LIFE RAFT
process
The life raft was invented in 1882 by a woman named Maria Beasley. Life rafts are still used by women today to stay afloat in a sea of patriarchal bullshit.
Life Raft is written and produced by two working artists, Charlotte Thurman and Tara Booth. Each issue centers on a theme, which strives to challenge and discuss the gender binary. This issue explores “process� through the views of female artists. Centerfold drawing by Charlotte Thurman. Submissions: liferaftzine@gmail.com Facebook.com/liferaftzine Instagram: @liferaftzine
p r o c e s s
PROCESS: A Manifesto for Unnamed Possibilities The University of Delaware’s MFA trip to Berlin, Germany was eye opening and inspiring on a number of levels. So many of the women we met were working towards an almost unnamable vision. They were careful not to allow language and terminology to constrain that vision. A curatorial project blurring the lines between the role of the artist and curator wasn’t simply a “project space.” It was broader than that. A large open room in a former Malt Factory, empty aside from a few multi-purpose structures doubling as tables and display boards, spoke to the often fluctuating nature of the role of objects and experiences in our daily lives, as well as their under-utilized systems of representation. The space’s sparseness reminded me that there is always room for something else. After a week of studio visits, museum tours, and conversations with a majority of women artists and curators, I came back to the States with some major questions. Is it an economic necessity that these spaces are fostering collaborative efforts in the arts? Would it be more economical to commit to some form of categorization? Is it possible that the arts have evolved past a reliance on branding and definition? Or can we look at the art endeavors of an organization with the same view we see individual artists? That is - the importance of art making speaks for itself - so the necessity for an art organization to promote a strategy for economic gain is beside the point.
That was the framework in which I felt a dramatic shift between the views of community-based projects in American and those in the small sliver I saw in Germany. For an arts organization to survive in America, the mission must be easily defined and accessible - an “artistic prescription” or a “social antidote,” simply located and pulled off the shelf. The lack of specificity in some of the organizations we visited, notably DISTRICT, was refreshing and, at times, beguilingly amorphous in nature. I see this as a strength and a vision of hope that can also translate to modes of thinking for an individual artist. There is an opportunity to learn from such models of thinking - to become more cognizant of our own self-containment. How much self-definition of our own practice is actually necessary? Are we making decisions for ourselves or for the expectations of others? Is the caricature of women as patient, nurturing, and communal a biological imprint - or does this stem from something else - some kind of search for more openness? I’m going to make some generalizations here, because I’m tired of being careful. And I’m going to write from personal experience with the hope and assumption that I am not alone. Yes, much of this applies to male artists as well. Yes, there are always exceptions to the rule. But I would argue that our culture fixates, mystifies and idolatrizes the exceptions rather than including them within the fibers of a collective experience. And I am not interested in that. I am interested in the ways in which our individual actions can collectively benefit us as a society.
I’ve begun to recognize some threads within the artist process of many working female artists - some observations that provide the ever essential hope for the future of art and feminism. I can best describe this phenomenon as that of an intuitive collaboration with material and process, which lends to future, unanticipated discoveries through the structuring of chance situations. There is an inherent absence of the ego in such a process. There is no imposition of the will on future actions. The process exhibits a deep trust in the self that manifests as the ability to allow and to recognize the beauty of unnamed possibilities. I am of the belief that artistic experimentation leads to discovery, and in turn, creates more space. We need more space within the Western dialogue of aesthetics; more space for what constitutes artistic merit; and more space for the simple act of creating. The trend for women to be generally more process oriented is an indication of - and a necessity for - change. I encourage female artists everywhere to create un-self-consciously. To make work despite the presumption of future accolades or potential criticism. The way to a broader understanding of ourselves is through process. Women must give themselves the permission to create art with unrestricted spontaneity. Spontaneity doesn’t have to mean doing something “crazy” or “wild.” It is the act of recognizing an entrance into an unknown. To create, knowing that confidence will result from giving yourself permission, and needn’t always be present in the initial steps of a working method. It is being aware of each step and allowing an opportunity to “fail.” In biological terms, this is how we change. A series of failures or risks leads to eventual advancements.
The beauty of art is that it is both real and it is metaphor. You are really living through the work you are creating. Once the work has been created it stands as a symbol or metaphor for a lived action. In this way, it translates as a language to those around you. This creates incredible potential and opportunity for both “failure” and “success.” Art gives us a living record of attempted changes right in front of us. As a woman, there is often pressure to be ready for everything. To be prepared for the unimaginable and the unthinkable. I suggest that we take that energy and expertise, and use it to create the unimaginable and the unthinkable. This is how we will make room for the world we want to live in. This is how we will see the eventual falling away of what came before. -Charlotte Thurman, 2016
Documentary Films about Female Creatives and Their Processes by Juan Camilo Sรกez
The Beaches of Agnès (2008, dir: Agnès Varda) Easily the most aesthetically interesting and significant film on this list. The first lady of French New Wave cinema, Agnès Varda reminisces on her life, both personal and artistic, with whimsical and endlessly creative cinematic flourishes. Photos, re-creations, clips, and animation are interwoven like a quilt. We see her working out shots, and through the reimaging of her life, Varda reminds us how our experiences shape the way we choose to create. You will leave this film inspired. Beyoncé: Year of 4 (2011, dir: Ed Burke) Believe the hype. Beyoncé is the ultimate pop/soul diva of our time. It isn’t just that she is so beautiful and so gifted, but also so tireless. The hardest working woman in show business and the most creatively daring in pop music. This doc (which clocks in at under half an hour and can be streamed on YouTube) shows the making of her grand, vocally soaring album 4, as well as the creation of the uber-empowering, high fashion, post-apocalyptic epic that is her “Run the World (Girls)” video. Favorite moment: When she admits to feeling nervous over her projects, that “What am I doing here?” feeling everyone will inevitably have in their creative process. But how cute is it to hear the most famous woman in the world admit to it?
Iris (2014, dir: Albert Maysles) Iris Apfel is a New York style icon known for her signature over-sized, round frames and maximalist approach to fashion. She mixes prints, textures, colors, new, old, cheap and luxury with aplomb. Her life has been a dedication to the pursuit of material beauty in all its infinite variety. Legendary documentarian Maysles (of Grey Gardens fame) catches the elderly, but ever energetic and witty Apfel in all her madcap glamour and enthusiasm. Hours are spent styling outfits and sorting through oh so many glorious pieces and accessories. The film reminds us that feeling inspired by art and beauty, even if it’s just a t-shirt, feeds the soul. Best line: “It’s more important to be happy than well-dressed.” Marina Abramovic: The Artist is Present (2012, dir: Matthew Akers and Jeff Dupre) The grand dame of performance art mounts a retrospective at MoMA and stages her most ambitious, famous and debated piece to date. For hours on end she sits, perfectly still, while museum patrons take turns sitting across from her. Some of their reactions will truly surprise you. If nothing else it is an amazing exercise in concentration and control on Abramovic’s part. It reminds us that even when we plan our ideas out, our projects may take on a life of their own and take us to unexpected places.
Public Speaking (2010, dir: Martin Scorsese) Noted writer and famed raconteur Fran Lebowitz might very well be the greatest wit since Dorothy Parker. In this doc you can hear her pointed observations on everything from pop culture, reading time, and New York, a city she has truly known and seen change. Writer’s block has tormented her for much of her career, but has given her many interesting insights into the writing process, though her views on the arts in general are equally engaging. This may be a Martin Scorsese production, but he was smart enough to keep it simple, let Fran be the star, and speak as only she can. Too many great lines to pick a favorite.
Juan Camilo Sáez is fashion obsessed and living in Brooklyn, New York. Over the years he acquired a fairly extensive knowledge of film history. His favorites are classic Hollywood films with strong, complex, yet glamorous, female leads. He is devoted to Beyoncé.
Abby Daleki grew up in Wisconsin and received her BFA and MA from Mankato State University in Mankato, MN. Currently, she is an MFA candidate at the University of Delaware. When Abby isn’t creating totally badass works of art, she can be found petting her two cats, belly dancing, playing drums, or writing poetry.
Quotes from Abby about her work and process:
“I’ve been interested in doing this for a while. Making these 3D paintings, I guess you can call them. It was bound to happen and I was making misshaped frames and then wrapping canvas around them, I was doing that a lot before. That made it more of an object, rather than just a canvas or just a painting on a wall. They were becoming objectified as a frame.”
“At this point, because it’s so new, for the object paintings, I’m experimenting right now. But, in my paintings, I’ll choose a color and then after I put that down, I look in my box to see what other colors I have and see how those would interact with the other colors that are already down, the shapes and how a specific shape and a specific color will react to the background wash.”
“Nobody has actually ever said, ‘your work is definitely made by a female.’ No one has actually ever said that, which I think is kind of cool because I hate when people put gender stereotypes on inanimate objects. Thinking about my artwork, trying not to think about me, I would say is androgynous, because you can’t really tell. You can tell when something is very feminine or masculine. I think because I don’t do things that many women are ‘supposed’ to do. Like ‘sit like a lady,’ or wear dresses all the time. I mean, my legs are spread right now and I don’t wear dresses ever. As a human, I’m very okay with my being and my art reflects that.”
For more of Abby’s work, visit abbydaleki.com or check her out on Instagram @abbymeowcat666
Stevie Lee Tanner is a printmaker and painter from Oberlin, Ohio. She has her MFA from the University of Delaware and her BFA from Myers School of Art at the University of Akron. Stevie is a lover of wildlife, birds, and baby animals of all kinds. Currently, she resides in Delaware with her husband, two cats, and four hermit crabs.
Stevie let us interview her about her work and process. To see more of her work, check out stevieleetanner.com
LR: Will you briefly describe your process? You can pick a specific piece or your overall process. S: To start, I use mostly traditional processes, like painting, drawing, printmaking, photography, a little bit of sculpture. Within printmaking, I’ve been using collagraphs, a printmaking process that is an intaglio process, but it’s done using cardboard or matte board instead of copper plates. The image is hand drawn and hand carved on to the plate and then it’s printed. I usually mono-prints, which means they’re one of a kind and not additions. That’s the most specific process I’ve been working with lately. LR: where do these images come from and how do you chose what images to include in your prints? S: I source the images from street view in Google Earth and they’re all images of places I know. When I’m on Google Earth, I’ll pick an area that’s within the county that I’m from, which is Larraine County, then I’ll start navigating around the streets and I’ll select certain areas that are interesting, sometimes I’ll select an area with significance.
LR: are there any surprises you come across? S: Printmaking is nothing but surprises. It’s not like painting where the work is right in front of you. It has to go through the press. The process I’m using operates on the ink adhering to the surface in a specific way, so I can have a general idea of what the image is going to look like based on the roughness or smoothness of the plate, but I really don’t know until it’s printed and then it can be printed a million different ways. Part of it is knowing the technique well and part of it is being ok with things turning out differently, being ok with experimentation and being a perfectionist and not a perfectionist at the same time.
LR: so, you accept that there’s chance involved or that you’re not going to know what going to happen? S: definitely. I mean, it sucks, I just spent twenty hours on this one plate that was huge and I really didn’t get a print that I loved. I made eight or nine of them. But, that’s just kind of what happens. It’s hard to be satisfied with something, but at the same time, because you don’t know what’s going to happen, you can end up with incredible looking things that you couldn’t have painted. You can invent new processes and turn those happy accidents into a learned technique or something. LR: do you feel like your work is gendered in any way? S: I’ve been told so. That’s a hard question. I wish my work wasn’t. I was just looking at my landscapes and wondering if a viewer would see my work differently if they didn’t know they were made by a woman. The landscapes that I’m making right now are a little less gendered than my work has been in the past. I’ve used a lot of subject matter that has been associated with femininity, like flowers, wildlife, birds, nests, and domestic imagery. When I was working with that subject matter, it was very common for people to reference femininity. I guess it depends. Maybe for women my work it isn’t gendered, but for men it could be easier to point out what looks more “girly.” In this specific series, I tried really hard to have them equally detached and equally personal. I tried to make some of them detached as well as very precious. I’m interested in things being aesthetically pleasing, almost to the point of being decorative. Especially with complimentary colors. So, you do see that come in some of the prints, but there are others where there’s not as much color variation and it’s a very straight forward image from Google Earth. If it retains that “generic-ness,” I think that it makes my work less gendered. Not that I agree with this, but it seems that the more personal the imagery, the more female it is.
“A lot of the female printmakers I look at may never be taken seriously in certain galleries in New York because of their subject matter. But, at that same gallery, they could have floral paintings done by a male. I feel like what else are we supposed to do? I don’t want to reduce myself to being all about flowers and nature, because I’m more than that, but I’m not going to deny that I enjoy the aesthetics of that imagery. I’m not going to hide from that because I’m a girl and that’s stereotypical. I feel like, as women, we’re put in a hard place with that.”
Abby Donovan at a glance: -world traveler -splits time between Newark, DE and Eugene, OR -professor, head of ceramics, and graduate coordinator and the University of Delaware -working artist -part of The 181, an artist collective -a role model for artists like us at Life Raft
We find Abby’s thought and artistic process truly unique. We emailed her a few questions in hopes of learning more. Here are her responses and images of her sketchbook. LR: You sometimes work in collaboration with your group, The 181 Collective. Can you talk about beinf the only woman in the group and your process within a group dynamic? A: I was thinking about this after receiving your questions, about how I do not consider gender roles/differentiation when working with the 181. And then I fell asleep and was hit with the worst mentrual cramps. In my dream the 181 was converging on a locus, we were inside a black and white map, suddenly Tom (husband) also had terrible cramps and then Brandon and Jason (181 members) too and it all became a 181 situational shared composition. But when I woke up because of the very real pain, I thought, “well, that will never happen. Or will it?” A: The 181 operates very much within the realm of what right now I would term an aesthetic of curiosity and trust. When we converge for a composition none of us has much idea what any of the others is going to do, exactly. In search of resonance. I think I read somewhere that arrows have to be separate from the coordinate system in order for them to be what we think of as arrows. ping…………………. PONG If someone says “there’s a see-saw movie the pacific wants to view” someone else might say “what does 500 gallons of clay slip sound like” while someone else is busy following a rolling glass sphere across the flow floor/trying to open a hole in space-time………so we put on candy-striped life preservers and set sail.
It is an important time in the garden right now (it is always an important time in the garden. However I will note that Tom as our resident scientist is often tasked with identifying when Newtonian laws might prove unfortunately relevant (=cause bodily harm). LR: Have you noticed any trends or changes since you’ve been working as an artist, related to women in art? A: Until we have pay equality in this country with its fountainhead spout of capitalist rhetoric, any change will not be and has not been enough. It’s ridiculous really. That being said, let’s celebrate Beyoncé. Lemonade. LR: Do you feel your work is gendered in any way or has been in the past? A: It is because I am. Because it makes a difference that I as a self/society-identified woman choose to focus on this or that, choose to do that or this. It is in fact crucial to note these things. I do not recognize any supposed institutional right to validate art; yet I highly value the rich revolutionary resources of the intellectual tradition. For this reason I enthusiastically participate in artistic and academic institutions, while abjuring the authority of those communities to dictate the terms of my individual artistic practice. For me the expansion of human culture depends upon this sometimes-contradictory vitality of exchange, subversion, and participation. LR: Do you have a methodology to making your work? What is your process like? A: Methodologies bore me, I mean, why limit what you might see?
“I am alive and I am trying my hardest to pay attention and not miss anything.To me art is experimental philosophy. A necessary implicating in, or indictment of, the material world as we form whatever it is we form de umbris idearum—of or about or pertaining to the shadow/cloud of ideas. What exactly is a letter? What exactly is a color? Books are very important, music and sounds are very important, my sense of sight and what I think I see is very important, and trying somehow to record/transmit all of these things is absolutely essential. What is happening right now? I’ve just returned from shooting video of William Edwards’s The Butterflies of North America at the Boston Athenaeum as a follow-up to the video I shot in Russia of Vladimir Nabokov’s butterfly collection, I am starting to re-read The Pelopponesian War, I am making porcelain lattices to incorporate in a future version of my cosmic/corporeal orrery, and over the summer I will be constructing glass constellation echo reflections mapping ancient Mound Builder forms for an upcoming exhibition at the Carnegie Institution for Science, Stanford University.”
LR: As a professor in the arts, how do you approach topics of gender in your classes? A: One example: when I give a presentation or talk that involves showing historical artwork, I always take time at the beginning to discuss all of the work we are NOT seeing. I make a point of saying that we as a society, a culture, (actually let’s lose even those limited limitations: we as humanity!) don’t even know who some of our best artists have or could have been because of issues of gender, race, socioeconomics. I take very seriously the idea that I should be a role model. I also take very seriously the idea of honesty. If I am asking students to be honest with their work–because I believe that is the only way art can go anywhere interesting– then I must be honest too.
abbydonovan.com
MAD LIBS© is fun to play with friends, but you can also play it by yourself! To begin with, DO NOT look at the story on the page below. Fill in the blanks on this page with the words called for. Then, using the words you have selected, fill in the blank spaces in the story. Now you’ve created your own hilarious MAD LIBS© game!
FOOLS AND FEMINISM PLURAL MEASUREMENT PAST TENSE VERB VERB ADJECTIVE VERB VERB ADJECTIVE ADJECTIVE PLURAL NOUN
Fools and Feminism Feminism has achieved __________ for women. plural measurement
If anything, it has ________ the progress of women. And, further past tense verb
more, it is likely to ________ back the ‘progress’ of women in the verb
near future. Women enjoy ________ freedoms today because of adjective
progress in the areas of science, medicine and technology, not be cause of feminism. Women have always got what they ________ verb for throughout history. They were biologically designed to manipulate and ________ men for their own purposes. This is why verb
they survive in so many circumstances in which men do not. The less ________ is the world outside, and the less ________ that adjective
adjective
women are to it, the more do they venture out into it. When human beings were living in ________ the women said to the men, plural noun
“You go out first.” And they did. And this is the way that it has been ever since. Real excerpts from angryharry.com in 2016