Metro Pulse/Artbeat/Mary Beth Edelson

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What:
Mary Beth Edelson: Re-scripting the Story, 1970-2000

Where:
The Ewing Gallery, 1715 Volunteer Boulevard

When:
Through Dec. 12, with an artist's lecture tonight, Nov. 29, in the Art and Architecture Buildingï¿½s Room 109 at 7 p.m.; reception following. Call 974-3200 for information.

From the last supper to guns and chiffon

by Heather Joyner

Re-scripting The Story is an appropriate title for Mary Beth Edelson's 30-year retrospective exhibition at UT's Ewing Gallery. In addition to referencing the artist's current exploration of how women are depicted in film, it reflects the shifting of feminist art itself. Changes in gender roles throughout the late 20th century have pushed female communicators to define, refine, and redefine their "stories" within a matter of decades. Although male artists have likewise had to decide where they fit within a given context, they've done so over a long period of time. Furthermore, because women artists were not acknowledged in significant numbers until recently, they've often felt obliged to speak for others, to place themselves within a context more like an onion patch than the layers of a single Vidalia. One could argue that their attempts to cover past as well as present territory has meant untying a tighter philosophical knot than that of their male counterparts.

So what is that knot? And why does feminist art scare or repulse so many people? Despite its inclusion of blatant lesbianism, it rarely approaches the eroticism of male homosexual art. The body may be a perennial topic, but it is usually used to confront the establishment or to celebrate goddess archetypes. Some people require more polite metaphors.

Edelson, whose impressive variety of work can be found in the permanent collections of the Guggenheim and MoMA, represents both the initial impact and the continuing cultural significance of feminist art. Her involvement with collective efforts such as the lesbian publication Heresies is certainly political, but it is above all artistic. Miriam Schapiro and Faith Wilding, in their introduction to a 1989 issue of that magazine, remarked that feminist art became "a defiant challenge to depictions of submissive female sexuality...[in the '70s] the body became the book: it was written upon, painted, photographed, ritually arranged, bathed in eggs, mud, and blood."

In Edelson's pieces displayed at the Ewing, such as an early '70s series of 12 photographic self-portraits marked with paint, ink, and crayon, she has done just that. Drawing together a range of icons like the Mediterranean trickster Baubo and the Celtic Sheela-na-gig, Edelson has assembled an engaging panoply. She says, "These images are defining images presented aggressively as sexuality, mind, and spirit comfortable in one body. The female body here is not a nude tantalizer, but powerful, wild, with self-generating energy symbolizing the joy and exuberance of our new freedom as well as making a statement that says I am, and I am my body, and I am not going away."

What keeps such works relevant and strong is their relationship to what Edelson is producing lately. In the retrospective format, we have an opportunity to see manifestations of the aforementioned message as it has unfolded and matured. Mixed-media assemblages like the infamous "Some Living American Women Artists/ Last Supper" (1972), in which Da Vinci's masterpiece has become an all-female gathering with the heads of Georgia O'Keefe, Louise Nevelson, Helen Frankenthaler, and others pasted onto disciples' figures, are still provocative. And women's access to positions of prominence within organized religion is still an issue. (In fact, I must salute the Ewing Gallery's gutsiness in placing that specific piece at its entrance considering its reception at another academic institution; I'll not be surprised if they get blasted for promoting such "blasphemy.") What's been dropped in Edelson's present work in terms of outright humor has been replaced with something edgier.

Beyond the women's "Last Supper," we glimpse a dressmaker's form donning a padded kitchen apron labeled "Bullet Proof." To its right is a double bed surrounded by images ("Untitled", 1992)—cotton pillows and cover printed with stills from the movie Gloria showing Gena Rowlands wielding a pistol. Numerous other representations of women with guns usher in a new era of inescapable violence. That they are often superimposed on tremendous chiffon panels, yet another material associated with feminine seduction and domesticity, makes them all the more jarring. The danger of such images is that they must do more than simply mimic violent male fantasy or substitute female aggression for that of males. If they don't, they seem like penis envy.

Edelson presently appears to be saying that what women thought would bring them power in the initial stages of the Women's Liberation movement was a tad idealistic; that power generally boils down to something far less imaginative. The optimism seen in her 1977 exhibition called "Your 5,000 Years Are Up!" (asserting the end of a patriarchal hierarchy) has been tempered. Because our collective memories are populated with images of Patty Hearst clutching a machine gun and tough females in film, we are perhaps oblivious to the changing context of those images. Whereas the Last Supper piece recognizes women's repression within a Christian construct, the women with guns suggest a world in chaos—one in which individuality is obliterated in much the same way people in the World Trade Center towers were: indiscriminately.

Video material—usually so dominant in feminist art—is herein far less interesting than cards in Edelson's "Story Gathering Boxes," a project begun in 1972. Featuring women artists in informal conversation, the tapes do not address or involve their audience. However, up-to-the-minute story box "research" found in the form of thousands of cards with handwritten responses to various questions is fascinating. Gallery-goers will no doubt want to grab one of the pencils provided and scribble away, becoming a part of the show themselves.

There we have it again: a constant "re-scripting." Edelson herself admits the story boxes do not always amount to the collective mythology she first envisioned. Deciding to no longer have expectations for them, she's remarked, "The responses on the cards have taught me that being open is the appropriate perspective." And if we are "open" as we take in Edelson's retrospective show, we are indeed rewarded.