floor, swinging from the ceiling slightly above ground, two moss green panels hung horizontally at her eye level, placed apart by the measure of one wall panelling.

Flat monochrome paintings, all these objects she grasps in an instant, all installed in the white cube in her mind’s eye. Mere surfaces for painting colors, one color for each surface, they are non-metaphoric, non-illusionistic. They do not represent any thing. They are not deep vessels of stories. In their flatness and emptiness, in the absence of myth or legend, they begin to call attention to the space that contains them. Or so she thinks. They point to this space as not a mere-innocent passive physical structure. This is her project. She wants these objects to tell the story of this space. How this space is constructed. Its purpose. What it can do. She wants to investigate its power to endow any thing, any object that is placed inside it the status of Art and the person who decides to place this object in this space, the status of being an Artist. And in this loop, to endow her thus the status of being an Artist.

1917: French master artist Marcel Duchamp places a urinal inside this white cube. Giving it the title Fountain, and signing it R. Mutt, he proposes to the gatekeepers of the white cube that a readymade, a non-art object be an art object. They accept his proposition and the lowly object becomes art of the highest order.

She traces her artmaking lineage to this master. Two male mentors introduce her to Duchamp. She voraciously reads their library on this master artist and on all the other artists who made art in his tradition. She is enamoured with this project. Mimics it not too well. In fact, her imitations are retrograde. By 1975, this project had reached its logical conclusion. Duchamp and his followers had already brought the word Art and the practice of art to its logical conclusion: if ‘placing an object in an art context or otherwise designating it as art makes it art, then it is in the context or designation, and not in the object that the art essence resides, and it is the context itself that should be exhibited , not an object in it’.47 Yet she could not even do away with the pedigreed art object — that is, the painting, no matter how minimal. She could not make the context be the point of her art.

A further derivation from such Wittgensteinian/Duchampian gestures of artmaking, Imagine Pieces (1980) was created with her simply phoning in three texts to be typewritten on pieces of bond paper by one of the gallery staff who was further given instructions to tape and install these pieces of paper on top of gallery pedestals as instructions for the viewers to imagine things. Being ill, unable to bodily attend to the making and placing of objects inside the white cube, and unwilling to forego the opportunity to exhibit a work, she solved her dilemma through these texts. These became her work for the exhibition.

Twice she used the white walls literally as her art material. The Virgin Almost Invisible on a Gallery Wall was a shallow etching of da Vinci’s Pieta on one of the white walls of a gallery in Los Angeles. Unfortunately no one saw the Virgin, no one saw the work.

Inside the white cube, she also used her body to perform art. Three Pieces was a short performance art in the main gallery of the major state museum where she was working as a curatorial assistant in 1976. Performed with an artist friend, one of the pieces located the artists within a designated area (a four feet by four feet floor area was marked off with masking tape).

She was inside the marked area reading a text on performance art as an art form. It was written by the museum director, one of her mentors. The other artist walked around her stepping on the masking tape.

To end the performance, both artists slowly ripped the tape off the floor removing the boundaries between her, the other artist and the viewers. Now there was no inside nor outside. But all were still inside the white cube. And only in this inside can such a nonsensical act be valorized as art.

From Rags to Riches: Art after Duchamp or Revisiting the Fountain (1997), an homage to the master, was her most admittedly honest derivative work. Some forty signed doormats — readymades, were installed on the walls and floors (after Carl Andre) of four major museums in Europe. Another set of forty all unsigned were installed at the doorways of the museums, deployed simply as doormats.

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Her (His) art was imbued with great reverence within this white space.

The ideal white cube built with hardly any exits nor entrances, tomblike, is tempered to keep the world outside at bay. The sky is never to be seen from within. It is never to be the source of light. Direct sunlight, daylight, and heat are all banished from this world. Light is always tracked directed from the ceiling, the ground, its floors are treated to minimize the sound of clicking feet. And always, always, all its walls must be painted pristine white.

The ideal white cube is built to cult-ure the viewer (who usually has just come in from the din and the heat of