Beyond, Before and In-Between Language: Feminist Art Practices through a Matrixial Sphere
Through extended research, writing, discussions, making and thinking I have arrived at this paper as both an end point and a spring board in to further activities. When I first encountered Ettinger’s Matrix theory I was forewarned about its complexities, Griselda Pollock in fact put this in writing in a Preface to The Matrixial Gaze in 1995.
“Don’t struggle for instant mastery …Listen to the process of unfolding thought, tune in and out, taking what makes sense and allowing the argument to travel its pathways which will arrive at places that suddenly make sense of things, that in some ways, many feel they had already intuited, known in some yet unspoken way.” (2)
The process of coming to understand, at least partially, Ettinger’s thinking has been a lengthy but wholly enlightening one. I embarked on this line of research precisely because of that sense of unspoken knowing, the hints and occasional moments of understanding that came out of reading Ettinger as well as Jenny Holzer and Mary Kelly. Translating these feelings in to a logical and articulate piece of writing has been difficult but also rewarding and it has come to significantly impact upon my art practice. I now move forward in to both writing and making practice with a more expansive framework of ideas, references and perhaps a matrixial gaze.
An Introduction: Positioning the Feminist Artist within Language.
“Feminine discourse is trying to articulate the unsaid, the “feminine” the negative signification, in language which is coincident with the patriarchy; for this reason the work is always in danger of being subsumed by it but in so far as the feminine is said, or articulated in language, it is profoundly subversive.” (Kelly 1997: 23)
“If one is to see Eurydice, one must ask about the site of not knowing… One must find the history of what she cannot narrate, the history of her muteness, if one is to recognize her. This is not to supply the key, to fill in the gap, to fill in the story, but to find the relevant remnants of that form the broken landscape that she is.” (Butler 2006: 6)
Language is a complex territory, bound up in cultural, social and political histories and perhaps intrinsic to an understanding of self and of one another, reflexive of our realities and instrumental in shaping them. Examining language through a feminist lens and considering its functions within art, I have traced its uses from commentary and theorization, to its emergence as medium itself in the latter part of the twentieth century. Where conceptual thought moved away from the art object into dematerialization, it was at this juncture that artists such as Jenny Holzer and Mary Kelly began using language from a distinctly feminist perspective. For these female artists negotiating the linguistic terrain involved a much more complex examination of their position within it. It could not be enough just to speak as the masculine patriarch or to rely upon language to act as a transparent vehicle for conceptual meaning. Battling against the historic muting of women’s voices they both speak instead from between the lines and in the interim spaces; engaging in the struggle between negative signification and articulation of the feminine. Both Mary Kelly and Jenny Holzer partake in a targeted examination of language itself, manipulating it, turning it inside out and shifting it to reveal more than what it, within itself, signifies.
Phallogocentric logic, a term first used by Jacques Derrida, permeates language with an economy of masculine hierarchy; codes, systems, oppositions that set boundaries between self and other, thought and materiality, male and female, private and public. Centring the male perspective through a privileging of the phallus in the construction of meaning, this masculinist logic suppresses otherness, and within art places the singular male genius or the ‘artistic hero’, on a pedestal. Problematizing the functions of this logic I will examine the ways in which Jenny Holzer and Mary Kelly have deconstructed traditional models of subjectivity, authorship and language in their respective practices. Holzer’s Truisms and Lustmord will be at the locus of my examination, alongside discussion of Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document. I will first foreground feminist theories from Helene Cixous and Julia Kristeva, and then go on to analyse the practices of Holzer and Kelly in relation to the matrixial sphere; glimpsing artist and theorist Bracha Ettinger’s part emerging, part disappearing subject.
Through this examination, alongside discoveries in my own textual art practice, I have found that language has the potential to open up in to a space where articulation of the feminine is possible. Ettinger named her Eurydice, in Greek mythology where, on being apprehended by her husband, Eurydice both comes in to being and is subsumed by death. This dissertation and my art practice have echoed one another, and between those strands of research, I have arrived at an expanded understanding of language and subject where coexistence, multiplicity and non-assimilating parts open up a position for otherness within patriarchal systems of representation. These discoveries will act as crux for this writing and continue to, underpin the work I make.
Écriture Féminine to the Matrixial Subject:
Theorizing the Paradox of Feminine Articulation
Whilst Bracha Ettinger’s matrixial sphere provides the main framework through which I align Holzer and Kelly’s art practices with my own, it was from within a landscape of 1960’s and 70’s post-structuralist feminism that both Holzer and Kelly embarked on their specific feminist projects. Informed by the writings of Hélène Cixous and Julia Kristeva, notions of Écriture féminine, Jouissance and the semiotic have premised both my writing and art making and it is interesting to foreground these ideas here. Phallogocentric logic dislocates thought from corporeality in the Cartesian mind-body split, and these feminist theories insist upon bringing them together in language, as in reality. These writers approach the question of gendered subjectivity, addressing the Lacanian conceptions of woman as lack or void, and attempt to bring woman’s body, her presence back in to writing. Whilst it is important to note that critics such as Showalter have named the post-structuralist reliance upon body as essentialist, suggesting it reinforces gender binaries (in Ives: 2006) these theories have expanded rather than limited the place of women in language; laying substantial ground for Bracha Ettinger’s theories of matrixial subjectivity. They all partake in the shared reaction against conventional patriarchal writing and propose more evasive, cyclical modes of signification.
Kristeva, in Revolution of Poetic Language (1984) theorizes poetic language or Jouissance, focusing on its significance as an “unlimited and unbounded generating process, this unceasing operation of the drives toward, in, and through language” (17). Kristeva’s orientation here looks not only in-between signifier and signified of traditional symbolic order, but beyond denotative meaning and in to the realm on pre-Oedipal impulses of the maternal body. Semiotic drives become part of the “subject in process” (ibid.) associated with the archaic mother and the feminine. She suggests that only through a “heterogeneous process” (ibid.) that acknowledges both the symbolic order of reference and rationality, and the semiotic impulses of unspoken knowing, that significance can expand to the outer margins of society and the subject. It is at these margins, out of marginality that Kristeva claims, “then - and only then - can [significance] be jouissance and revolution” (1984: 17)
Helene Cixous also theorized language through a feminist lens and thus imagined Écriture féminine; a revolutionary mode of writing that she believed would open up a space in which women, out of their marginality, could speak. In her seminal essay Laugh of the Medusa (1976) she urged women to write through their lived experiences of the female body, to transgress dominant linear, masculinist logic and thus open up new ways of thinking, giving them access to subjectivity. She opposed the Lacanian psychoanalytical definitions of women as lack and the negative signification of the feminine within symbolic language. She proposed that ‘Woman’ overthrow this place within language – or void – that she had been forced in to, “…to explode it, turn it around and seize it: to make it hers, containing it, taking it in her own mouth, biting that tongue with her very own teeth to invent for herself a language to get inside of.” (ibid.) The phallocentric tradition of patriarchal discourse depends upon binary oppositions codes and regulations that place the feminine as subordinate to masculine. Cixous believed that in “writ[ing] through their bodies” women could break free entirely of the symbolic order and “invent the impregnable language that will wreck partitions, classes, and rhetoric, regulations, and codes” (ibid.) This “white ink”, as she proposed, offered a way out of, away from the symbolic order that had perpetuated the repression of women and their voices and denied them access to subjectivity.
From the post-structuralist position, some two decades later, emerges painter, psychoanalyst and theorist Bracha Ettinger’s matrixial theories (1992, 1993, 1995). The radical model of subjectivity that Ettinger proposes can be aligned with the devices used in Holzer and Kelly’s linguistic art practices, offering a new perspective from which to understand the work. Ettinger’s concept of matrixial subjectivity, whilst difficult to unravel and steeped in the complex terminology of psychoanalysis, rearticulates the notion of a fixed, essentialized subject from within a feminine sphere of reference. Modelled on the relationship between pregnant woman and unborn child, where both alternate and coexist, Ettinger proposes a paradigm of subjectivity that deconstructs the dualism of ‘self’ as entirely separate from ‘other’. She questions Lacan’s definition of the feminine as that which is outside of the Symbolic (Ferris 1993) that which is unsayable.
Unlike Kristeva or Cixous, who imagined the poetic semiotic or Écriture féminine as an entirely new place from which women may speak, Ettinger proposes “an expanded understanding of the Symbolic” (Pollock 2004), that includes the feminine within it. Ettinger asks if the “Lacanian idea of the Phallus [is] the only mechanism of meaning- revelation” (1993: 11), not rejecting it, but seeing it as “only one of a set of possible symbolic and imaginary prisms rather than a monopolizing totality.” (ibid.) The female lived experience and the phallic symbolic are perhaps not foreclosed arenas as Lacanian psychoanalysis suggests. The matrixial construction of meaning operates alongside phallic production of meaning in language, and this heterogeneity opens up space for otherness and thus articulations of the feminine.
This matrixial dimension can be characterized by what Pollock described as, “distinctive severality” and as “jointness-in-separateness” (2004: 9) and it opens up the possibility for difference to exist in a non-assimilative space. “Matrix is not about the Woman, but about feminine dimension of plurality and difference of the several in joint subjectivity…” (Ettinger 1993: 18). I will go on to examine how, in the practices of Holzer and Kelly multiple perspectives and voices could operate in this joint subjectivity. The matrixial realm is a discursive space that I believe is played out in these artworks and in turn echoed in my own art practice, where the subject is both distinct and merging, where voice is fractured but joint. I feel that out of “transformation and an exchange” within these practices “instances of co-emergence of meaning” occur (Ettinger 2006: 65). The woman is simultaneously present and absent, and the feminine emerges and dissipates between the fissures in her representation; she is not cast in to the void but pushed beyond, before and in-between language. In between a “stratum of subjectivization (Ettinger 1993: 18), out of thresholds and margins, emerges a heterogeneous voice and an artist in constant process of becoming that opens up new ways of uttering the feminine from within.
Jenny Holzer, Mary Kelly and Art Practice:
A Space for the Feminine in Heterogeneous Discourses, Matrixial Subjectivity
and the Shifting Spectacle.
Jenny Holzer and Mary Kelly, both began working as feminist artists in the postmodernist era of the 1970s. In a questioning of essentialist feminism both artists avoided direct imaging of the woman’s body in their practices, Kelly pointing out that this imaging was precisely “what women in art were expected to do.” (in Crimp 1997: 16) They have instead since engaged, through and in-between language, in a subversive critique of dominant masculine models of representation. Over the last forty years, these artists have brought together many voices within their artworking, incorporating a spectrum of appropriated texts with original writing in tangles of authorship and meaning. They have played out Ettinger’s discursive “open space of conjunction” as part of a post-Duchampian age where the distinctions between concepts of borrowed and original have been dissolved. (1995: 51) As Kelly noted, Benjamin Buchloh located both herself and Holzer in a secondary conceptual movement that engaged in institutional critique through textual appropriation. (Crimp 1997: 8) Speaking in the space of a discourse precisely between passages and sections, they suggest seemingly contradictory perspectives, both limiting and emancipating the position of women. I will go on to discuss the heterogeneous nature of these practices within the simultaneous functions of appropriated material and constructed text and of phallocentric structure and feminine discourse.
Arriving at an expanded understanding of feminist strategies and linguistic practice has also come to effect my own making processes; rather than trapping myself in to problematic representations of body, or even essentialist seizing of ‘woman’s writing’ over the duration of this research process my art writing, book works and sound pieces have opened out in to a more exploratory space. My most recent work is a semi-autobiographical writing project, manifested in multiple ways through happenings, inscriptions and installed presentation of the subsequently formed material objects (Figure 11), and it explores a discursive space between found text, interviews and poetic writing. In an attempt to capture a complex, shifting relationship between my mother and myself, alongside a universal question of identity and belonging I have used analogies of spaces and journeys. Systems of mapping, control and rationality formalise the nonsensical tangle of voices, discussions and perspectives that cloud this relationship. This notion of matrixial subjectivity has afforded me a means through I can explain and understand my work. Eurydice is mother and myself as we ebb and flow in and out of the work, emerging between the many voices, a feminine discourse and a symbolic structure.
Whilst looking through the lens of matrixial theory, considering both my practice and that of
Holzer and Kelly, I have learnt that a feminine discourse can emerge out of linguistic structures
that utilize rather than reject conventional, rational logic. I have placed the artists’ most iconic
pieces, Kelly’s Post-Partum Document (1973-7) (PPD) and Holzer’s Truisms (1977-79) at the
locus of my investigation. As the basis for discussion and theorization, I will align the devices
used in these pieces with those in my own practice. While both works operate within matrixial
subjectivity, the content and concerns are vastly different, their spheres of reception entirely
different and their voices are unique.
Mary Kelly’s large scale narrative installation works, of which Post-Partum Document was her first and arguably most significant, set down radical new paradigms for the critique of domestic labour and the constructs of femininity. Actively involved in feminist praxis, contributing to the early women’s movement in London throughout the 1970’s, Kelly’s preoccupation with gender politics and women’s representation has continually underpinned her practice. Steeped in complex psychoanalysis and feminist discussion her work was particularly emphatic with an audience already well versed in feminist theory and contributed significantly to that debate. Formed over six years PPD is an extended documentation of the mother-child relationship between Mary Kelly and her son. Whilst I access the work in its later realization in book form (1983), it first came in to completion as one hundred and thirty-five pieces, divided in to six sections for gallery installation. From “Documentation I: Analysed faecal stains and feeding charts”, right up to “Documentation VI: Pre-writing alphabet, exerque and diary”, Kelly documents and analyses her child’s entrance in to signification alongside her own struggles in the making of PPD.
Holzer however, in Truisms, appealed to far more universal concerns and reached out to audiences in much more accessible ways. Born out of the reading list at the Rhode Island School of Design in the 70’s, Holzer’s Truisms are a reimagining of those texts, formed as a list of aphorisms and pseudo-clichés. Provocations such as “ABUSE OF POWER COMES AS NO SURPRISE.” And “ROMANTIC LOVE WAS INVENTED TO MANIPULATE WOMEN” were set on a lengthy trajectory out in to the public sphere across decades and countries. Anonymously posted in the streets of lower-Manhattan, the series has since been immortalised in print, on caps and t-shirts, on signs, even as a webpage, and operates across multiple international public platforms. Speaking of universal ideas, the works attempts “to be hundreds of people” (Holzer 1997: 107). With concerns ranging from fathers to freedom, myths to money and class to crime, Truisms’ shocking effects is perpetuated across temporal and spatial realizations.
As Joselit wrote, a number of feminist artists working in the 60’s and 70’s had come to consider “language as a profoundly gendered privilege.” (1998: 46) To be a female artist was to be “marginalized within language and discourse, and therefore, indeed to experience subjectivity or selfhood more often as a matter of conflict.” (Betterton 1996: 165) If the feminine is unspeakable from within linguistic signification, from what position can women speak? Amongst these artists were Kelly and Holzer, both of whom engage in this post-structuralist “problem of artistic subjectivity” (ibid.). When we look at PPD and Truisms, both works interrogate the position of artist as absolute author and fixed subject. Their subversive positioning emerges within a wider context of the Conceptualist Movement. Artists such as Joseph Kosuth and Lawrence Weiner had also begun to question the traditional models of authorship and were making textual work just prior to these feminist artists. They sought the dematerialization of the art object; rather than locating artistic meaning in act and gesture, finding it instead in a metaphysical space of thought, concept and language. Kosuth in Art as Idea as Idea (1967) appropriated text from within an English dictionary, avoiding the gesture of writing entirely, placing value in meaning produced out of the text itself.
Kosuth stated that, “a work of art is a tautology in that it is a presentation of the artist’s intention…” (1969), and whilst shifting the parameters of an artist’s role he, alongside his fellow conceptualists, instead transferred the essential, masculine authorial position from that of original production to within language itself. Whilst the subject of the work appeared to have been dissolved, in the assumption of language as a neutral space the tautology renders the authorial position no less phallocentric. Through a feminist lens this model of authorship falls short, we must look past “the gendering of the author to the gendering of language itself.” (Betterton 1996: 165) It is not surprising that Kelly and Holzer negotiate language in an entirely different way, employing what Kelly termed “heterogeneity of discourse” (1996: 30). They negate a singular subject, not through as Barthes said the “Death of the Author” (1968) but construct discourses from multiple positions, becoming a subject that is in constant change. Multiplicity makes space for feminine difference through, what Kelly described as, the many “different ways you’re drawn in to the work” (ibid.) and offers a position from which to resist subjugation, sublimation and silence. Incident is the “feminist author as situated within language not so much its source as its effect.” (Joselit 1998: 47) finding her way through, beyond before and in-between the symbolic order and making herself heard.
Holzer uses this “heterogeneity of discourse” (ibid.) in Truisms with explosive effect, revealing the power inherent in language, unravelling the knot of ideologies that claim to define society. In her deconstruction of the fixed subject we both question the validity of the statements and turn our distrust to language itself. In encountering Truisms, for a spectator on the streets of 70’s Manhattan (see Figure 1) or in any of the other subsequent re-formings of the work, we are confronted by a complex interplay of statements, aphorisms that do not speak from a fixed subject. “RAISE BOYS AND GIRLS THE SAME WAY” seems to jar against “SEX DIFFERENCE IS HERE TO STAY” whereas “IT’S A GIFT TO THE WORLD NOT TO HAVE BABIES” conflicts with “CHILDREN ARE THE HOPE OF THE FUTURE”. Holzer’s authoritative tone is pervasive; it speaks as if it is truthful, but the message she tells us is fractured. How can one single artist articulate such conflicting statements? “The self here is deliberately hybrid…inscribed within different speaking positions and discursive traditions which shift and overlap.” (Betterton 1996: 162) In “extreme forms of dislocation and pluralisation” (Joselit 1998: 46) Holzer opens up many routes through the work.
These routes open up both in terms of ideologies, of personal opinion and in terms of materiality. When we look at the street poster (Figures 2a & b), they list and alphabetise; this ordered language is reminiscent of public announcement, imperative and blunt, entirely matter- of-fact. In a unified tone and typeface, Holzer homogenises all positions and collapses a hierarchical structure that would have given us any hint of her artistic intention. This opens up a space of alliance and confluence. She is heterogeneous in both perspectives and in means of distribution. We can pin neither Truisms nor Holzer down in one place.
Thus we can understand Holzer’s discursive space as modelled in Ettinger’s stratum of subjectivity (1993). Operating as fractured togetherness, a perspective such as “A STRONG SENSE OF DUTY IMPRISONS YOU” in a shared site of the voice, in the shared space of the page, of the luminous sign or the engraved stone “neither assimilates nor rejects the otherness in a phrase such as “AMBIVALENCE CAN RUIN YOUR LIFE”. The spectator enters and is exalted to take a stance and position themselves in-between this multitude of perspectives. The work prompts gut reactions and heart-felt responses, even defacement through annotation (see Figure 2b). We are coerced in to an ethical thinking process “…in continual re-adjustment of distances.” (Ettinger 1992: 12) With the work’s continual iteration, the inter-relation between statements is subject to continual flux, what two ideas that conflict for one viewer, may sit comfortably for another. As Hughes wrote, “we create our own hierarchies of relative value”, immediate, tautological “contradiction is exactly what Holzer’s language avoids.” (2006: 431) Unlike the conceptual project, these conflicts are not self-evident and rely upon the very personal ideas and histories of the spectator. Holzer allows the work to remain a site of possible readings, in that flux. As meaning and language merge and change so the self, the pervasive voice, is also “subject in process” (Kristeva 1987: 9)
Systems of advertisement, government and institution all lay claim to totalitarian truth; on TV and in literature, in the objects we buy and consume, the messages of mass culture saturate us with these many versions of truth. Holzer imitates this authoritative position, but cracks it from within, revealing the false homogeneity of patriarchal, phallocentric language. Holzer’s “desire not to force anyone” had her write in a way so “many speak and no one dominates.”(1997: 106) Here in Truisms, as across her work, the position of the speaker is continually in process, unstable and changing. “The entanglement is a continual displacement – to the point where the reader begins to see that first that (s)he is not an autonomous individual of free beliefs so much as a subject inserted into language and, second, that this insertion can be changed.” (Foster 1985:109) She collapses the phallocentric structure that excludes feminine difference. Dissolving and destabilising our accepted notions of truth, she pushes through binary language, that which is based on truth/fiction, man/woman, turning it in on itself, exposing its dangerous power. In doing so, Holzer implies new ways of thinking, new approaches that do not fall in to a structure of opposition, but one of acceptance, heterogeneity and difference.
Likewise, Kelly uses the heterogeneity of discourse in Post-Partum Document. However, unlike Truisms the work on first reading seems rooted in sentimentality; depicting the relics of a childhood collected and organised by a mother. These objects, the nappies, the scribbles, the vests; they all appear to map the sensual shared experience of a mother and child’s mutual discoveries. Through a visual reading this “prosaic biological/autobiographical level” (Lippard 1983: 4) of the work emerges. Looking past those delicately collected objects, considering Document in all its inter-related parts, the work becomes much more than “[A]n object of perception.”(ibid.)
PPD in fact opens up a dialogue between what Kelly named “the experiential narrative”, “the pseudo academic discourse” and “the psychoanalytic reading” (1996: 30) of the mother- child relationship. What emerges out of these coexisting parts is Kelly herself, as mother and as artist, dislocated and fractured amongst documentation. She has been criticized for her reliance upon Lacan, upon systems of patriarchy and control, however, in a similar way to Holzer, Kelly also occupies typically phallocentric discourse, deconstructing it to reveal the power inherent in language. She sustains a porous, shifting form, between the footnotes and bibliography, diagrams, objects, diaristic text and analysis PPD avoids closing the gap, leaving space for a feminine discourse to emerge. The work rather than asserting truth or falsity, opens up the matrixial encounter, the discursive space in between which she is many things and also nothing at once. The examination and cross-examination operating across the stratum of texts is unable to fully represent her as a whole, positioning “the maternal body at the edges of culture and on the boundaries of the unrepresentable” (Betterton 1996: 10).
And so Kelly’s own position as subject of Post-Partum Document is in flux, her voice shifts and changes over the course of the work. Lacan’s psychoanalytic theorization punctuates the Document and throughout insists that her son must, to enter signification, turn away from her. We witness over six years the struggle to represent this separation as the child enters in to the symbolic, institutions of language and of education. ………….
Contact rachael.baskeyfield@outlook.com for full text
