This talk was delivered to a group celebrating “Women in Photography” in 1986.
Historically, for a woman to choose to be an artist has meant choosing a male role. The popular cultural myths about artists involve men. Many of these myths come from the Nineteenth century, more specifically from the Romantic Movement, which, among other things, cultivated tie idea of the artist/poet as a super-sensitive visionary, in touch with realities above and beyond those accessible to most of us. These ideas are still with us.
To be an artist, according to the traditional male model, one has to be alone a lot, to think, to listen to one’s muse, to actually create the art. One doesn’t, in general, devote much time to cooking, cleaning house, washing clothes. The commitments of parenthood, if the artist chooses them, traditionally don’t require much time, though the emotional commitment may be deep.
This was a fairly viable, even attractive model. The individual artist has a lot of freedom to pursue these presumably higher goals. A social system of servants and women is, of course, essential. Nowadays, such a system is harder and harder to create. Nonetheless, one only has to read reports on the lifestyle of someone like well-known American artist Julian Schnabel to realize that the myth and a contemporary version of its reality goes on.
Artists who support themselves entirely by the sale of their artworks are a small percentage of the artistic community. Most artists, and especially those practicing photography, earn the money to support their basic needs by working at other jobs.
In fact, the situation of artist photographers is particularly dismal in relation to selling their work. Over a hundred years of debate about whether photography was or should or could be or may be or is or ought to be an artistic practice has left its indelible mark. Photography has only recently become acceptable as an art investment commodity. Few photographers sell prints consistently and at prices worthy of the work. Photography is still the bargain basement of the art marketplace. (Ironically, the few people close to supporting themselves by the sale of their work are not photographers who make “art,” but rather, artists who make “photographs”…)
As a consequence of this, photography has been more dependent upon the academy for its survival than other media. Indeed, if college and university art departments had not introduced and expanded photography programs during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, photographic art such as we have seen today would not exist. It has been photographic artists who earn their incomes by teaching who are the nucleus of the recent photographic explosion.
This leads me to a central premise about the position of artists in our society, a premise which is magnified for photographers, but which applies to all artists in greater or lesser degree. To be an artist you are expected to work twice as hard as everyone else, and feel grateful for half as much income as everyone else. You have to work to support yourself, and you have to work at your art. Artwork occupies a place in our culture similar to housework: it is unpaid, unattributed, and yet everyone expects someone to do it and do it well.
So the artist accepts that support from government and state agencies will be intermittent at best and non-existent at worst. For most of us, the reality, year in and year out, is artwork sandwiched between and around other jobs. But this situation is survivable, even rewarding, particularly if you are partners with someone who has similar goals and commitments, or who at least supports your own. Where things begin to get difficult is when artists chose to become parents. This discussion has been gender neutral so far-- when I approach the triple obligations to parenting, to artwork, and to livelihood, I see this as a model that men must be encouraged to emulate, but I see it also as ground broken by women.
Women seem to be more concerned with parenting than men. Whether this ought to be is open to speculation, but that it has been the case historically is a fact. And this fact led me to the triple configuration that became the title of this presentation. It seems bad luck that two of the three elements in this triangle are held in low esteem by our culture. Government support of, the arts is inconsistent during “good” economic times and viewed as a dispensable luxury during “bad” economic times. Government support for parenting comes and goes in the token forms of tax deductions and credits and child care deductions. Since artists frequently have small incomes, they often cannot even exploit the existing deductions. But, is this bad luck, or a particularly strong cultural message to us that women are not supposed to be artists?
Women (and men) who choose to be parents and to participate fully in parenting are free to make artworks only insofar as they have support in the areas of livelihood and parenting. When the pressure is on, it is often the artwork that is sacrificed, sometimes for years. This situation would be alien to the nineteenth-century male artist, and even to most male artists today. It is hard for people who don’t have children, and particularly for artists who don’t have children, to understand how a commitment to a small human being could compete with and overshadow’ a commitment to one’s artistic endeavor.
For me, it was easier to be an artist before I had children, but my children have been more important to me than any art I have made and perhaps will make. On the other hand, I still choose to make art because there is a part of me separate from my children, a part of me which will continue to grow and create after my children no longer need me.
I didn’t know all of this when I started making the artwork I will show you today. I knew that I was dissatisfied with the conventional silver photographic print. I knew that the portraits I had been taking of other parents and their children were pushing me toward exploring material from my own family. I knew that hand coloring old photographs gave them qualities I found both poignant and amusing, but I also knew that viewers were easily charmed by the nostalgia of 1950s cars and hairstyles. So I added writing– at first captions, then longer narratives, to point the viewer away from the surface of the image, to another reality that connected with it.
In about 1974, I began copying and enlarging old photos, hand coloring them, then placing them on large sheets of paper, often with photo corners, then writing on the paper. Finally, I sandwiched the large pages between sheets of plexiglass, bolted them together and hung them.
One of my goals has been to make work which will encourage women to question their social reality, and to make connections between social, economic, and political realities. While each piece deals with the specifics of a particular place and time, I am always seeking to explore the relationship between the historical moment and the political present.
arts crafts writing teaching 