The women of and in art

The exhibition, curated by Cecilia Alemani, at the Venice Art Biennale, was one informed by the feminist mandate of seeking out all the voices of the past that were marginalised or repressed

I’ve often wondered about the rooms in which “the women come and go/ Talking of Michelangelo”; the anonymous women who occupy the shadow chorus in T S Eliot’s poem, “The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock”. It’s a literary work I felt immensely drawn to when I first encountered it during my undergraduate studies in Literature. Prufrock seemed like Eliot’s alter ego, and though I never identified with him in any way, the invitational subtext of the poem was alluring. “Let us go then, you and I...” The “us” dared to include me. But what about these women, who always appeared in the refrain? I often imagined them in motion, in mystical black gowns, and I liked to believe they weren’t really talking about Michelangelo.

I get that it’s about the rhyme. But it felt mysterious to me, all those conversations Eliot himself couldn’t access. These lines from the poem have assumed a more mythical ethos in my imagination. I like to speculate about the inner lives of these women, their identities. Was it conceivable for them to enter and exit rooms in their time? What was their time? Were they speaking of Michelangelo because they lived in the Renaissance era or because he was the artistic ideal and represented the canon? Or was his name code for something else?

This recurring thought about the anonymous women of Eliot’s poem returned to me recently because I had been re-approaching the essay by his contemporary, Virginia Woolf, which is all about women and rooms. She urges women to work towards independence and financial autonomy, not only for themselves but for the future and in continuation with the struggles made by women in the past. The “room” in Woolf’s, “A Room of One’s Own” has multiple dimensions, among which is its function as a containment space for female subjectivity.

Doll-like representations of a female figure. Pics/Rosalyn D’Mello

But what happens if you are not a white or upper caste or upper class person and cannot possibly imagine having the means to afford such autonomy? What if you are a third world woman of colour? What then?

Then you follow Gloria Anzaldúa’s advice in her essay, “Speaking in Tongues: A Letter to 3rd World Women Writers”: “Forget about the room of one’s own—write in the kitchen, lock yourself up in the bathroom. Write on the bus or the welfare line, on the job or during meals, between sleeping and waking. I write while sitting on the john. No long stretches at the typewriter unless you’re wealthy or have a patron—you may not even own a typewriter. While you wash the floor or clothes listen to the words chanting in your body. When you’re depressed, angry, hurt, when compassion and love possess you. When you cannot help but write.”

Incidentally, I began writing this while breastfeeding. Yesterday, as I was navigating the portion of the main exhibition at the Venice Art Biennale in the Giardini, “The Milk of Dreams”,  curated by Cecilia Alemani and her team, I felt mind-blown, overcome, elated and undone by the rooms I walked in and out of. Here, finally, was the kind of exhibition I had been longing for, that, as a feminist art critic, I never thought I’d see in such magnitude. The exhibition was arranged as a series of capsules, and was informed by the feminist mandate of seeking out all the voices of the past that were marginalised or repressed, never allowed to enter the mainstream, gatekept outside of “legitimate, canonical discourse”—historically the preserve of male thought.

One room roused the pores of my skin. Without even seeing the name of the artist or reading the caption, I felt a connection with the work—hanging, painted and other doll-like representations of a female figure. The artist, I learned later, was born in 1894 in Denmark, as Louis Marcussen, assigned male at birth, who apprenticed as a naturalistic craft painter before moving to Argentina in 1923, a country in which she travelled for six years before returning home, apparently “frayed” enough to be admitted by her family into a psychiatric hospital in Risskov, in which she would live and work for the next 56 years, and would give herself the name, Ovartaci, which meant “Chief Lunatic”. Ovartaci’s large dolls were suspended in a cabinet in the centre of the room, around her paintings, and there was a permeable aura around every inch of material that bore traces of her touch.

I loved that the curatorial team had taken the time to look beyond the art institutions, beyond even art history, in their efforts to relocate lost female and queer subjectivity. Instead of looking in all the rooms that had been occupied by men, they sought the ones to which women had been committed, either voluntarily or against their will—the mental asylums, convents, or witches’ cradles. In one room a footage of Josephine Baker dancing dialogues directly with Mary Wigman’s “Hexentanz” (Witch’s dance). You got a clear sense of how women had intentionally used their art as “medium”, almost in an occult sense, to time-travel and dialogue with each other, and how feminist sisterhood was like a portal.

I enjoyed this transdisciplinary, intersectional approach to curating. There were many moments where, as a feminist visitor, I felt ecstasy and joy. I’m excited about what awaits me today at the main exhibition at the Arsenale. 

Deliberating on the life and times of Everywoman, Rosalyn D’Mello is a reputable art critic and the author of A Handbook For My Lover. She tweets @RosaParx
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