Unapologeticcommunicationplay posters by (both laughing) Collaborative

Introduction

UNAPOLOGETICCOMMUNICATIONPLAY posters, hand-drawn by (both laughing) Collaborative, play with language, humour, colour and layout, using quotes from artists, writers and theorists as well as using their own words. The posters deliberately make a non-hierarchical statement about judgements on whose voices are the most important. This methodology alludes to the margin references in Roland Barthes A Lover’s Discourse, repurposed by Maggie Nelson in The Argonauts, backing up personal experience with theory from many different sources.

The posters can be read as individual works but also work as a visual essay about what it is to be a feminist and to make feminist art.

(both laughing) Collaborative 2023

Contents:

Page 3: Introduction

Page 5: Contents

Page 6: Humour

Page 16: Female Wisdom

Page 22: Feminism and Difficulty

Page 26: Houseworkwork

Page 32: Uncertainty

Page 38: Language and Difficulty

Page 52: Anger and Change

Page 64: Everything, Everything

Page 67: (both laughing) Collaborative

Page 68: Bibliography

BOTH LAUGHING

A quote from the transcripts of (both laughing)’s original interviews made with dust from a hoover bag. They found themselves laughing a lot during their discussions about drawing. Their remit is to make serious points through humour.

hoover dirt and sharpie on paper 594mm x 841mm

(DON’T) BE MORE PENIS

This is one of (both laughing)’s maxims, that in order to be taken seriously, it should not be necessary to appropriate the stereotypical behaviour of men. Helen Lewis makes the point in her book Difficult Women: “We are told that we say sorry too much, for example, and that this undermines our authority. No one asks if perhaps men don’t say sorry enough”. Mary Ann Sieghart, in her book The Authority Gap, agrees: “Maybe, instead of sending women on assertiveness training courses, we should send men on humility and bullshit-avoidance courses, and the authority gap might be better addressed”.

ink, sharpie and gesso on paper 594mm x 841mm

SO GOOD YOU WOULD NEVER HAVE KNOWN IT WAS DONE BY A WOMAN

In The History of Art Without Men, Katy Hessel points out that German tutor Hans Hoffman ‘famously said’ about Lee Krasner’s work “her work is so good, you would never have known it was done by a woman”. (both laughing) would like to think that this is an approach relegated to our distant past, however Sieghart writes that this attitude still persists: “Men have also been brought up to believe, on average, that they are cleverer than women, and that men can be brilliant, while women are just diligent”.

ink, sharpie and glitter on paper 594mm x 841mm

MEN EXPLAIN THINGS TO ME

This is a quote from Rebecca Solnit’s book of essays, Men Explain Things to Me. She continues: “... whether or not they know what they’re talking about”. She wrote this essay after a man explained her own book to her, not realising that she was the author. After leaving the meeting with a friend she says: “Being women, we were politely out of earshot before we started laughing, and we’ve never really stopped”.

graphite and collage on paper 594mm x 841mm

YOU’VE GOT SOME BALLS

A ubiquitous quote (EVB standing in for everybody), about the link between having testicles and being brave. (both laughing) much prefer actor Betty White’s take quoted in Amanda Montell’s book Wordslut: “Why do people say, ‘Grow some balls’? Balls are weak and sensitive. If you really wanna be tough, grow a vagina. Those things really take a pounding!”. (both laughing) argue that language does matter and can be used even in the most innocuous ways to assert power and control.

gesso and collage on paper 594mm x 841mm

IN OTHER WORDS, CREATE A MAGICAL WORLD

Far from serving the patriarchy, Valerie Solanas suggested in her book Scum Manifesto that “In actual fact, the female function is to explore, discover, invent, solve problems, crack jokes, make music – all with love. In other words, create a magical world”. This is a maxim that (both laughing) have tried to adhere to when making all their artwork, and in fact they argue that creating magical worlds does not just have to be a ‘female’ function, but one that is open to all.

ink and collage on paper 594mm x 841mm

SHE’S GOT EVERYTHING SHE NEEDS, SHE’S AN ARTIST

A lyric from Bob Dylan’s song She Belongs To Me. This is a song about a strong women yet Dylan still asserts ownership in the title...

ink and sharpie on paper 594mm x 841mm

INTO THE SPACE SHIP GRANNY

This is a quote taken from Ursula K Le Guin’s essay Space Crone concerning who on earth would be the best fit to represent humanity for an alien species. Le Guin argues the case for a seventy-year-old woman (as do (both laughing)). Writing about influences on artists, Rebecca Solnit picks up on this idea: “Everyone is influenced by those things that precede formal education, that come out of the blue and out of everyday life. Those excluded influences I call the grandmothers”.

Feminism and Difficulty

SOMETIMES IT’S HARD TO BE A WOMAN

Tammy Wynette sings this lyric as part of the song Stand By Your Man. Helen Lewis writes: “We are still paid less. We still do more unpaid labour. We are still raped and murdered and abused by violent men. We are still taught to hate our bodies. We still die because research into sleeping pills and seat belts doesn’t include us. We are still under-represented in politics. We still only make up a third of speaking characters in Hollywood films”. However, the patriarchy is bad for everyone – equality is good for us all.

sharpie and collage on paper 594mm x 841mm

OOH, IT’S HARD ON THE MAN

This is a lyric from Kate Bush’s song This Woman’s Work. Rather than being anti-men, feminism is all about equality. In her essay, We Should All Be Feminists, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie points out: “We do a great disservice to boys in how we raise them. We stifle the humanity of boys. We define masculinity in a very narrow way. Masculinity is a hard, small cage, and we put boys inside this cage”.

gesso on paper 594mm x 841mm

GET YOUR SHAME OUT

This is a quote from artist Vanessa Baird, who makes drawings about her home life, caring for her elderly mother and her two daughters. Housework is usually presented as something so taken for granted that it has very little value in our society and it is very rare that work is made about it. Baird’s motto is to get it all out there and this is backed by Maggie Nelson, who writes about ‘honesty’ as the ‘antidote to shame’. ink and sharpie on paper 594mm x 841mm

DIRT EXISTS IN THE EYE OF THE BEHOLDER

In her book, Purity and Danger, anthropologist Mary Douglas writes: “There is no such thing as absolute dirt: it exists in the eye of the beholder. If we shun dirt, it is not because of craven fear, still less dread of holy terror. Dirt offends against order. Eliminating it is not a negative movement, but a positive effort to organise the environment”. Helen Lewis backs this up: “If you’re trapped as a housewife, you begin to take pride in how shiny your taps are, castigate other women whose taps are not sufficiently shiny, and refuse to contemplate a world in which shiny taps are not the best measure of your worth as a human being. You do not question why, if shiny taps are so important, you’re not being paid to clean them”. (both laughing) apply this to their own housework policies – and do as little as possible.

IS IT BIN DAY?

This is a quote from one of (both laughing)’s collection of badges. This phrase can be looked at in a variety of ways – apart from whose responsibility it is to remember to put the bins out, and which ones, it also questions whether it is time to bin traditional ideas around gender responsibilities and cultural roles in a wider sense. In her book Hysterical, Pragya Agarwal writes about not just the physical load that women carry out in the domestic domain, but also the mental load and the toll it takes on them.

Even not getting raped seems to be the responsibility of women. Rebecca Solnit alludes to:“‘Top tips to end rape’ offers advice to men, for example: ‘Carry a whistle! If you are worried you might assault someone ‘by accident’ you can hand it to the person you are with, so they can call for help’.” She continues: “While funny, the piece points out something terrible: the usual guidelines in such situations put the full burden on prevention on potential victims, treating the violence as given. There’s no good reason (and many bad reasons) colleges spend more time telling women how to survive predators than telling the other half of their students not to be predators.”

collage on cardboard 594mm x 841mm

Uncertainty

IS THIS WHAT I AM MAKING?

This is a question posited by (both laughing) and other artists frequently. It is a question about uncertainty and the freedom to not know, both when making artwork, and in life. Rebecca Solnit writes about Virginia Woolf’s irreductability and her refusal to pigeonhole. There is a power in trusting to intuition. Rachel Jones writes in her essay On the Value of Not Knowing: Wonder, Beginning Again and Letting Be: “Yet without the risk of failure, of getting lost or ‘being adrift’, there is no real openness to the unknown, to the new thoughts that might emerge from the as yet unknown”.

ink and sharpie on paper 594mm x 841mm

MARX! NIETZSCHE! FREUD! *NB PHILOSOPHISED AND THEORISED FROM THEIR OWN EXPERIENCE

Women are often criticised for writing/creating from a subjective, personal point of view. Jennifer Doyle, in her book, Hold It Against Me : Difficulty and Emotion in Contemporary Art, writes that critical thought is assumed to displace emotion. In Autotheory as Feminist Practice in Art, Writing and Criticism, Lauren Fournier points out that feminist artists (and writers) “continually face the charge of narcissism when they incorporate themselves in direct ways into their work”. Maggie Nelson argues that some of the white, male ‘big hitters’ of the patriarchy do the same thing without the same scrutiny or accusations as their female counterparts.

ink, gesso, sharpie and collage on paper 594mm x 841mm

THE DIAGRAM DOES NOT CONSIDER ITS ERRORS

In her book Faux Pas, artist Amy Sillman writes about the difficulty inherent in imagining that something is wholly knowable. “The diagram’s best form, painting’s best aspect, seemed to lie in its unknowns, its silence, its way of not working out, or being at risk, a matter of fate, ruin, or possible resuscitation. So it seemed like the very idea of knowing was where the problem lay, maybe.” Certainty, objectivity and perfection are (perhaps) never really possible.

ink, sharpie and collage on paper 594mm x 841mm

Language and Difficulty

NOTHING IS NOT CONNECTED

Amy Sillman asserts that everything is related to everything else. Things do not have to be big and important (objective) ideas in order to have meaning and status. In her book Exposure, Olivia Sudjic writes: “By starting from small details, details that overlap with one’s life, ideas, a whole world can be examined without presuming to have cracked universal mysteries. And yet it’s maddening how it’s both presumptuous for a woman to write beyond her limits (invariably those of her own experience) and equally presumptuous to write about or from that experience”.

collage on paper 594mm x 841mm

A LITTLE BIT POSITIVE

There is a power in small things and gestures. Uncertainty can be a positive situation to be in. In On Not Knowing: How Artists Think, Fortnum and Fisher write: “Where knowledge is positive, the unknown is often simply its opposite: it is uncertain, invisible, incomprehensible. Not knowing represents a lack or absence, inadequacy to be overcome”. However, there is a way to look at this unknown in a positive light: “sought, explored and savoured; where failure, boredom, frustration and getting lost are constructively deployed alongside wonder, secrets and play.”

wax, ink and collage on paper 594mm x 841mm

NOTHING DOESN’T NOT REQUIRE ATTENTION

This is a quote from artist Wolfgang Tillmans, mentioned in Olivia Laing’s collected art criticism book Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency. It’s always good to notice what is missing. (See also Paul Newman in Cool Hand Luke: ‘Sometimes nothing can be a real cool hand’).

ink and sharpie on paper 594mm x 841mm

PAST THE KNOWN AND EVEN THE UNKNOWN, INTO THE MURKIER AREA OF THE UNKNOWABLE

Amy Sillman puts forward the position that the unknowns, and unknowables are desirable places for artists to explore. Art writer Emma Cocker agrees, writing in Tactics For Not Knowing: Preparing for the Unexpected: “Not knowing is an active space within practice, wherein an artist hopes for an encounter with something new or unfamiliar, unrecognizable or unknown. However, within artistic practice, the possibility of producing something new is not always about the conversion of the not known towards new knowledge, but rather involves the aspiration to retain something of the unknown within what is produced.”

ink, sharpie and collage on paper 594mm x 841mm

CONFUSION IS A WORD WORDS ARE OUR CONFUSION

This is a quote from philosopher, poet and transdisciplinary artist Madeline Gins in her 1969 essay Word Rain. Are words enough to express the inexpressible?

ink and sharpie on paper 594mm x 841mm

DO YOU MAKE A LIVING FROM IT?

(both laughing) and many other creatives are often asked this question the first time they are introduced as artists. The poster is a way to ask questions about success – is it all about money? Does making money from something necessarily mean it is successful? Olivia Laing quotes novelist, Ali Smith: “Art is one of the prime ways we have of opening ourselves and going beyond ourselves. That’s what art is, it’s the product of the human being in the world and imagination, all coming together”. The appropriate question should not be about its commercial value, but rather: WHAT DOES YOUR ART DO?

ink and sharpie on paper 594mm x 841mm

WHAT’S LOVE GOT TO DO WITH IT?

This is a song about domestic violence against women, performed by Tina Turner. Pragya Agarwal draws attention to the UN report that found that “736 million women, almost 1 in 3, have been subject to intimate partner violence, non-partner sexual violence, or both at least once in their life.”

Rebecca Solnit argues that if we were to talk more about masculinity, male roles, or the patriarchy it would be easier to make changes to that statistic: “It’s not that I want to pick on men. I just think that if we noticed that women are, on the whole, radically less violent, we might be able to theorize where violence comes from and what we can do about it a lot more productively”.

flowers, plastic and spray paint 594mm x 841mm

fake

Anger and Change

I AM ANGRY WE SHOULD ALL BE ANGRY

This is a quote from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s book We Should All Be Feminists, in which she makes the argument that we should raise children differently in order to tackle the inherent sexism that still exists. It’s not just a problem for women and girls but for the whole of society.

ink on paper 594mm x 841mm

ELAINE, LET’S GET THE HELL OUT OF HERE

An anecdote concerning Abstract Expressionist artists Joan Mitchell and Elaine de Kooning recounted in an essay by Helen Molesworth: at an art opening a man went up to the two artists and asked “What do you women artists think? “Joan grabbed Elaine’s arm and said “Elaine, let’s get the hell out of here”. Of course – all women must think exactly the same and are not given the same agency as artists (men) to have their own opinions. The poster makes reference to the difficulty of thinking about ‘women artists’, who have been overlooked, but do not want to be referred to as ‘women artists’, which immediately puts them into a category of ‘not quite artists’ but a potentially less important, sub-section of artists. Of course, this was a while ago – but as Sieghart writes: “Women still have a very long way to go – and men still have a very long way to fall – before we get anywhere near equality”.

VALERIE WAS FUMING

This is a quote from Avital Ronell’s introduction to Valerie Solanas’s Scum Manifesto, a scathing (and very angry) essay about everyone’s culpability of the perpetuation of the patriarchy. She felt overlooked by the world she inhabited and ended up going mad and shooting Andy Warhol. This was in the 1980s, but, as Sieghart points out : “It’s extraordinary, and depressing, that – even in the twenty-first century – people still find it hard to believe that women can be exceptional”.

ink and sharpie on paper 594mm x 841mm

HURT PEOPLE HURT PEOPLE

A lyric from Loyle Carner’s song HGU – a song about forgiveness and understanding – even to the people who have hurt us the most.

ink and collage on paper 594mm x 841mm

LET’S NOT GET HYSTERICAL

A phrase often used to belittle women – (TP standing in for The Patriarchy), reminiscent of David Cameron’s ‘calm down, dear’ and countless other instances where emotion is pitted against seriousness and used as a power play to silence the voices of the underrepresented. Pragya Agarwal writes of the gendered way in which the word ‘hysteria’ is used: “A complex system of cultural and social practices through history has led to these dualities of men/women, rationality/emotionality being embedded as norms. This proclivity for binary thinking has also led to a tendency to believe that there are some innate emotional differences between all women and all men: that men are rational, and women are not. That women are emotional, and men are not.”

Coloured pencil and graphite on paper 594mm x 841mm

AND WE RELY ON EACH OTHER AH AH

A lyric sung by Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers in the song Islands in the Stream. Helen Lewis writes about society’s reliance on the unpaid labour of women: “Women’s unpaid work is work that society depends on, and it is work from which society as a whole benefits ... The unpaid work that women do isn’t simply a matter of ‘choice’. It is built into the system we have created – and it could just as easily be built out of it.” Caring for each other matters and is an essential part of life.

ink and sharpie on paper 594mm x 841mm

IS THIS FEMALE FEMALE

Is this female female, began with a quote from Amy Sillman, who asks the question when writing about Rachel Harrison’s paintings: “What isn’t seen is equal to what is seen. Is this female?”. (both laughing) subverted Sillman’s question in order to ask the question ‘is it okay to ask this question?’. Doubling up the word female and leaving off the question mark left the work open to many interpretations. The words simultaneously refer to binary notions of male and femaleness and what they actually mean, while also thinking of the difficulties around the trans debate and sport, and which colours are traditionally seen as masculine and feminine. Leaving off the question mark was a nod to the difficulty of answering the question, or questions thrown up in the poster. The asking of the questions is the important thing. Grey areas are important. Understanding is important, but coming up with a definite solution that would universally suit everyone is impossible. Helen Lewis writes of the trickiness of pigeonholing: “The criticism reflects a desperate desire to pretend that thorny issues are actually straightforward. No more flawed humans struggling inside vast, complicated systems: there are good guys and bad guys, and it’s easy to tell which is which. This approach is pathetic and childish, and it should be resisted”.

Photograph: Hatty Frances Bell Houseworkwork 2023

Words: Emily Lucas

Book design: Nick Grellier

Photography: Stephen Lenthall at Article Studio

All artwork © (both laughing) Collaborative (Emily Lucas & Nick Grellier) 2023

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photographing, recording or information storage and retrieval, without prior permission in writing from the artists.

(both laughing) Collaborative

(both laughing) Collaborative artists, Emily Lucas and Nick Grellier, have been making work together since Spring 2022 after many conversations around their individual autobiographical drawing practices. They make artwork using low-value, lo-fi materials and objects from around the home in order to tackle the problem of emotion versus seriousness and other hierarchies, both in the artworld and wider society. Their remit is to generate new ways to talk, write and think about drawing and other art practices. They are developing a manifesto for drawing as a way to embrace mistakes, test out new ideas and acknowledge non-binary viewpoints and grey areas, giving value to the overlooked.

(both laughing) Collaborative’s work is held in both private and public collections including Tate Archives and the Royal Academy Print Collection.

www.bothlaughingcollaborative.com

Bibliography

Books:

Adiche, Chimamanda Ngozi (2014) We Should All Be Feminists, London: Fourth Estate.

Agarwal, Pragya (2022) Hysterical: Exploding the Myth of Gendered Emotions, Edinburgh: Canongate Books.

Baird, Vanessa (2021) If Ever There Was an End That Had No Beginning, London: Drawing Room.

Barthes, Roland (2002) A Lover’s Discourse, London: Vintage.

Beard, Mary (2017) Women and Power: A Manifesto, London: Profile Books.

Cocker, Emma (2013) Tactics For Not Knowing: Preparing for the Unexpected. In: Fisher, Elizabeth and Fortnum, Rebecca (2013) On Not Knowing: How Artists Think, London: Black Dog Publishing, pp 126-135.

Douglas, Mary (1966) Purity and Danger, Abingdon: Routledge.

Doyle, Jennifer (2013) Hold it Against Me: Difficulty and Emotion in Contemporary Art, Durham and London: Duke University Press.

Fisher, Elizabeth and Fortnum, Rebecca (2013) On Not Knowing: How Artists Think, London: Black Dog Publishing.

Fournier, Lauren (2021) Autotheory as Feminist Practice in Art, Writing and Criticism, Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT.

Gins, Madeline (1969) Word Rain. In: Lucy Ives (2020) The Saddest Thing Is I Have Had To Use Words: A Madeline Gins Reader, New York: Siglio Press.

Hessel, Katie (2022) The Story of Art Without Men, London: Hutchinson Heinemann.

Jones, Rachel (2013) On the Value of Not Knowing: Wonder, Beginning Again and Letting Be. In: Fisher, Elizabeth and Fortnum, Rebecca (2013) On Not Knowing: How Artists Think, London: Black Dog Publishing, pp 16-31.

Laing, Olivia (2020) Funny Weather: Art In An Emergency, London: Picador.

Laing, Olivia (2021) Freedom, London: Picador.

Le Guin, Ursula K (1976) Space Crone. In: Le Guin, Ursula K (1989) Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places, New York: Grove Press.

Lewis, Helen (2021) Difficult Women: A History of Feminism in 11 Fights, London: Vintage.

Molesworth, Helen (2007) Painting with Ambivalence, in Butler, Cornelia (2007) Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution, Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, pp.428-439.

Montell, Amanda (2019) Wordslut, New York: Harper Collins.

Nelson, Maggie (2015) The Argonauts, London: Melville House.

Sieghart, Mary Ann (2021) The Authority Gap: Why Women are Still Taken Less Seriously Than Men, and What We Can Do About It, London: Penguin.

Sillman, Amy (2020) Faux Pas: Selected Writings and Drawings, Paris: After 8 Books.

Solanas, Valerie (2015) Scum Manifesto, London: Verso.

Solnit, Rebecca (2014) Men Explain Things to Me and Other Essays, London: Granta.

Sudjic, Olivia (2018) Exposure, London: Peninsula Press.

Music:

HGU (2022) Performed and written by Loyle Carner, Zento.

Islands in the Stream (1983) Performed by Dolly Parton and Kenny Rodgers, written by The Bee Gees.

She Belongs to Me (1965) Performed and written by Bob Dylan.

Sometimes It’s Hard to be a Woman (1968) Performed by Tammy Wynette, written by Tammy Wynette, Billy Sherrill.

This Woman’s Work (1988) Performed and written by Kate Bush

What’s Love Got to do With It? (1984) Performed by Tina Turner, written by Graham Lyle, Terry Britten

Film: Cool Hand Luke