Oratrix Magazine

o ratri x

feminist perspectives on art • fall 2022

Why the artworld needs feminist economics

Group think: why art loves a crowd

Marguerite Humeau: Echoes

The Sweet Science of Bruising

Swive [Elizabeth]

Marguerite Humeau: Echoes

Rachel Whiteread: the secret life of things

Sarah Lucas: I scream Daddio

Francesca Woodman: Italian works

Group think: why art loves a crowd

Body issues: how feminist artists of the 1970s used art to condemn sexual violence

Why the art world needs feminist economics

Three new publications intimately concerned with difficult bodies

I Love Dick by Chris Kraus

Art, sex, drugs and climate anxiety: Maggie Nelson’s search for freedom

Dysfunctional Environments: the unsettling photography of Joanna Piotrowska

o ratri x

Editor

Claire Peckham

Performance Editor

Elena Balzarini

Exhibition Editor Ghislaine Leung

Essay Editor Kassiani Tremountani

Books Editor

Simon Davison

Art Director

Timo Keller Designer Will Pirkis

Contributers

Deborah Frances-White, Julia Messing, Helena Payne, Emily Spicer, Ruth Beale, Amy Feneck, Tish Wrigley, Adrian Searle, Alina Cohen, Olivia Laing

Special Thanks

Ciaran Peckham

Jill Vartenigian

© 2022 oratrix magazine hello@oratrix.com oratrix.com

From the editor

Dear reader, this is a collection of my favorite perfomances, exhibitions, essays and books from some of the most inspirational femi nists working in the art sector today.

The opportunity to see the world translat ed through a feminist lens can expand your perspective, stiffen your spine and warm your heart. All the writers in this issue have done so for me, and this is my letter to the art world and to you, dear reader.

As one of our writers once said, "isn't every letter a love letter?"

Emilia

An Elizabethan poet takes her rightful place on stage

Vinette Robinson (Emilia 2) in rehearsals for Emilia, 2018

Emilia Lanier is my favourite historical guilty feminist and Elizabethan girl-crush. She was a poet, a class warrior and a champi on of women — but she knew how to party and she really went the distance. She died neither virtuous nor young. It was said she broke the record for a woman who had given birth, by living till 76. Apparently, her closest rival died at 57. Putting it into perspective, Shakespeare, her contemporary, died at 52 which wasn’t especially young. Some critics say that Emilia Lanier had an affair with Shakespeare and that she was the dark lady he wrote about in his sonnets. But I don’t care if that’s true or not. Why do wom en always have to be defined by the most famous man they’ve slept with? I don’t want to be defined by Jon Hamm or John Stewart — both men I assume I will have an import ant sexual relationship with before I die. I want to talk about Emilia Lanier on her own merits. Did she know Shakespeare? For sure. The population of London then was around 86 and 49 of those people were poets and playwrights, because there was more funding for the arts under a bloodthirsty monarchy than there is under the current Tory govern ment. Did they get it on? Probably — because things were really boring before the Internet,

so people had to make their own entertain ment which usually consisted of word games and sexual intercourse. I’m pretty sure both Emilia Lanier and Shakespeare shagged loads of people. They just didn’t go on about it be cause they both had awesome careers.

She was born and christened in St Botolph, Bishopsgate in 1569. Now it’s near Liverpool Street Station but then it was where ‘foreign musicians and theatre-folk lived’. Think Stoke Newington — coffee houses, fingerless mit tens and acoustic lutes.

Her father, Baptista Bassano, a hot Italian musician, died of being Elizabethan when Emilia was seven and her English mother, Margaret, couldn’t afford to keep all her chil dren because she was on only twice the ben efits single mothers are given under our Tory government. So Emilia was sent into service at a country house called Cookham, owned by Susan Bertie, Countess of Kent.

Susan was quite bohemian in as much as she thought girls should be schooled and was educating her own daughters. I like to think Emilia was so charming and witty when she brought in the tea and buns, Susan thought she would be a good influence and upgraded Emilia to the position of student and foster daughter. It was certainly there that she

Deborah Frances-White

learned writing and languages and without that could never have become a poet.

Here’s where it all goes a bit Love Island. Emilia became a WAG to Henry Carey, Lord Hunsdon. Henry’s mum was ‘the other Boleyn girl’ and he was said to be Henry VIII’s illegitimate son. She was 18. He was 61. He was also Shakespeare’s boss. He became The Lord Chamberlain of ‘The Lord Chamberlain’s Men’ — Will’s theatre company. Henry gifted Emilia 40 pounds a year and you could buy a lot of corsets and designer ruffs with that. These were her Hello! magazine years, rubbing shoulders with celebrities such as Queen Elizabeth I, Marlowe, Sir Francis Drake. When she was 23 she got knocked up, which was one of the most ill-mannered things you could do in the court. Henry dropped her like a pregnant brick. He was married and almost 70, after all. Like many women before and after her, she was ousted from all that was glamorous and he carried on like nothing had happened.

It was at this point I like to think she

realised how superficial the world of the court was and decided to follow her heart. Enter Alphonso Lanier. He was her age. In fact, he was her cousin — but once removed, so relax.

He was also a rock star of his day. He played the most phallic instrument you can imagine. The recorder. Yes, like the one you played at school but back then that was the equivalent of the electric guitar. I imagine she was with the groundlings in the mosh pit laughing with her friends: ‘He doth play such a lusty melody. Verily, I would blow his recorder.’ Alphonso’s biggest gig was when he played at Elizabeth I’s funeral a few years later. Think Elton John and Candle in the Wind.

She married him when she was pregnant with another man’s child, like many a rock and roll A-Lister, and it was then that she started visiting a therapist and astrologer called Simon Forman. She wanted to know whether her husband would ever make any money because he was busy spending all of hers. Simon Forman fancied her, of course.

Carolyn Pickles (Lord Henry Carey) and Anna Andresen (Mary Sidney) in rehearsals for Emilia, 2018

He exclusively saw female patients and wrote down in his notebooks whenever he ‘haleked’ them. It wasn’t Elizabethan slang. It was his own made up word for shagging. When she ‘would not halek’ he called her a ‘succubus’ (nymphomaniac demon) and a lesbian in his notebook. He was a Jacobean troll. We know a lot about her because he kept terrific misogynistic records.

When her husband died of being Jacobean, Emilia did lots of things to survive and support her son. She opened a school, and ran a hay-weighing business. She often sued men over business disputes and always won. She defended herself in court and referred to herself as an ‘oratrix’, a word I intend to bring back for myself.

The most exciting of the jobs she took up, in what was very much a gig economy, was writing. She was the first English woman to become a professional poet. Other women had written for vanity, but she published for cash. Her most famous poem was so feminist

as to be blasphemous. She got away with it by claiming she’d dreamed the title. The ‘di vine dream’ defence was one used by women through the ages because no-one could argue with what God had told you in your sleep, but I love the fact that she was only prepared to give God credit for the name. The rhymes were all hers. It was called Salve Deus Rex Judæorum and its thesis is wild: stop blaming women for the Fall. Eve was seduced. Adam knew better. And even if women did get us kicked out of the garden of Eden, you men killed Jesus. The introduction to the poem contains this reckless and glorious defence of women.

“As also in respect it pleased our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ… from the time of his conception, till the houre of his death, to be begotten of a woman, borne of a woman, nourished of a woman, obedient to a woman; and that he healed woman, pardoned women, comforted women: yea, euen when he was in his greatest agonie and bloodie sweat, going

Leah Harvey as Emilia 1

to be crucified, and also in the last houre of his death, tooke care to dispose of a wom an: after his resurrection, appeared first to a woman, sent a woman to declare his most glorious resurrection to the rest of his Disciples.”

So lads, if you don’t love women, you don’t love Jesus. All this when being the wrong re ligion was one of the leading causes of death. What a woman. I drink to Emilia often when

I think of how much she’d enjoy the MeToo movement and how much I’d love to have her guest on my podcast. I couldn’t be more intrigued and excited to spend some time with her as the Globe resurrects her spirit and imagines her into being once more. She is the answer to the question, what would have happened to Shakespeare’s sister? And Virginia Woolf was wrong. She wouldn’t have died in the gutter from syphilis. She’d have been a magnificent successful poet, business woman and personality. We just wouldn’t ever learn about her in school. Tonight, we remember her vividly and The Globe will make sure we never dare forget her again.

Like many women before and after her, she was ousted from all that was glamorous and he carried on like nothing had happened.

Leah Harvey and Charity Wakefield in

e Sweet Science of Bruising

Controlled by men and constrained by corsets, each character finds an unexpected freedom in the boxing ring.

Boxing and corsets are not two things you’d expect to be put together, yet this is exactly what Theatre Travels Productions does, and does well in The Sweet Science of Bruising The Australian premiere of the British play written by Joy Wilkinson, explores the lure of boxing for four distinct women living in 1869 London.

The set (production design by Hannah Yardley) immerses the audience in the life of the so called ‘Angel Theatre’ — theatre

by day, boxing ring by night — transformed under the reigns of the unconvention al Professor Sharp (Cormac Costello). The audience are put in the position of boxing and theatre spectators, allowing for fun and energetic participation.

The play follows four women desperate to break free of the constraints placed upon them. Each has a distinct accent reflecting their upbringing and class (Linda NichollsGidley as accent and dialogue coach) and

Julia Messing

Celeste Dodwell and Fiona Skinner

costumes which cement this (Bella Rose). There is Violet (Kitty Simpson), a science extraordinaire struggling to secure respect and funds needed to train as a doctor. Anna, a mum of two, living with an abusive and controlling husband (Davey Seagle). Matilda (Kian Pitman), who works at The Times by day and frequents ‘The Angel’ at night as a prostitute. And the vibrant Polly (Esther Williams), who is a ‘fighter’ by nature after being abandoned at birth.

them it’s their freedom they are fighting for. The clever use of lighting (Sophie Parker and Capri Harris) adds to the suspense and stakes of these matches, casting shadows around the room.

After Polly is seen sparring with her ‘broth er’ (Benjamin Balte Russell), Professor Sharp comes up with the idea to introduce female boxing to the Angel, with the show culminat ing with a competition for the title of ‘Lady Boxing Champion of the World.’ The large sum of prize money brings a chance for all these four women to live without needing to be dependent on or constrained by men — for

The production doesn’t shy away from heavy themes, such as domestic and med ical abuse and violence, which leads to some deeply vulnerable and tragic scenes. Under the careful direction of Carly Fisher, these topics are treated with respect and not used for shock value, giving audience members the space to process what is hap pening on stage. The precise choreography (Tim Dashwood) in intimate scenes, violent scenes, and of course the boxing scenes adds to the feeling of respect and safety for the themes raised, as well as some thrilling and impressive boxing! The humour and energy in the play, especially from Professor Sharp, brings balance to the heavier themes.

The four intertwining narratives come to gether beautifully, with the power of friend ship reigning above all these things. This show is a must see!

...it’s their freedom they are fighting for.

Swive Elizabeth

A tale of two queens

Helena Payne

On the eve of a hotly contested and viciously fought general election, we settle into the warm rubic cube of the Sam Wanamaker playhouse; the chunky stage of gilded chip board, an apt metaphor for Elizabeth I as a monarch. Swive is a dynamic new play writ ten by Ella Hickson and directed by Natalie Abrahami charting the meteoric ascent of the Sun Queen from her fractious youth to political dominance as the most celebrated ruler of this sceptred isle. Four actors multirole lead by Nina Cassells as the Princess transforming into Abigail Cruttenden as the mature Queen supported by Michael Gould

Abigail Cruttenden as Queen

and Colin Tierney as a series of male threats, love interests, confidants and counsellors.

The play begins with direct address, appro priate for the space-inspired to recreate the experience an Elizabethan audience would have enjoyed whilst hearing a play, but as Cruttenden points out ironically this is “all an illusion,” as the space is only five years old. The prologue sets the tone for the sardonic and blunt female voice given to the Queen as she fights off the threat of alternative regents and marriage proposals that would weaken her absolutism. Hickson’s portrait of the Queen is one who begins anxious and afraid, desperately dependent on the solace of her religion, then a woman who wields power through her intelligence and sexuality to manipulate and control. Cassells delivers a breathless depiction as the Princess; she is innocent and wide-eyed but there are flashes of steel, betraying the transformation to come. Cruttenden capitalises on being able

to perform this legendary figure and gives a powerhouse performance as a woman confident in her wiles, believing her own mythologies and deposing every perceived threat with verve and wit. She revels in the attention and Elizabeth’s firebrand feminin ity exerts a real sense of showmanship as if we, the audience, are the courtiers invited to watch her shine.

There are genuine tender moments includ ing the flirtation of Elizabeth and Tierney as Robert Dudley. The chemistry between them is electric and it is heartrendingly human watching her wrestle and crush the desire for love and companionship in favour of duty. There are many astute comments from all the characters that are as relevant today as they were 450 years ago. The way the women in the piece vie and compete with each other for male attention and therefore influence seems sadly relevant as does Elizabeth’s fixation on Knox’s musings that “newer is

Abigail Cruttenden as middle-aged Elizabeth

better,” until she herself is no longer “new.” There is amusing work from Cassells as a hapless Washerwoman who pithily reduces the divine right to rule and the significance of the crown to “it’s just hats really.” Also noting that as determined by their headgear “priests and witches get treated very dif ferently.” It is also worth mentioning Angus McRae’s atmospheric music that compli ments the action beautifully, especially the warm timbre of Maddie Crutter’s cello that gives us the sensation that we are all in the

resonating hollow of the instrument.

Swive is a proudly feminist play and a fantastic vehicle for Cruttenden to put in a stellar performance. I have no doubt, mono logues and duologues from the text will work their way into Drama School auditions and courses as well they should. Sometimes the action can feel a little static but I imagine this decision was intentional on Abrahami’s part to capture the intimacy and suffoca tion of the inner workings of the court. It is a finely constructed piece of theatre and fitting tribute to a monarch who was never openly celebrated in the words of the immor tal bard.

‘My mother seduced a man so successfully that he altered the constitutional history of this country.’

Nina Cassells as young Elizabeth

Marguerite Humeau: Echoes

French-born artist Marguerite Humeau resurrects an eerie voice from the ancient past at Tate Britain. And she adds in some exotic fluids for good measure

A loud, breathy, disembodied voice ema nates from the room containing Marguerite Humeau’s installation. It is a hissing voice—a woman’s voice, a spirit of unknown inten tions echoing from within a chamber paint ed in a vicious, acid yellow. In the centre of the room sits a conundrum. Two abstracted white objects are mounted on frames. One looks like a visualisation of sound waves, and seems to have a tail and a small head resem bling a sentient orchid, if you can imagine such a thing. The other seems to be some symmetrical, alien organ. They are fed (or are they being milked?) by thin tubes contain ing a strange, orange mixture, which lead back to two opaque tanks, one holding a pale white-blue liquid, the other a deep red one.

The more you learn about the work, the stranger it gets. Familiarity with the mate rials only deepens the intrigue. The yellow paint on the walls has been made from the venom of black mambas, which Humeau sourced from a snake farm in Florida. The mysterious liquids wending their way through the transparent plastic tubes are hippopotamus milk and alligator blood. These substances offer a clue to the identi ty of the woman chanting hypnotically over the tannoy. This is the voice of Cleopatra,

reconstructed synthetically by engineers in a laboratory in Cambridge, and it utters the closest approximation to the now extinct lan guage the tragic queen would have spoken.

Humeau (b.1986, Cholet, France) has worked with scientists before. Her gradu ate show at the Royal College of Art in 2011 involved the not insignificant task of re constructing the vocal tract of a species of mammoth with the help of a collection of zoologists, palaeontologists, radiologists and biologists. She then turned her attention to a type of long-extinct “walking whale”, a precursor to modern cetaceans and a twometre-tall prehistoric mammal called an entelodont, sometimes known as a “termi nator pig”. The challenge lay in the fact that soft tissue (with a few notable exceptions) does not fossilise, so respiratory tracts and vocal chords had to be reconstructed with a healthy dose of educated guesswork. Once the structures were designed and mould ed, Humeau forced compressed air through them, so that these long-dead creatures could speak again, albeit with a touch of artistic licence.

Humeau’s projects to date aim to create what the artist calls ecosystems, self-con tained worlds that draw you in to her

Emily Spicer

Installation shots of Marguerite Humeau, Echoes at Tate Britain

alternative realities. They are inspired by the past, real or imagined (or, often, a conflation of the two) and flirt with abstract forms designed to confuse and disorient. When talking about her work, she frequently uses the word “horrific”, which might sound a touch sensational, but there are certain fac ets of her work that do lend themselves to the horror genre.

For one exhibition—entitled FOXP2 (2016)—Humeau imagines a moment when elephants develop complex language as part of an imagined future without us. With their newfound abilities, they lament the passing of the herd’s matriarch in a mournful chorus. But Homo sapiens do feature in this strange world. Humeau included vats of “liquid hu man”, a mixture of the elemental substances

that make up the human body. As strange as it seems, her assistants sourced the constit uent parts from eBay and had carpets dyed with the resulting solution. In case you are curious about the colour of liquid human, it is a not-unpleasant pink, although the name might need tweaking for the Dulux colour chart.

Blurring the line between life and death— an unnerving idea, to be sure—is at the core of her practice. This is where Cleopatra comes in. The ancient Egyptians are known to us largely through their funerary practic es, which sought to preserve the body for the afterlife. They believed that the under world, and the dead souls that resided there, was accessible via liminal spaces at the back of tombs. For the Ancient Egyptians,

the end of life on Earth was just the begin ning of something more, something eternal. The two abstract structures that form the centrepieces of Echoes represent Wadjet, a protective goddess, who was represented as a cobra, and Taweret, the goddess of child birth and fertility, represented in statuary as an anthropomorphised hippo. Together, these two beings are producing “an elixir of life”, as Humeau calls it. But what is life? What does it mean to be living? The queen’s voice has been resurrected, but it is a soulless phantom. Cleopatra the woman can never be brought back and this is part of the under lying tragedy of the work. Fragments of the past only intensify the loss of the whole.

Despite the biological origins of Humeau’s

installations, they always appear clinical and there is undoubtedly an esoteric slant to everything she does. Without reading an explanation, many of the gorier details would remain out of reach, and it is these almost unimaginable facts that contain the real shock factor. But the visceral experience makes seeking information too tempting and in this way Humeau draws us in to her world and fills our heads full of questions, ultimately leaving us disquieted and unset tled. She manages to combine the ancient past with an imagined future; one leaks into another as though the rules of time no lon ger apply. With Humeau, there are no rules. Anything is possible.

Installation shots of Marguerite Humeau, Echoes at Tate Britain

Rachel Whiteread: the secret life of things

Untitled (One Hundred Spaces) 1995, an installation of 100 casts of the underside of chairs.

Adrian Searle

What’s under the bed and in the wardrobe? Who’s on the stair and what’s going on in the shed? Rachel Whiteread’s sculpture is both deadpan and affecting. It can be modest in scale and homely, grand and aus tere, mischievous, menacing. Her art is filled with safe spaces and frightening places, mystery and memories. All this from an artist who, since the late 1980s, has been almost entirely devoted to the making of casts. From filling a rubber hot-water bottle with liquid plaster and using it as a mould, Whiteread has gone on to cast sinks and baths and mattresses, the interior of

A journey into a common landscape made strange

Left: Due Porte, 2016

Right: Light II, 2010

a room in north London, then an entire East End house slated for demolition. She has cast library shelves and even one of New York’s ubiquitous rooftop water tanks. Looking up, the translucent cast of the tank’s interior presented a solidified, glinting void against the sky.

Some of her more recent casts of cabins and sheds have been permanently located in out-of-the way places, to be discovered by chance (just imagining them baking in the Mojave desert, or getting soaked in rainswept Norway, is itself a pleasure). Whiteread refers to some of her recent works as “shy sculptures”. Throughout her career, she has shuttled between complexity and simplicity, and between the small and close at hand, to fragments of the larger world —the vacant plinth on Trafalgar Square, a stairwell, a cast of the meeting room in Broadcasting House that inspired George Orwell’s Room 101, which is now installed in Whiteread’s complex and rewarding show at Tate Britain.

The false walls in the main temporary exhibition galleries have been removed—to my memory, for the first time—leaving one enormous, open space. At first, it feels like a warehouse, filled with objects that you have to walk among and between. We are also walking through a career and a life, making our way as we will. But individual works soon take hold, and the proximities of her sculp tures play off against one another and the exhibition space itself.

Similarity doesn’t mean sameness. Each of her cast mattresses and bed-bases has an entirely different timbre and feel. This is as much psychological as it is physical. Casts of sash windows and casements, interior and front doors (some with a letter-flap), are

plays on differences as much as on their sim ilarity as forms. The way her casting materi als pick up the imprint of grain on a wooden floor, the muffled contours and planes of a painted door, dinks and dents, spalled plas terwork, soot stains in a fireplace, human and material imperfections, give each work character, even a kind of personality. The details are at once forensic and a reminder that everything that was once new gets worn down by time and accident, imprinted by human contact and use.

Beyond the galleries, Whiteread’s 100 casts of the spaces under chairs (made in 1995) march in rows down the first half of the Duveen sculpture court. In the rear half, Whiteread has selected a number of works from Tate’s collection—signalling affinities and friendships, artistic affections, kinship. Unexpectedly, Richard Dadd’s 1855-64 paint ing The Fairy Feller’s Master Stroke, a small window into the patricidal Dadd’s mental turmoil, hangs alone on one wall. All these works—including sculptures by Anthony Caro, Lynda Benglis and Sarah Lucas—do things Whiteread’s own art doesn’t. Outside

Tate Britain, her white, concrete chicken shed shares a lawn with a Barbara Hepworth bronze.

Back inside the gallery, the saw-tooth inverted stair treads of Whiteread’s cast

Whiteread’s singularity rests in what is shared, the common space both of everyday objects and of art itself.

stairwell climbs towards the trapezoid sky lights. Nearby, light pools on an aluminium cast floor. Both these works refer to other spaces, other times.

Whiteread’s singularity rests in what is shared, the common space both of everyday objects and of art itself. As various as it is consistent, as metaphorical as it is material, her work insists on its volume and mass, its physicality and surface and absorption and resistance to light, reflection and refraction, shine and mattness, solemnity and sparkle and even colour—a multitude of off-whites, greys, ambers, yellows and a spectrum of Morandi-like dusty tints and shadows.

But still one asks: what does a window mean, or a toilet roll, or the space inside a room, a doorknob, or a humble hot-wa ter bottle? A beehive or a chicken shed? Whiteread’s work often looks blank and liter al, a fixed trace, like a snapshot, of an absent object, the space that once it occupied. We can never forget our passage through our surroundings, among the things we recognise and handle daily, often unconsidered and unmeasured, a familiarity that can sudden ly turn into a threat and glower back at us. What Whiteread does goes beyond formal gambits or a repertoire. What she is really doing is making solid a volume of air.

Out under the portico and in the big first room of the British pavilion stand two iden tical yellow sculptures. Arch-backed and bums raised, as though in some difficult Pilates position, arms behind head and huge of erection, they look as if they are about to orgasm. Hrrryghhhh. If Jeff Koons’s balloon dog mated with a Franz West sausage, these two works by Sarah Lucas might be their pri apic offspring. Each of their bodies provides a spider-like support for a humungous quest ing penis, reaching skyward. In the pavilion, the tip of the penis catches the light, gleam ing white against the yellow walls.

Except it is not quite a penis, not exact ly a sausage and not entirely a male body. Even the pendulous sagging balls have something breast-like about them. Named after Maradona, neither of these sculptures has a hand—only a blob at the end of their tubular resin limbs. The sculptures are an up-yours welcome to Lucas’s official British contribution to the 56th Venice Biennale. Her exhibition, I Scream Daddio, uses all the art ist’s familiar tropes, yet Lucas still manages to surprise. The surprise for some is that she gets away with it, time and again. Lucas has a great knack for reinvention: she can make the familiar fresh.

Beyond these two yellow sculptures, in a series of custard-yellow rumpus rooms,

Lucas’s sculptural army of friends and muses are all pleasuring themselves – and they’ll make you feel good too

Adrian Searle

Me Bar Stool, Venice Biennale 2015

figures wait for or recover from sex. Or maybe they’re just naked and hanging about. Cross-legged on the edge of a chair, one looks as if she’s dying for a pee. Another spreads her legs on an office desk, and one more lies on her stomach on a drop-leaf Formica kitchen table, waiting for the post man’s knock. One leans over a toilet bowl, while another straddles a concrete loo as if it were a horse. And they’re all having a fag, each of them with a cigarette poking out of their bum or their fanny and/or their navel. Anyone got a light? Each pose, and every

body, is different. They could be us. In fact, some of these bodies are casts of people I know, each of them name-checked in the accompanying exhibition pamphlet. Here’s Margot and Sadie and Pauline, Lucas and her friends, her muses.

Lucas treads a line between the bawdy, the saucy and the abject. The bawdiness is in the bodies who have no heads or arms but somehow manage a cigarette, and don’t care what we think of them. The sauce is the yellow that covers the walls. It is the yellow of eggs and sunshine and the walls of Sir John Soane’s drawing room in his house in Bloomsbury. The abject is the drama of the hapless plaster bodies, a choreography of arrested moments.

Dedicated to basic human pervery and pleasure, Lucas’s pavilion gives us room after room of sculptural images, of the kinds of things people get up to when they’re left to their own devices. These are the pleasures

The sculptures are an upyours welcome to Lucas’s official British contribution to the 56th Venice Biennale.

Patricia, Kris, 2015

of the body in the listless hours when we’ve nothing more constructive to do with our selves. The figures are also like commands and positions from a highly constructed dance: front, back, spread, close, lift, bend, turn. If this is what bodies do, it is what sculpture does, too.

What are we meant to think about as we wander from room to room, with their mid-century modern furniture, the brand new washing machine, the sanitary porce lain and the giant fridge freezer, on which a cast of the bottom half of chef Margot Henderson reclines, like one of Ingres’s odalesques?

“The sculptures are set in a sea of cus tard,” Lucas writes. “Crème Anglais in other words.” She wants to put us all in a good mood. The off-white plaster bodies remind her of meringues in a dessert, with Fergus Henderson providing a recipe for iles flot tantes in the catalogue. Lucas’s catalogue, rather than providing explanation (though it does, by devious default) continues her work by other means. Part sculptor’s notebook,

part autobiography, part diary of her life in London and Suffolk, it is filled with disarm ing delights.

Among her figures, wretched black bronze cats—which look as if they’re made from black bin liners and tar—pad about. They lounge on the furniture and on breeze-block plinths, minding their own business, getting their own pleasures where they can, oblivi ous to ours.

Yoko, 2015

Francesca Woodman: Italian works

A new Venice exhibition explores the works the artist made in Italy over the course of her too-short life

Self-portrait, Easter, Rome, 1978

Tish Wrigley

The short life of photographer  Francesca Woodman has been picked over obsessively in the 37 years since she died. It is inevitable that her suicide at 22 years old colours responses to her work, but it is unusual how much it has come to define her as an artist.

“It’s a basic fallacy that her death is what she was all about,” her mother Betty Woodman said in 2014. “Her life wasn’t a series of miseries. People read that into the photographs. They psychoanalyse them.”

Of course, there are some grounds for this interpretation. Woodman’s images, the majority of them self-portraits or of mod els who closely resemble the artist, use long shutter exposures and silvery monochrome to intensely dramatic effect. Naked wom en fade into puffs of smoke, transform into tree roots, blend into walls, evaporate under bright sunlight. A quest for erasure can be read into every frame, but does this

recalibration via hindsight give a balanced insight into Woodman’s world?

A new show at Victoria Miro Venice strives to expand perceptions of Woodman’s artistic interests with an exhibition of her Italian Works. Francesca was fluent in Italian, hav ing gone to school near Florence for second grade and spent summers at her family’s holiday home in Antella, Tuscany. It was in Italy that George Woodman first gave his daughter a camera. Between 1977-8, she spent a year in Rome studying at the Rhode Island School of Design’s European Honours programme. The images collected here, mostly taken from her year of study, show an art student blending her own preoccupa tions with inspiration from her new city and surroundings.

The history and ideas of Italian art that filled the RISD syllabus soon began to per meate Woodman’s pictures. By studying master artists such as Giotto, she worked

on mastering the arts of composition and perspective. The exploration of classical sculpture translated into the carytids who would populate later images. She spent hours in the Maldoror bookstore in Via di Parione, which specialised in avant-garde, Surrealist and fantastical literature, and where she later held her first solo exhibition. She made friends with Italian artists who introduced her to the Pastifico Cerere, an abandoned pasta factory in San Lorenzo within which cavernous, dilapidated space she was able to explore the boundaries of her imagination.

Many celebrated images came from this time, including the Angel series, where Woodman leaps joyfully towards two wings hanging from the ceiling of the Cerere, and the Surrealist-inspired Eel series, disjointed nudes paired with bowls of eels. The privacy,

light, space and peeling walls of the pas ta factory also allowed her to experiment further with her confrontational nudes, the hazy figures blending into furniture, her dis appearing forms, elements that have since become synonymous with Woodman’s style, and in some cases interpreted as dark omens foreshadowing her tragic end.

Ultimately it is impossible to separate Woodman’s end from her life and her work. But this show gives a refreshing perspective, taking her away from that New York high rise window and the depression that engulfed her in 1981 and fixing her in a moment when her pictures carry no dark portent, when she was simply a student artist inspired by a city, a culture and a history, being fed by new ideas and free to try them all out.

Left: Self-deceit #1, Rome, Italy, 1978

Right: November has been a slightly uncomfortable baroque, 1977-78

Liverpool Street Station

Group think: why art loves a crowd

From flâneurs to rallies, protests to parties, human beings are drawn to congregate. With social gatherings a possibility once again, Olivia Laing considers the crowd in art and literature

Laing

When I was very lonely in New York, one of the things that most comforted me was to wander up Broadway or along the East River, alone but in the company of thousands of strangers. Anonymised by the multitude, I felt the burden of my sorrow slide off me. It was a relief to be part of a whole, no longer agonisingly singular but a drop in what Walt Whitman once called “the rolling ocean the crowd”.

Until last year, the crowd was the trade mark of the city. All through the day and night, people shoaled together, hurrying through streets, dawdling in parks, jostling at protests, concerts and football matches, like so many bees in a hive. Pre-pandemic, any film that wanted to kindle an atmo sphere of eeriness needed only to show one of the world’s great cities empty of people to instantly convey disaster. From I Am Legend to 28 Days Later, the depopulated city is axi omatic of catastrophe.

No people in a space designed for them is

disturbing, but that doesn’t mean crowds have always been regarded with favour. There are as many different types of crowd as there are moods, from the mob that stormed the Capitol last January to the uniformed commuters pouring out of London’s Liverpool Street Station in their dark suits and shining shoes. A crowd might resemble the well-fed bourgeoisie of Seurat or Renoir, replete bod ies in orderly pursuit of leisure, or the chaotic dispossessed of Goya’s paintings. A crowd might be angry or exuberant, vengeful or terrified. As we return tentatively to proximi ty and embrace, it’s illuminating to peer back at the massed bodies of the past, to see how artists, thinkers and politicians have experi enced and interpreted the crowd, as well as how the crowd has understood itself.

Lean in among the guests at Bruegel’s The Wedding Dance, with their scarlet jerkins and scrubbed white aprons, and nearly every reveller’s face is distinct. This man gurns, eyes crossed; this one, blushing hard, steals

Olivia

a kiss. There are expressions of deviousness, stances of aggression and seduction beneath the trembling summer trees. All of life, you might say, is here, and yet the medieval crowd is different from the modern in that it is primarily a group of people familiar to one another. It was the great shift to the cities that brought about the proximity to strang ers that we now experience as a crucial element of crowd dynamics.

This crowd is an artefact of modernity, at once generated and serviced by the ma chine age. This crowd travels by train, then plane; this crowd is illuminated in ghoulish pools of artificial light, which opened up the after-dark hours and made whole new vistas available to the eye. This crowd works in fac tories and takes its pleasure at the weekend. This crowd is turbulent and shifting: now mods fighting rockers, now ravers on pills, now miners on strike, now the doomed dem onstrators gathering in their Sunday best at what would become known as Peterloo.

Among the first to document the modern crowd’s newly awesome density was the Victorian painter William Frith. In The Derby Day, a gargantuan work made between 1856 and 1858, the assorted revellers gathered on the hill above Epsom racecourse are the product of industrial urban labour, no matter how bucolic the scene appears. These indi viduals are just as bent on pleasure, mischief and misrule as Bruegel’s peasants, but they are emphatically strangers to one another, their brief respite from urban life facilitated by the railway, which reached Epsom nine years before Frith began his painting and which he later made the explicit subject of another of his virtuosic crowd scenes.

The heaving, surging crowd was the object of fascination and disquiet, widely consid ered unpredictable and capable of concealing dangerous elements (“a crowd of roaring blackguards,” an MP said of the Epsom revel lers in 1880). In his painting, Frith, a believer in phrenology, depicted what he regarded

The Derby Day, 1856-8, by William Powell Frith

as the hopelessly deviant bodies of criminals and the poor, from the pickpocket snaffling a watch to the beggarly children who watch in longing as a footman prepares a feast of boiled lobster.

Part of the fascist route to power was to convert the energy of the crowd into a disci plined force under the sway of a leader

Five years after Frith completed the last brushstrokes of The Derby Day, the poet Baudelaire wrote a famous essay that took a seemingly very different attitude to the massed bodies of strangers. In The Painter of Modern Life, he established the figure of the flâneur, the urban wanderer. “The crowd is his element,” it begins, “as the air is that of birds and water of fishes.” (Later, in the prose-poem Crowds, Baudelaire wrote of taking “a bath of multitude”.) Here the crowd is not sinister or dangerous, but instead a live element, pulsing and electric, appreciated by the solitary connoisseur, who longs “to set up house at the heart of the multitude”, and yet who remains outside, a perennially estranged

watcher and witness.

What is happening here, to the real peo ple who make up the body of the crowd? They’ve become a kind of living backdrop, transformed from individuals into a tapes try or chorus, a blur of colour and sound. It’s the same transformation the commuters on the Paris Métro undergo to become Ezra Pound’s “petals on a wet black bough”, at once aestheticised and dehumanised by the overwhelming density and scale of modern life. For these artists, joining the crowd could mean experiencing a sublime dissolution, but at the perennial risk of becoming less than human.

Pound would become a fascist, and his atti tude is not unrelated to the way that fascists viewed the masses as raw material, in need of sifting and moulding (Goebbels charac terised the relationship as that of a painter to his paints). Part of the fascist route to power was to convert the energy of the crowd into a disciplined force under the sway of a leader: a mass of humans stripped of their

A scene from Leni Riefenstahl’s Nazi propaganda documentary The Triumph of the Will, made at the 1934 Nuremberg rallies

individuality, marching in lockstep, cogs in a formidable machine.

This is among the most frightening crowds to witness, though it clearly offers consider able pleasure to at least some of its partic ipants. It’s also a crowd most effectively represented by the aerial gaze of cinema, so adept at conveying the visual shock of scale, the same form multiplied a thousand times. Take, for instance, the cowed workers in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, no longer capable of resis tance or refusal, or the wheeling, uniformed formations in Leni Riefenstahl’s glamorising 1935 documentary The Triumph of the Will Indeed, the Nuremberg rallies were explicit ly designed as a spectacle for Riefenstahl’s camera, to convey individuality utterly subsumed by Nazi ideology to crowds not yet perhaps under its spell.

But isn’t something missing from this account? What does it feel like to be in a crowd, thrust cheek by jowl against the sweating bodies of strangers? What about carnival? What about raves and protests, what about circuit parties and darkrooms, or cruising? What about the 25,000 people who marched from Selma to Montgomery in sup port of African American voting rights, or the

Stonewall riots, where drag queens armed themselves with bricks and fought back against police harassment? As I was writing this, a crowd in Glasgow surrounded an im migration removal van that had arrested two men and refused to let it pass, chanting “let our neighbours go” until they were released. Oh, there are many ways of experiencing a crowd, and many things a crowd can do!

My most memorable childhood crowd was marching at Gay Pride in the late 1980s, jubilant at being part of such a traffic-stop ping, formidably defiant body. Later, as an indie kid, I indulged in the high-risk sport of crowd surfing, leaping from the stage and waiting for the hands of strangers to tumble me aloft, or not.

A crowd is a way of smashing out of the confines of the individual body, that little prison. Look at the dancers in Mark Leckey’s melancholy love letter to club culture, Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore. It’s like peering into a rock pool, watching the feet move in unison, the bodies float and sway, entranced. No one is in charge. Patterns develop and shift spontaneously, though the skilled orator or performer is adept at channelling these eddies into ocean-going waves (Nina Simone,

that consummate magician of crowd dy namics, once compared it to mesmerising “a giant animal”, as a toreador mesmerises a bull).

It’s no coincidence that one of the great est works of crowd analysis arose from the experience of being inside one. On 15 July 1927, a demonstration in Vienna turned into a massacre when the police began to fire on tens of thousands of unprotected marchers and bystanders, using dumdum bullets. The future Nobel Laureate Elias Canetti, then a 22-year-old chemistry student, heard an un canny roaring, and went into the streets to investigate. “I did not feel as if I were moving on my own legs,” he wrote later. “I felt as if I were in a resonant wind.”

His experiences that day made a non sense of the theories he’d read about crowd behaviour. It was all very well for Freud and Gustave Le Bon to write about the violence and irrationality of the crowd as a threat to civilisation, but what he had encountered was the crowd’s immense dignity. Joining that almighty we had felt ecstatic, almost sublime. The realisation that the crowd was a living being, and one that had been mistrust ed and maligned throughout history, drove

his enormous, unclassifiable work of nonfic tion, Crowds and Power

Canetti contested the widely held belief that the crowd was automatically primitive and irrational, the opposite of the composed and articulate individual. Crowds might not use language, but that didn’t mean they

weren’t communicating subtle ideas. Crowds offered people the chance for contact, intimacy, excitement, action. They were democracy in the raw, a site of visceral and sometimes mysterious intelligence—though there’s no doubt that crowds can be more stupid than their individual participants, and also more cruel.

As Canetti had seen on the streets of Vienna, crowds are often punished by the state, especially when they’ve assembled to

Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore , Mark Leckey

Part of the fascist route to power was to convert the energy of the crowd into a disciplined force under the sway of a leader

demand rights, or their presence is interpret ed as a threat to social order. From Peterloo to Black Lives Matter, demonstrations can have the unwelcome consequence of induc ing a tightening of the reins, an increase in restriction and control. When I was involved in environmental activism in the 1990s, pro test was made more perilous by the passage of a repressive new law. The Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 gave the police powers to prevent unauthorised camping and trespass, and created the new offence of aggravated trespass, which would soon be

a succession of repetitive beats”. It might have sounded ridiculous, but it licensed the police to disperse open-air gatherings and meant organisers risked fines and prison sentences for putting on free parties.

I was at the “kill the bill” protests in 1994, including the epic party in Trafalgar Square, to which the KLF turned up with a sound system in a tank, and so it was with a feeling of deja vu that I first read about the Police, Crime and Sentencing bill, currently passing through committee stage in the House of Commons. This bill was explicitly devised to combat the effectiveness of demonstrations by Black Lives Matter in 2020 and Extinction Rebellion, which gridlocked London twice in 2019. It represents the latest sally in a centuries-long attempt to relegate the need for communal rights below the demand for communal order.

used widely in the policing of road protest ers, hunt saboteurs and strikers.

This law was created in direct response to Castlemorton, a spontaneous three-day rave on common land in the Malvern Hills, and it was infamous for attempting to criminalise the music itself, defined as “the emission of

Over the past frightening, sequestered year, I have been dogged by two crowd scenes in particular. The first is Henry Moore’s Shelter Drawings, made at the dead centre of the second world war. They document the disquieting sight of hundreds of sleepers in London tube stations, which had been repur posed as communal shelters during the blitz

Kill the Bill protest in London

Crowds are often punished by the state, especially when their presence is interpreted

of 1940-41. Two rows of reclining, eyeless bodies fill a tunnel, tidy as pilchards. A man lies tented beneath a green blanket, one arm akimbo, mouth agape. Privacy is annihilat ed. Even his teeth are visible. A mother sits in vigil with her baby, surrounded by dozens of unconscious bodies. They could be corps es, each heavy dreamer de-individualised by catastrophe.

I’m wary of making common cause with the past, but the sense of waiting feels fa miliar. Life on hold, a long night, not knowing what absences await in the outside world. As the original National Gallery catalogue explained of Tube Shelter Perspective, “It is a terrifying vista of recumbent shapes, pale as all underground life tends to be pale; regi mented, as only fear can regiment; helpless yet tense, safe yet listening, uncouth, up rooted, waiting in the tunnel for the dawn to release them.”

The second image is Nicole Eisenman’s 2008 painting Coping. If Moore’s figures are all the same, this crowd is radiantly individu al. They are walking through the streets of a small town, with mountains in the distance. It could be Switzerland. Each character seems to have wandered in from a different

era of art history. There’s a mummy wrapped in bandages, while the man in the fore ground, his face pancake white, could be an off-duty acrobat from a rose-period Picasso, though he’s managed to score a takeaway coffee on his way out. A banker trudges past. A parrot hitches a ride on a cat. A diminutive cartoon cop trails a Lautrecian nude. The only thing that unites them is that they’re wading through a river of shit.

I recognise us in that crowd, too. Aren’t we in it together, up to our necks, trapped in the outflow pipe of history? As our face masks betray, we’re mortally vulnerable to one another, dependent on strangers every day. “Better together”, “stronger together”, “in it together”: these are phrases spun by politicians who are no better than Frith’s pickpockets, rifling the public purse. The mob who stormed the Capitol thought they were the people, even as they undermined the people’s right to vote, and yet I can’t help founding my dreaming of tomorrow on a vision of an “us”. Not a radiant host, perhaps, but the scrappy figures of a Lowry painting, stuttering into proximity, maybe even fellow ship at last.

Body issues: how feminist artists of the 1970s used art to condemn sexual violence

As our future on this planet becomes increasingly uncertain, ideas about the body—and what it can withstand—are ever more relevant.

For centuries, artists celebrated rape in allegorical paintings. Roman mytholo gy, after all, cites two stories of rape as absolutely foundational to Western civili zation. A member of the Etruscan royal family decided to rape Lucretia, inciting a rebellion that led to Rome’s establish ment. And Roman men raped the Sabines because there weren’t enough Roman women with whom they could procreate.

The Sabine women’s offspring allowed the republic to thrive. Artists includ ing Titian, Rembrandt, Nicolas Poussin, and Jacques-Louis David commemorat ed these violations in their paintings. Looking at their canvases, and consider ing the tales behind them, you’d be for given for thinking rape was a romantic, dramatic encounter that ultimately led to the betterment of society.

Alina Cohen

To the contemporary reader, that is (or should be!) an infuriating conclusion. The implicit lessons—that women must be pawns in men’s political games, that women’s lives and desires should be sacrificed in favor of a common cause—are the purview of proud misogynists. Yet throughout much of Western art history, women’s objectification was both aesthetic and legal. “Rape was a crime of property, and specifically a crime against the woman’s husband or guardian,” writes Nancy

encouragement of passivity, Princenthal be lieves otherwise. “To shine a light on environ ments of sexualized threat is, at least implic itly, to refuse unquestioning acquiescence,” writes Princenthal. By taking control of dan gerous environments, “artists help conceive a safer world.” For a 1969 film, Rape, Ono and collaborator John Lennon filmed a young woman as they chased her around London. The title underscores the boundary between a bodily threat and a violent actuality as it turns the camera into a weapon. Filming and chasing someone is not the equivalent of raping her, yet an artist—or anyone, for that matter—who wields documentary equipment can be a fearful aggressor.

Princenthal in her new book, Unspeakable Acts: Women, Art, and Sexual Violence in the 1970s (2019). Princenthal explores how fem inist artists, from the 1970s through today, have offered alternately grotesque, funny, vulnerable, and media-savvy counternarra tives. Through radical performances, paint ings, and photographs, artists including Yoko Ono, Suzanne Lacy, Jenny Holzer, Kara Walker, and Naima Ramos-Chapman, among others, have developed revolutionary new ways to speak about violence against women’s bodies.

Throughout the 1960s, the emergence of performance art offered women a potent new medium for discussing rape. Ono took both vulnerable and predatory positions in her work. In Cut Piece (1964), she sat on a Kyoto stage and invited audience members to snip away her clothing. While the piece may sound like an invitation for harm and an

Ono’s protofeminist work anticipated the burst of feminist art throughout the 1970s. In California, Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro co-founded the California Institute of the Arts’s Feminist Art Program and or ganized the legendary project Womanhouse (1972). Situated in an abandoned Hollywood home, the installation gave its female par ticipants space to make work and discuss gender-related struggles. Theatricality and spectacle reigned. Women adorned them selves with exaggerated stage makeup, wield ed genital-shaped props, and acted out the process of giving birth.

Lacy, a student involved with the Feminist Art Program, took this dramatic, fit-for-Tin seltown approach a step further. She har nessed the camera, and media attention itself, in a brand-new way. Her socially oriented project Three Weeks in May (1977) featured performances, self-defense demon strations, and artworks about Los Angeles’s rampant rape epidemic—in 1977, the LAPD received 2,386 reports of rapes and attempts.

...throughout much of Western art history, women’s objectification was both aesthetic and legal.

Previous: Yoko Ono, Cut Piece, 1964

Suzanne Lacy and Leslie Labowitz, In Mourning and In Rage , 1977

Lacy actively sought media attention and issued press statements. Six months later, she and fellow artist Leslie Labowitz staged In Mourning and in Rage, an explicit “media event” that comprised a symbolic funeral for the women who were rape and murder victims of the recent “Hillside Strangler.” Princenthal writes that each detail—“the literally larger-than-life actors; the anger-fu eled sound bites; the clear symbolism of the funeral cortege; the control of the scene so that every photograph would capture what the artists intended”—was chosen in order to “carry a clear meaning via mass media.” Perhaps the first artist to ever harness the press in this way, Lacy took complete control

of her messaging and its public image. Though women discussed violence and victim hood in her work, they ultimately appeared powerful and potent to the camera lens.

While Lacy took a hyperlocal approach to her subject, Holzer adopted an internation al view in her photography series Lustmord (1993–94). The German title of the work, which means “sex-murder,” “names an act of homicidal violence that is converted into sexual satisfaction,” Princenthal writes, “an inversion of the common understanding that rape is sex converted into a gratifying (for the assailant) act of violence.” A genre of German Expressionist work in this vein, by artists including George Grosz and Otto Dix,

glorifies these acts.

In a particularly disturbing picture, Dix’s Sexual Murderer (Der Lustmörder) (1920), a diabolical man in a checkered suit holds a bloody knife in one hand and a leg in anoth er. Hacked off, female body parts ooze blood around him. “They are among the nastiest things I’ve ever seen,” Princenthal told me. The sheer ingenuity and number of ways that men have delighted in depicting violence against women truly boggles the mind.  Holzer, a poet of an artist, reclaimed both the concept of “Lustmord” and the visual and written language used to discuss rape. Addressing the rapes against Bosnian women during the Bosnian War in the 1990s, Holzer created texts from the perspectives of a victim, a perpetrator, and an observer. She projected them on walls, photographed them as tattoos on skin, and etched them into metal bands that circled human bones. “I AM AWAKE IN THE PLACE WHERE WOMEN DIE,” reads one. Arguably as visceral and disturbing as depictions of violence itself, Holzer’s work

reconsiders what kind of visual language we need when considering rape—must we show the act itself to convey its horror?

For a counterexample, one might look to Kara Walker’s black-and-white silhouettes, which regularly depict slave owners violating their charges. Both bodies of work are pow erful; the divergence of Walker’s and Holzer’s

aesthetic strategies evidences the growing plurality of voices and perspectives address ing rape. These complications may ultimately be a good thing. While feminism fractures, a growing number of women are able to enter the conversation.

“Until the last quarter of the twentieth century, the artists and writers who repre sented sexual violence were almost entirely

By taking control of dangerous environments, “artists help conceive a safer world.”

men. And it was men whom they addressed,” Princenthal writes. She notes that these men’s work entirely elided the victims’ experiences. Over the past 50 years, daring, creative women have changed that.

The #MeToo movement has similarly helped women find language for their experienc es, though Princenthal is careful to note its limitations. The hashtag hardly helps eluci date what “sexual violence” actually means, and entirely omits the fact that women living in poor, minority communities are the most vulnerable—not white women on college campuses, who are the most vocal about such issues. For artists, these gray areas aren’t problems, but invitations to address an endlessly complicated subject with unique, individual points of view.

One of the most recent artworks Princenthal includes in her book is Naima Ramos-Chapman’s short film And Nothing Happened (2016), which follows a young woman struggling to explain her assault and its emotional repercussions. The video

exemplifies one of the greatest challeng es, and most important issues, still facing women artists who want to address sexual violence in their work. “It’s still about finding language,” Princenthal said. That’s the point.

Naima Ramos-Chapman’s short film And Nothing Happened, 2016

Why the artworld needs feminist economics

It is difficult to define a ‘job’ that has no single description, salary or terms of em ployment, as Charlotte Warne Thomas’s recent report on Artists as Workers for the thinktank Autonomy, identifies. While artists often resist definition, the lack of clarity leads to messy philosophical, ethical and practical implications for how artists are remunerated for the work they under take. Warne Thomas’s report quotes Sarah

Jaffe’s book Work Won’t Love You Back (2021), which argues that the neoliberal worker is required not only to labour in exchange for a wage, but also to love their job and discov er personal fulfilment within it—and so too artists are defined by their practice and their status in the artworld. But Jaffe also com pares the type of work that artists do to the more hidden labour done in the home, and child-raising in particular, ‘which is often

'Speaking to the City', 2018-19, durational billboard with 15 iterations, The Alternative School of Economics

done by mothers in the name of love, and remains almost exclusively unpaid’. For many artists who are parents, their days are filled with two types of work that are undervalued and under-acknowledged.

As The Alternative School of Economics, we use artist practice and self-education to study economics in collaboration with others. In the early days of COVID-19 lockdowns, we were working on a podcast about feminist economics called True Currency. It began as a way of exploring our own sense of alienation as mothers, while foregrounding the expe riences of those at the brunt of policies like zero hour contracts and the ‘hostile environ ment’. It became all the more urgent as the pandemic highlighted and extremified harsh social inequalities, as well as a crisis of care. People were applauding keyworkers while the UK Home Office excluded the same low-paid ‘essential workers’ from work visas. There were increasing burdens on parents and family members during lockdowns, ourselves included, with our children off school and nursery, but equally for unpaid carers filling in for the support usually required for dis abilities, dementia, neurodiversity or mental health. The mantra to ‘protect the economy’ fundamentally did not recognise care as a key part of that economy.

Feminist economics offers a different view on this crisis, and the economics of both ev eryday life and being an artist. In a series of workshops we ran at a local children’s centre (before the lockdowns), we spoke to parents about the role of women and mothers in the

economy. We used feminist economist JK Gibson-Graham’s analogy of the iceberg—an idea that artist Kathrin Bohm has represent ed visually—where the ‘official’ economy is above the waterline—wages, corporations, taxation—and everything below is outside of it. This emphasises how the economy is ac tually made up of a plurality of economies— most of which keep the ‘official’ economy running: care, gifts and favours, volunteer ing, cash in hand, and the things we do for friends and family. It includes ‘reproductive labour’, a term used by writer and activist Silvia Federici, and others, which describes work that is neither productive or unpro ductive, but instead cares or sustains. The housework, shopping for food, raising chil dren: the work that is repetitive, but which seems to erase itself, like the washing basket that is always full, or the meals that need making every day. The iceberg also illustrates interconnectedness—a way of thinking about economics that foregrounds relationships, not the market and big finance.

One episode of True Currency intertwines interviews with Claire, a nurse and a moth er, and Lisa Baraitser, an academic whose

Artists Ruth Beale and Amy Feneck on the importance of recognising care Ruth Beale and Amy Feneck

The mantra to ‘protect the economy’ fundamentally did not recognise care as a key part of that economy.

psychosocial theory focuses on temporal, ethical and affective dimensions of care. Baraitser’s work draws on both her expe rience working in mental health settings supporting women who experienced violence, abuse and poverty, her experience as a moth er, and that of artists whose work covered care and ‘maintenance’ work. She references Mierle Laderman Ukeles, who, for her 1979 performance piece Touch Sanitation, shook hands with every sanitation worker in New York City. Ukeles’ project made visible that which was previously erased: the work that capitalism not only fails to acknowledge, but also relies on. In the episode, both Claire and Lisa spoke about how time is experienced differently through care, repetition and interruption. The conversation also explored how the gender binary frames the experience of women carers, but is difficult to escape from, locking them into certain roles. The feeling of being outside of capitalism, whilst

still serving it.

Reimagining is part of the feminist eco nomic approach: certain kinds of labour need to be recognised, but we also need to reimagine—and change—the systems that define them, and learn from the insights we gain when we feel ourselves outside of capitalism. The iceberg is one example, as is Kate Rowarth’s Doughnut Economics (2017): she visualises resources as a balance be tween over-and under-consumption, human need and planetary need; she rejects ideas of ‘economic man’ with a household of in come through wage labour and expenditure through consumption.

Economic relationships in the art world need revisualisation. Often mirroring the iceberg analogy, especially in relation to the flow of money, the luxury commodity market of art is at the very tip of the iceberg, and is built on the unpaid and underpaid labour of many supporting it. It is a top-down

Artists' Economies: a series of posters, fly-posted across Oslo, use the language and form of surveys to ask questions about ethical, financial and creative challenges faced by artists. 2021-22

infrastructure from which few art workers benefit, high finance capitalism at its most extreme. What might care and interconnect edness teach us? What could an art economy based on human relationships, environ mental and ecological concerns look like? There have been several relevant solutions in recent years, including Kathrin Böhm and Kuba Schreder’s Icebergian Economies of Contemporary Art, which uses the principle of the iceberg to critique art’s ecosystems. Some very practical examples include How Not to Exclude Artist Parents, which offers guidance to reduce the exclusion which stag nates many women artists’ careers; Mother House Studios in South London claims to be the first workspace in the world to offer in tegrated studios and childcare; CASCO in the Netherlands has adopted a non-hierarchical, commons structure which attempts to value the reproductive labour that supports the day-to day running of their organisation; We

Industria’s Artist Leaks has highlighted the ways in which marginalised people are called upon to perform certain kinds of labour and are subsequently exploited. But since CASCO adopted a feminist way of working, it has struggled to secure funding from previous major supporters. Purposefully refusing to use words like ‘succeed’ or ‘achieve’, CASCO have become a square peg in an old-fash ioned patriarchal hole. Change will be slow: it requires a greater reimagining which recognises the social value of artists not as a quantity, but as part of our cultural ecosystem.

• Three new publications intimately concerned with difficult bodies

Tariq Alvi, The Bandaged Lady (from Two Hankies diptych), 2005

Olivia Laing

body like

I’ve got an earworm. I’m walking down East 4th Street, yellow leaves, blue sky, and I keep repeating ‘an orgy of specificity, an orgy of specificity’. It takes six blocks before I figure out the source: Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts (2015, Graywolf), her magnificent memoir-cum-philosophical treatise about transness, motherhood, queer politics, de votion, love. ‘An orgy of specificity’ is how she describes the task of talking about her then-lover, now-husband, the artist Harry Dodge, without resorting to a gendered pronoun. But it strikes me that the phrase does double duty, serving as a manifesto for what amounts to an explosion of new writing about the body: libidinal, politically engaged, ardently invested in multiplicity and difference. Take Dodie Bellamy, whose new collection, When the Sick Rule the World (2015, Semiotext(e)) is likewise intimately concerned with difficult bodies: disruptive bodies, bodies that resist categorization, not least among them Bellamy’s own. Let’s get specific. In the virtuosic, expulsive Barf Manifesto (2008, Ugly Duck Press), which somehow manages to find connections between the nausea-inducing op art of Bridget Riley, Bellamy’s spiky friendship with the poet Eileen Myles, vomit, dog urine and incestuous mother love, Bellamy repeatedly reveals herself in states of abjection. This

self-exposure culminates in a scene in which she inadvertently clogs Myles’s toilet with her own shit and then frantically tries to plunge it while Myles watches from the door way, barking unsympathetic instruction.

Out it all comes: ‘It’s first thing in the morning and I haven’t had coffee, and it’s hot as hell, I’m wearing this thin white organic cotton nightgown, with peach and white embroidered vines on it, and I’m sweating and as I pump my breasts are bob bing crazily for all the world to see, the water finally goes down and I flush and the toilet fills up again with my horrible smelly poo, my shame.’ What does it mean to display the body like this: to let it sprawl and smear onto the page? It means being able to talk about power and vulnerability; it means being able to test abstract ideas on the proving ground of the actual. Barf Manifesto is, at heart, in form as well as content, an argument against generality, which is never truly universal and which always necessitates more or less ruthless omissions and excisions. Like Myles’s essay that provoked it (‘Everyday Barf’, 2007) and like The Argonauts, Barf Manifesto is ‘a manifesto of complexity, ambiguity, indeter minacy, layering, contradiction, blurring of boundaries’, which seeks to track ‘how the personal intersects content intersects form intersects politics’. The memoir is a morphing

What does it mean to display the

this: to let it sprawl and smear onto the page?

form and it seems to me that this particular approach represents a new development. If we’re at an intersectional moment, a mo ment of realizing that gender is complicated by race is complicated by sexuality is compli cated by class, then it’s perhaps not wholly surprising that current accounts of bodily experience should likewise be valuing com plexity over simplicity, contradiction over unidirectional truth.

David Wojnarowicz, Arthur Rimbaud in New York (diner), 1978–79. Courtesy P.P.O.W, New York One of the less palatable fruits of being both or neither or something else entirely is the endless, tiresome and some times violent boundary-policing it occasions. In The Argonauts, Nelson’s pregnant body and Dodge’s trans body repeatedly serve as lightning rods for prejudicial thinking—from

a patrician white guy shocked that Nelson might be capable of talking about art and cruelty while ‘with child’ to a bouncer at a burlesque show, unwilling to let the heroically queer space be polluted by the spectacle of a mother and baby. Excluded bodies are also front and centre in Trans (2015, Verso), Juliet Jacques’s memoir-cum-history, which in terlaces a nuanced account of trans politics with her own story of transitioning between genders. If Nelson wants to put bodies back into theory—revealing, for example, the patent absurdity of the transphobic philosophy dispensed by the likes of Slavoj Žižek and Jean Baudrillard when applied to actual humans living actual loving human lives—then what Jacques wants to do is put theory back into the body. She’s particular ly keen to find a way of complicating the

Left: Dodie Bellamy

Right: Maggie Nelson

omnipresent media narrative of trans people being trapped in the wrong body, with its reliance on shock reveals and its obsession with genitalia.

Jacques’s own account of transitioning has more in common with the work of Yishay Garbasz, one of the many artists she draws upon to contextualize and enrich her own experience. Garbasz used photography to document the incremental stages ofher shift between genders, so that even her surgery ‘did not appear abrupt or incongruous, but rather assimilated into the physical land scape that she presented’. How, considers Jacques, do you do the same with language? Specificity again: a textured litany of office jobs worked and football teams supported; the overarching message being that there is no one way to be trans, just as there is no one way to be pregnant or sick or anything else. The boundary-policing Jacques experi ences is physically violent, particularly during the early, non-passing stages of her jour ney. Men throw bottles at her in the street;

opportunistic and abusive strangers prop osition her in clubs. These scenes reminded me more than once of Close to the Knives (1991, Vintage), David Wojnarowicz’s searing memoir about abuse, aids, art-making and activism. Intersectionality avant la lettre, the message of Close to the Knives can be boiled down to its most famous sentence: ‘My rage is really about the fact that when I was told I’d contracted this virus, it didn’t take me long to realize i’d contracted a diseased society as well.’ Here, the body is ground for radical awakening. Memoir writers are often accused of narcissism or self-absorption, but using personal testimony for politi cal purposes is hardly new. Wojnarowicz’s all-caps howl is another version of the old feminist slogan ‘The Personal Is Political’, meaning that oppression is never abstract, but takes place in the realm of the physical, the realm of feeling, the domestic sphere. Feminist consciousness-raising groups were laboratories for participants to realize that what had previously seemed like dismally

David Wojnarowicz, Arthur Rimbaud in New York (diner), 1978–79

private inequities and miseries were actually shared; aids memoirs served as rallying cries for activism and social change. But the other lesson of the body is complexity. You can build consensus based on physical experi ence, but the body is troublesome, perpetual ly disruptive. I keep thinking of all the bodies in Bellamy’s account. A room of sick bodies, trying to police each other’s use of perfume and hair spray. (‘You’re giving me brain fog,’ the large-breasted woman replies.) Three horny bodies, in a motel room with two beds. Homeless bodies; bodies taking crack; body parts, stuffed into a suitcase. This is the trouble with identity, it won’t all hold togeth er. Even if you join a group, you can’t be cer tain that some unruly aspect of what Nelson calls ‘the snowball of the self’ won’t cause you later to be cast out. It isn’t hard to see why people might want identity set in stone, or to defend its outer borders. But isn’t it better, more ethical as well as pleasurable, to get stuck into the orgy of the specific? It certainly makes for thrilling writing: Nelson’s paragraphs vaulting topics, Bellamy’s stream of consciousness swerving through tone and thought. This is style in service to something larger: a political worldview profoundly in vested in diversity. ‘People are different from each other,’ Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick once said, and the task of language is to find a way of encompassing that, capturing every radiant minute of the turbulent realm that lies be tween birth and death.

Juliet JacquesApiary (by Morgan King)

I Love Dick by Chris Kraus

I first read I Love Dick a few years ago. What was it? I didn’t know exactly: some kind of cult book I’d heard of via whispers from the US, where it was published in 1997. Reader, I read it, and I still wasn’t sure. An autobiog raphy, a piece of fiction, a series of essays, a work of critical theory?

It tells the story of Chris, a 39-year-old “failed” video artist, married to Sylvère, a cultural critic more than a decade her senior. When the couple visit Sylvère’s friend, Dick, Chris conceives an unrequited passion for him, and her husband colludes with her

to play it out in love letters, which Sylvère reads, and sometimes co-writes, and which they mostly do not send. The letters pro liferate into autobiographical confessions, essays on artists, rants against the position of women in the art world.

The eponymous “Dick” is the British ac ademic Dick Hebdige. Sylvère is real, too: Kraus’s ex-husband, with whom she still runs Semiotext(e), a publisher of cultural theory, avant-garde fiction and essays by authors who, like Kraus, work at the intersection of writing and art, including Kathy Acker and

Joanna Walsh

This influential screwball tragedy set in the avant-garde art world is as fresh and passionate as ever

Chris Kraus

Gary Indiana.

I thought the book would be a terrifying feminist classic with a cover I might not want to be seen with on the tube. But guess what: I Love Dick is funny, very funny. Kraus’s development of her narrator persona in her subsequent novel, Torpor, has been compared to I Love Lucy; that would be accurate had Lucy been a cerebral sometime-topless danc er and adept survivor in the New York art world. Here, Kraus introduces her “Lonely Girl Phenomenology”: “I believed I was invent ing a new genre and it was secret because there was nobody to tell it to.” The book was published only a little past the heyday of critical theory, and Kraus was aware of how conceptualising and naming experience could validate it; she was also aware of the absur dity of this practice. In that spirit, I’m going to call ILD a screwball tragedy.

“It works in practice,” as the old post structuralist’s joke goes, “but will it work in theory?” In the book Sylvère and Chris have

grown apart, but “maintain their intimacy via deconstruction”, what Sylvère calls “the desire to fictionalise life”. There is a certain brand of self-flagellating confessional lit that is, it has recently been said, specifically female. An S&M aficionado, Kraus knows all about abjection, and she knows about the line between play and when it’s for real. “The game is real, or even better than real,” Chris tells Dick in her first letter, framing the book as a high-wire act of self-exposure, balanced with consummate art. “Dear Dick … I guess in a sense I’ve killed you,” Chris writes later, as her letters go beyond her own desires to become a kind of art project.

ILD is a joyful riposte to all those stories in which clever women fall victim to the pressures of convention—from The Yellow Wallpaper to The Bell Jar and beyond—and also to the countless books by men in which women are crushed by romantic encounters: from Madame Bovary to Anna Karenina to Laclos’s epistolatory Les Liaisons Dangereuses

and André Breton’s autofiction, Nadja Equally earnest and flip, ILD balances its narrator’s yearning with the surprising em powerment the performance of her abjection brings. By giving the tragic heroine an absurd

retrospective gratitude: without Kraus, we might not have had the philosophers in high heels of Zoe Pilger’s Eat My Heart Out, or Susana Medina’s Philosophical Toys. Without her challenge to what she called “the ‘seri ous’ contemporary hetero-male novel … a thinly veiled Story of Me”, Sheila Heti might never have asked How Should a Person Be?, and Ben Lerner might never have written Leaving the Atocha Station. A whole genera tion of writers owes her.

edge, Kraus is able to tackle some serious stuff. “I always believe that the rhetoric is part of a strategy,” as she told Lauren Elkin in an interview for the White Review.

What makes now the right moment to publish Kraus’s debut novel for the first time in the UK, after 18 years? There is a hint of

Do you have to read critical theory to get ILD? It may help, but perhaps no more than knowing about palaeontology will help you enjoy Bringing up Baby. You can get high on the book’s passion, its humour, on the cre ation of a still-fresh style that not only says new things about female experience, but is able simultaneously to comment, tongue-incheek, on how this experience has been writ ten, filmed and made into art. Kraus writes with an elegance that includes enough rough edges to make I Love Dick a game for real.

“Dear Dick … I guess in a sense I’ve killed you,” Chris writes later, as her letters go beyond her own desires to become a kind of art project.

Kathryn Hahn and Kevin Bacon in the 2016 television adaptation of I Love Dick

Art, sex, drugs and climate anxiety: Maggie Nelson’s search for freedom

In On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint, Nelson defends artistic indeterminacy against those who want to instrumentalise art and fix its meaning

Freedom, Maggie Nelson admits while intro ducing this quartet of extended essays, is a problematic word. In part that’s because it’s been co-opted by rightwingers—as fuck-you, neo-Confederate freedom in the author’s embattled United States—and in part be cause the left can’t agree on what it means. Personal freedom and collective freedom can seem antonymic (Hannah Arendt thought so; James Baldwin didn’t), and in 2021 free dom as a notion might feel spent after such lengthy struggles for it—freedom from rac ism, or sexism—haven’t achieved the desired results. Against all this, in four tracts that examine prismatic spaces where freedom might, if complicatedly, be possible—art, sex, drugs and, no, not rock ’n’ roll but climate anxiety—Nelson skews to nuanced, nonbinary thinking, and the conviction that freedom is

a process: that there is no liberatory moment but an ongoing, near-ambient movement towards. She seeks to demonstrate that, per Foucault, people are freer, or potentially freer, than they know; and that, per David Graeber, revolution lies in acting like you’re already free.

Her characteristic rhetorical move is to lay out a seemingly unbridgeable divide, two spaces of unfreedom, and find a midpoint at which some measure of liberation might flourish or, at least, be defended. ‘The Ballad of Sexual Optimism’ sets sex positivity—the contemporary injunction, underwritten by pop culture, to go out and ‘do the work of fucking’—against post-#MeToo attitudes, which don’t easily square with the former outlook, and in which sexual encounters are framed only in terms of either ‘sin, abuse,

Martin Herbert

violation, or trauma’. Nelson, while typically affirming the good in both sides’ arguments, finds that each stifles ‘female wayward ness, transgression, desire, and agency… expressions of female complexity’, and sexual experimentation per se, in which freedom might be pursued. Nelson, as detailed in her much-loved 2015 book of ‘autotheory’, The Argonauts, is the partner of gender-fluid art ist Harry Dodge (the current book is dedicated to their son).

Nelson is also a recovered alcoholic and a devotee of the drug memoir, and ‘Drug Fugue’ explores the paradoxes of drug writing—how the authors can seem to be writing about lib eration while describing imprisonment—and the difference between addiction memoirs by men and those by women (the former skew to notions of liberation, the latter to self-abase ment). From here, via a lengthy discussion of Paul B. Preciado’s melange of theory and drug diary, Testo Junkie (2008), Nelson arrives at

on climate change, Nelson doesn’t bottom out; instead, while raising a small child in a California ravaged by wildfires, she locates a modicum of mental space in the fact that there are wildly different predictions for how environmentally screwed we are, and thus ‘something’ is still up to us. (She also notes that much thoughtful writing on the subject comes from women of colour, who are used to the patient work of emancipation, rather than ‘doomer dudes’.)

freedom residing in the abyssal indefinable, plus the idea—returning to abasement—that ‘this feeling of the “I” gone missing… can also arrive in the state colloquially known as “bot toming out”’. In ‘Riding the Blinds’, her essay

In ‘Art Song’ Nelson, who teaches at CalArts, defends artistic indeterminacy and the right to say what you want, even if you upset some people, against those who want to instru mentalise art and fix its meaning, and those who—increasingly so over the past half-de cade—want it to be reparative, therapeutic, uncomplicated. Parsing the debates around flashpoint works by Dana Schutz and Sam Durant, and considering, circumspectly, the long tail of the ‘orthopaedic aesthetic’ by which art seeks to help the damaged or (in early-modernist art) numbed viewer, Nelson arrives at a different definition of ‘care’ visà-vis art: that protecting artistic freedom is also a form of care, and that being against ‘the homogenising logic of paranoia’ is quite opposed to art-as-caring. There would seem to be something a little dusty about art’s power lying in transgression—though I say that as a cis white male—but, here as else where, Nelson makes her case persuasively, marshalling a chorus of thinkers alongside her own experience. One model of freedom, On Freedom suggests, lies in choosing—and arguing for—one’s definition of freedom itself.

Nelson skews to nuanced, nonbinary thinking, and the conviction that freedom is a process: that there is no liberatory moment but an ongoing, near-ambient movement towards.

California wildfires, 2021

Dysfunctional Environments: the unsettling photography of Joanna Piotrowska

The celebrated Polish photographer’s new book explores the complex domestic spaces we inhabit, which are “often built on inequality and violence”

Belle Huton

Joanna Piotrowska’s photographs are often described as ‘unsettling’ or ‘uncanny’, even ‘disturbing’. The Polish image-maker, who is based in London, is known for her black and white works which mine themes like shelter, violence, domesticity and agency. Captured via shots of bodies or structures with a super-sharp focus, the subtext of such ideas makes for these feelings of un ease. Piotrowska’s work has been acclaimed since her graduation from London’s Royal College of Art in 2013, her photographs later appearing in MoMA’s annual Being: New

Photography show in 2018 and making up a solo exhibition at Tate Britain the following year. Now, Stable Vices is a title which brings together three of Piotrowska’s series, newly published by MACK.

The book’s title Stable Vices is taken from the concerning ways horses behave if left to their own devices in confined spaces, starved of exercise, attention and stimu lation. “Walking in circles, crib-biting, and weaving are all examples of the mal-effects our human-designed enclosures can have on non-human species,” Piotrowska writes

Joanna Piotrowska, Untitled 2015

over email. “The term is primarily used in an equine context but many other wild animals in captivity exhibit similar behaviours. It is only now that we talk about ‘dysfunctional environments’ rather than the dysfunctional behaviours which are in reality, a very nat ural response to oppression.” Looking at her photography through this lens of behavioural psychology, the complex threads that run through each series are more apparent. “I selected this term because I think it has a strong relationship to other themes in the book—our created physical environments, in the context of our domestic space but also the existing relationships and systems within which we function—often, built on inequality and violence.”

The third series featured in Stable Vices feels perhaps most explicitly linked to these ideas of confinement and human interaction – though each explores these subjects in some form. Piotrowska captures series of enclosures—stark and empty of life but crammed with things – which are clearly man-made for holding animals. They are the cages, boxes, pools and vitrines we are used to seeing at zoos, except, in Piotrowska’s images, there are no animals beyond the wire fences and glass windows. As Joanna Bednarek writes in an essay entitled Animals Beyond the Forest published in the book, the lack of life in these staged habitats is unnerving. “The crampedness of the space

is palpable: it is as if we were imprisoned, or at least confronted with the mechanism by which we create structures that imprison both humans and other animals … The pho tographs evoke an atmosphere of desolation: freedom and play seem far removed from the world they suggest.”

This suggestion of violence is echoed in Piotrowska’s untitled series which draws on women and self-defence, and appears first in Stable Vices. The series draws on illustrated self-defence manuals Piotrowska discovered, as well as the writings of Carol Gilligan, a longtime influence on her practice. (Gilligan’s work as a feminist and psychologist has an alysed the position of women in society and morality via influential books like A Different Voice.) “I had been very concerned about vulnerability and the position of women. The figures in self-defence manuals were obvi ously men,” Piotrowska told The Guardian in 2019 as her Tate Britain exhibition, All Our False Devices, was staged. “I wanted to start staging these positions with women in do mestic spaces. We need to defend ourselves and use our bodies as a weapon.” The result ing photographs are some of Piotrowska’s most commanding: various women are seen in poses, their bodies contorted, sometimes with an unknown man’s hands interfering somehow. Defending against an invisible op pressor and seeking protection also intersect in Shelter, Stable Vice’s second series: staged

Joanna Piotrowska, Untitled 2015

photographs depicting forts built up from soft furnishings and household objects—like the childhood game—in which the subjects then take shelter.

Piotrowska looks to choreographers, writ ers and filmmakers, finding that the likes of Sharon Eyal, Pina Bausch, Virginia Woolf, Margaret Atwood and Chantal Akerman in form her own practice. During the past year, when London has been in and out of Covid-19 lockdowns, she has dedicated time to ex ploring more work, especially films. “London was very apocalyptic (and inspiring),” she says. “Undistracted by crowds and noise and the constant sensory overload, the city was a complete metamorphosis. Everything was different, somehow slower and I immersed myself in a self-guided cinema programme—I watched 13 films by Eric Rohmer, most of the films by Cassavetes, very early Coppola mov ies, some Japanese classics, most of the films of Chantal Akerman and quite a lot from Italian neorealism. It was very intense and amazing to finally be able to watch all those films.” After more than a year of restrictions, Piotrowska’s photographs – and how they ex plore ideas of confinement, shelter, inequal ity and oppression—feel especially arresting and vital, in their uniquely unsettling ways.