Faith Wilding's Fearful Symmetries

Sharon Stratton, Faith Wilding

Description

Deeply influenced by studies of female iconology, the medieval, the afterlife and hybrid bodies, Faith Wilding’s art is instantly recognizable and distinctive in style. In keeping with Wilding’s own artworks, the book is a bricollage: memoirs and watercolours sit alongside critical essays and family photographs to form an overall history of both Wilding’s life and works, as well as the wider feminist art movement of the Seventies and beyond.
This collection spans 50 years of Wilding’s artistic production, feminist art pedagogy, participation in, and organizing of, feminist art collectives, such as the Feminist Art Program, Womanspace Gallery and the Woman’s Building.
With contributions from scholars and artists, including Amelia Jones, the book is the first of its kind to celebrate the career of an artist who not only partook in the cornerstone movement, but helped shape the feminist art of today.
Intimate, philosophical and insightful, Faith Wilding’s Fearful Symmetries is a beautiful book intended for the artist, scholar and broader audience.

Sujets

• Arts visuels
• Arts visuels
• Histoire des Arts
• Histoire des Arts
• Histoire des arts visuels
• Art

Informations

• Publié par: Intellect Books Ltd
• Date de parution: 15 janvier 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783209781
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 9 Mo

Extrait

Fresno Feminist Art Program, Isadora Duncan collaborative costume image, 1971. Performer: Faith Wilding, Staging: Nancy Youdelman, Photo credit: Dori Atlantis.

First published in the UK in 2018 by
Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the UK in 2018 by
Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,
Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright © 2018 Intellect Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Copy-editor: MPS Technologies
Cover image: Faith Wilding, Peach Cunt, 1971. Watercolor, 19 x 15 inches
Design: Aleksandra Szumlas
Production manager: Katie Evans
Typesetting: Contentra Technologies
ISBN: 978-1-78320-781-7
ePDF ISBN: 978-1-78320-782-4
ePUB ISBN: 978-1-78320-978-1
Printed and bound by Gomer, UK.
This is a peer-reviewed publication.
Contents
Faith Wilding, Memoirs Excerpt: Calling the World
Shannon R. Stratton, Coming to Becoming: An Introduction
Faith Wilding, Memoirs Excerpt: Drawring
Jenni Sorkin, Drawing through the Feminine
Amelia Jones, Faith Wilding and the Enfleshing of Painting
Faith Wilding, Memoirs Excerpt: Reading
Faith Wilding and Elizabeth Hess, “As Faith Would Say…”
Keith Vaughn, Faith Wilding: Fearful Symmetries
Faith Wilding, Memoirs Excerpt: Born Pagan
Irina Aristarkhova, The One Who Waits
Mario Ontiveros, Imagining Solidarity Otherwise: Faith Wilding’s Strategies for Writing, Making, and Collaborating
Faith Wilding, Memoirs Excerpt: The Blue Flower
Daniel Tucker and Faith Wilding, Learning Together
Mira Schor and Faith Wilding, The Best and the Worst
Faith Wilding, Memoirs Excerpt: Fearful Symmetries
Shannon R. Stratton, Anlagen: An Afterword
Acknowledgements
Faith Wilding: Chronology
Contributor Biographies
“Connie Barron arrives in Primavera on a Mennonite wagon, 1941”, Bob and Shirley Wagoner. Community in Paraguay: A Visit to the Bruderhof . Farmington, PA: Plough Publishing House, 1991.
Memoirs Excerpt
CALLING THE WORLD
Faith Wilding
I am lying in the back of a rumbling, horse-drawn wagon gazing up at the boundless night sky pricked with stars blinking and winking as though signaling to the sparkling glowworms darting around me in the hot, humid night. I rock to the rhythmic clunk and grind of iron axles and heavy wooden wheels in the sandy track, lulled by the clopping hooves, creak, slap, and jingle of the leather harness and bridles, murmur of distant voices. Faint singing drifts in from afar; half asleep, I sing along: Slow, horses, slow, as through the night we go; We would count the stars in heaven; Hear the grasses grow … . Sounds of other wagons approach from all directions; horses whinny softly in greeting; human voices call out in German, English, and languages I don’t understand. Who are these travelers? Where do they come from? Where are they going? The wagons draw together side by side, a protective bulwark against the night. A bonfire flares up, people begin to move around it in a slow circle dance holding hands, singing in German: … schliesst den Kreis! schliesst den Kreis! bunt und weiss, horch und sieh, horch und sieh: Harmonie, Harmonie ! I long to join the circle but can’t move from my nest in the wagon. The fire dies down; people climb back into the wagons that rumble away into the night, scattering in different directions until I can no longer hear them. I wake up sweating, still humming Harmonie, Harmonie…
OUR FAMILY BOOK
My mother kept meticulous records of the births and early development of each of her first three children. To this day, I can read the exact dates on which Vivien, Rick, and I were fed our first solid foods, turned over, got our first teeth, and spoke our first words. The book’s worn, dark blue cloth cover bears the title, Our Family , embroidered in yellow chain-stitch below a simple cross-stitched border. The lined pages are foxed and brittle-edged now, but Mum’s rounded, cursive script in black, or blue ink, is as clear and legible as on the day she wrote it in her teacher’s neat handwriting. On the reverse of the flyleaf Mum pasted my father’s rough, black pencil sketch of the interior of the dining hall of the Cotswold community in England where my parents celebrated their wedding on September 14, 1940. Though the entries trail off in 1950, Our Family Book unlocks vivid early memories before I became fully conscious of the world I was born into.
Edith and Harry Barron Wedding, Cotswold Bruderhof, September 14, 1940.
Edith and Granny Appleton, last holiday in Blackpool before Edith emigrated to Paraguay, 1939.
Sometimes, as a special Sunday night treat, Vivi and I begged Mum to get out the Family Book and read us bits of our family’s founding story: How she and my father met during a Methodist Whitsuntide outing in Snowdonia, Wales; how Dad became a conscientious objector at the beginning of the Second World War, and quit his job in the accounts department of the Manchester Cooperative Society, and began his search for a more meaningful way of life serving the poor and needy. Dad searched all over England, until he discovered a German Christian commune on a farm in the Cotswolds, and made up his mind to join it within two weeks of his first visit there. Here, Mum would pause, look up and wink at Dad, before continuing the story of how he had sent her a telegram in Widnes where she was teaching Primary School. Solemnly, she intoned the fateful words: “HAVE FOUND IT. COME AS SOON AS POSSIBLE. STOP. LOVE, HARRY.” “And guess what?” she’d add, pausing dramatically for us to chime in: “Mummy came on her holidays, and liked it, and then you got married in a Registrar’s office.” Dad jumped in at this point to paint a vivid picture of the part of the story we never tired of: “Then England declared war on Germany, and the British Home Office warned the commune that they would have to leave England, or else all the German men and older boys would be put in a camp while the war lasts.” Rather than be separated, the commune decided to stick together, and look for a new home far away from war-torn England and Europe: “And then someone told us that Paraguay was full of monkeys, and orange and banana trees, so we decided to go to Paraguay!” Dad would say solemnly in his broadest Yorkshire accent that always sent us into whoops and giggles.
Dad, Vivien, Faith, and Mum Barron, 1943, Primavera, Paraguay.
Maureen, Vivien, and Faith at Sawmill, Primavera, Paraguay, 1958.
I was born in Paraguay into a world still at war, on Sunday morning, June 6, 1943, exactly three years after the date on which my father had arrived on his first visit to the Cotswold commune in England, in June 1940. This auspicious coincidence was one of the reasons I was named Faith, for as my mother wrote in Our Family Book, “We wanted her name to remind us always of the faith for which we live.” In naming me Faith, my parents marked me with a prediction and expectation that I never fulfilled in the way they had intended.
THE HOLY TREES
As a child I walked enchanted among holy trees gazing up into their leafy crowns so high above me. Dad came to know the botanical characteristics of the different trees intimately during his work in the sawmill, and taught us to distinguish them by their bark, growth patterns, leaf shapes, blossoms, and seeds. I would run my fingers slowly over their ridged, smooth, or crenellated bark, chanting their musical names in Guaraní or Spanish: Lapácho, Urundemí, Curupaí, Samahú, Ombú, Yvirapitá, Yataí, Aguaí, Paraíso, Espina de Coróna, an incantation I still sing to myself. Often I’d climb up into their top-most branches and perch there light as a leaf, completely happy, while birds sang around me and branches swayed in the wild wind. From this aerie, I surveyed my world: tall-grass campos stretching to the horizon on all sides, sap-green, straw-gold, or umber depending on the season, encircled by the spiky silhouettes of dark wood-islands edging the campos like the scissor-cut forests in my book of German fairy-tales. The sky was silvery, blinding – it hurt my eyes to look at it too long. Everything shimmered and undulated in the humid heat. I’d run home barefoot, hopping from shady patch to shady patch to avoid getting blisters from the hot sand. When it rained, I’d hitch up my long skirt and apron, tuck them into my roomy knickers, and splash joyously through puddles and squelchy mud.
We lived in long, low, mud-walled, straw-thatched multi-family Hallen (halls), surrounded by a wild tangle of bougainvillea , loofah vines, moonflower bushes, citrus trees, climbing roses, gardenias, honeysuckle, and jasmine that exhaled intoxicating bursts of perfume at night. Safely in bed on stormy nights, I’d listen to the wind roaring through the treetops, clouds exploding thunderously, and rain rushing down, imagining that I was in Noah’s Ark with all the animals safely below deck. The storms died down as abruptly as they started. I’d kneel up in bed and stick my cupped hand out the window to catch the last fat drops seeping from the straw roof. The rain tasted of sun-dried grasses.
Tapiraquay river, 1953.
After the electricity was shut off at ten o’clock at night, we had only stars and moon for light. Dad taught us the constellations: the Southern Cross he’d never seen in England, the Great Dipper turned upside down, bold Orion who took a year to travel the sky from horizon to horizon, the foamy river of the Milky Way arching brightly above our heads, setting the sky aglow. When it was my turn to sleep by the window, I lay gazing up through my mosquito net, trying to stay awake until I’d seen a shooting star. The moon drew me with its mysterious power: After finding me half