A Beauteous Tree: Margaret Fuller's Femality | Curated by Jenessa Kenway

Eric LoPresti Sedan Crater/Lewisia as Lotus, 2015 Watercolor, pencil on paper 15 x 20 x 1 inches Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art Collection Gift of the artist James Gobel I Have Been This Way Before (Jeffrey Vallance), 2006 Acrylic felt, wool felt, yarn and acrylic on canvas 32 x 26 x 1.5 inches Las Vegas Art Museum Collection Gift of the artist I was thinking about Margaret Fuller’s concept of “femality” and how it’s filled with energy that pulses back and forth. This set of images by Eric LoPresti felt like a visualization of male and female energy blooming and sinking, perpetually moving back and forth in a cycle of renewal. The shallow dish of the crater is the concave of the pink waterlily’s convex.

James Gobel’s image feels similarly in flux. It is a dialectical image that refuses closure, moving between male and female, somehow both yet neither. Like an optical illusion, depending on the viewer it will lean more one way than the other. (JK)

The mannequins in Lolita Develay’s Secrets to Tell struck me as visual representations of the cyborgs made of quintessence that Harraway describes in her 1980 Cyborg Manifesto. Quintessence is described as “concentrated essence of substance,” “the most perfect embodiment of something.” Lacking definition and thus flaws, it transcends perfection. Harraway’s cyborg quintessence shares a kindred spirit with Woolf’s description of the incandescent mind. Develay’s beings both radiate and absorb the light of the space. Their clothing hangs upon them like arbitrary window dressing, bestowing genders.

Despite Fuller’s insistence upon mingling male and female, she also tells us in “Magnolia” that all the “secret powers are ‘mothers’” and that “man never creates, he only recombines the lines and colors of his own existence.”

This seems to downplay the importance of the masculine, relegating it to an organizational function. But perhaps her true purpose is demonstrating the ever-present feminine within the masculine. The experience of creating—a work of art, or, through childbirth, a human life—transforms the creator, connecting us with our feminine power. Lance L. Smith’s painting “When I’m with You” depicts their mother A Beauteous Tree: Margaret Fuller’s Femality Curated by Jenessa Kenway 3

“People are nowhere near so fluid, being both material and opaque. Cyborgs are ether, quintessence . . . Cyborgs might consider more seriously the partial, fluid, sometimes aspect of sex and sexual embodiment. Gender might not be global identity after all, even if it has profound historical breadth and depth.”

Donna Harraway, A Cyborg Manifesto

Lolita Develay Secrets to Tell, 2010 Oil on canvas Courtesy the artist The mannequins depicted in Develay’s painting struck me as visual representations of the cyborgs made of ether and quintessence that Harraway describes in her manifesto. Quintessence is a wholly new substance, set apart from the traditional four—a fifth element. Quintessence is ether, “the constituent matter of heavenly bodies”—starlight. It is described as “pure and concentrated essence of substance,” “the most perfect embodiment of something.” This perfect something is an ungendered, unquantifiable creative essence. Its inability to be labeled or pinned down by social identity preconditions allows quintessence to be perfect because it lacks definition and thus flaws. Haraway’s cyborg quintessence shares a kindred spirit with Virginia Woolf’s description of the incandescent androgynous mind in A Room of One’s Own. The slick chrome beings populating the painting radiate and seemingly absorb the light of the space. The gender of the clothing they wear hangs upon them like arbitrary window dressing. (JK) A Beauteous Tree: Margaret Fuller’s Femality Curated by Jenessa Kenway 7

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