Post Facto Recapitulation of NWSA remarks

""What I said, strictly off the wrist (since I was cuffless that day), had something to do with the perception of a gap, and the question: are we constructing a gap by the act of "perceiving" one? Gaps are produced and enforced, they are not accidental. How this question is phrased has everything to do with how one might begin to answer and/or remediate it. Certainly the presence of one slide projector instead of two demonstrated quite materially that we were at a women's studies conference rather than an art history one. (The massage table outside the room was another clue.) But my major theme was: I and my students use whatever tools we can find to answer the questions we have about the objects and producers that interest us. Those questions are always different, and tools will evolve accordingly.

An anecdote: when I was researching Warhol for my book Machine in the Studio, I confronted a marked void around the shooting of Warhol by Valerie Solanis (Solanas/Solanos...). I had found in the Warhol Archives a tattered photocopy of Solanis's "SCUM Manifesto," yet the art historical literature was astoundingly mute on the subject, beyond the usual "wounded by a crazed Factory hanger-on..." When I went to the master librarian at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton where I was doing my research, he said, "Oh, Valerie -- here are three readers that anthologize her pathbreaking "SCUM Manifesto,"�and I learned that she was a major theorist in the fields of feminist literature, women's studies, and 1960s radicalism. So I used queer theory to work out Solanis's lesbian relation to (as it was then conceived) homosexual patriarchy -- and to this day the void I initially discovered continues to be produced and maintained around Warhol's queer patriarchy (i.e., no one has ever engaged with that aspect of my work, nor have I ever been invited to participate in any Warhol events, even "queer" ones).

Another anecdote: I showed a slide of Carolee Schneemann's "Interior Scroll" and Cindy Sherman's "Film Stills", sequentially rather than the Wollflinian binary I preferred. The point to be made was that I teach these slides weeks apart in my lecture class, although the works in question are only 3 years apart. But although I preserve their diachronic separation as "late sixties" versus "seventies" feminist productions, I rummage through the toolkit of women's studies (and my sister Amelia Jones' important revisions) to insist that Schneemann's work be seen as complicating essentialism rather than instantiating it (pointing out, as few art historians do, that the "Scroll" was about gendered constructions of theory, and was performed within a consciousness-raising group, not a performance art audience). Sherman's work, although bracketed by the artist from consideration in these terms, must also be read as woven into a complex fabric of feminist and post-structuralist critiques with which Schneemann was also grappling. And then I was done."