Issue 14

The Issue 14 Collective

Collective: Lyn Blumenthal, Cynthia Carr, Sandy De Sando, Sue Heinemann, Elizabeth Hess, Alesia Kunz, Lucy R. Lippard

Design: Cynthia Carr

From the Issue 14 Collective

“When the age of mechanical reproduction separated art from its basis in cult, the semblance of its autonomy
disappeared forever.
-Walter Benjamin

From its inception, Heresies has solicited, encouraged, cajoled and proselytized for a “political” page art. Most issues of Heresies have included visual/verbal pieces that fit no other category. But we receive far less such work than we would like. Thus our decision to devote a whole issue to “women’s pages executed by artists who have not yet been seen in Heresies. We hope that by expanding our base we will also expand our audience and our content and give a sense of the immediacy in this new and developing medium.

Page art is quite simply the artist speaking for herself by invading a medium traditionally reserved for critical intervention and jargon. Page art might even be called self-determined advertising, a simultaneous criticism and appropriation of mass media, a grassroots counter to the dominant culture. Page art is a work of art made for a specific page and specific context, ideally to communicate a specific idea.

Page art is not a reproduction of work made for any other context. It incorporates the means of production into its reproductive potential. (The work here has an automatic audience of 8,000.) It tends to use drawing, photography and/or words in various combinations. It borrows from other disciplines, developing new visual/verbal forms to combat the isolation of the specialized mediums. Writers and artists are both crossing boundaries to make page art, often in collaboration.

Page art does not have to be “political” (i.e., socially concerned or involved from a Leftist viewpoint rather than maintaining the status quo), but it is an inherently political form. It shares much of its outreach energy with its sister, the street poster, which has proliferated in Lower Manhattan in the last few years, continuing a time-honored tradition of public speaking by artists through broadsides, leaflets, graffiti and “democracy walls.

Page art is an intimate medium. You can take it home with you, even to bed with you. It’s an instrument of visual/verbal seduction, the perfect way to make the personal political...and the political personal. Camera-ready art is rough-and-ready art—the raging page (though sometimes a new cage). A declaration of independence. It’s a way of turning over a new leaf, and another, and another.....

When artists’ books came out as a recognized phenomenon in the late 60s, a lot of us on the art Left had great hopes for them. We saw them as accessible, as a potential means of populist expansion and as an appropriately cheap, direct and intimate vehicle for social change. It seemed for a while as though page art could bypass the art market and therefore say all the things the system preferred not to have said. Printed art media propagated rapidly through the ’70s; thousands of artists books were published and occasionally art magazines encouraged independent project pages. Yet in 1982, though occasionally reviewed in the trade magazines, page art’s still not in the supermarket. Potential is still the only way to describe the role of page art in feminist progressive culture.

Why? It’s easy to blame it all on external factors, on the commodity system that discourages serious consideration of mass reproductive media, and that system’s effect on artists trying to scrape a living off it. But one of the reasons for page art’s slow start has been strictly internal. That is, the lack of intense political analysis from within the art community about the place and role of various kinds of art. It’s a cliche by now that the New York art world is obsessed with form and space to the exclusion of meaning. Feminism brought with it the revelation that one reason page art hadn’t moved further was because it provided only a new form. New content had not yet been poured into it. The potential for communication had not been realized.

Under scrutiny, the social expectations of art (those of both the specialized and general public) are integrally linked to our conditioned attitudes toward mass-produced and mass-distributed outreach art. The ideal vehicle for such a form is of course the alternative small press, collectively published magazines; so Heresies has something of a mission in this case. Community/political organizing and networking-the great feminst metaphor—are both extremely dependent on mass-produced communication, which is obviously where art comes in. It remains to be seen why more innovative artists, already committed to such activities, aren’t devoting themselves to unexpected and visually effective ways of getting their messages across.

Messages. Ah. We’ve been raised to think that forms or images must speak for themselves, that to demand a message from them is demeaning. You’ve probably heard the old purist saw: Wanna send a message? Call Western Union. ...But don’t make art. Yet all art of any kind, style, size and medium is on some level provocative and subversive. By making people see, it makes people think. Feminist culture or a culture of resistance to the status quo specifically informs, reforms, rejects, rehabilitates and rebels. It questions authority and exposes sacred cows. For better or worse, this is an area where artists, and especially women artists, feel at home, since artists are considered social outsiders even when they’re doing their best to belong. Our acting president has said, “The arts should concentrate on what they do best, and leave the broader social problems to others. So what is it art does best? Get used? Or get useful? Mass-produced art—pages, posters, postcards, broadsides—is seen in the art world as the cheap byproduct of the Real Thing, like most so-called “multiples really are because they serve exactly the same function as their more expensive counterparts. (It’s a truism of capitalism that if you give something away, nobody wants it. The more you charge, the more desirable it is. Valueless art becomes valuable if it conforms to the dominant value system.)

But is that attitude necessary? If a page of this issue were blown up into a huge painting, would its message clearer? Or dimmer? Is it true, as Adrian Piper has suggested, that “the more likely it is people will understand what you’re trying to convey, the less fashionable it is to try and convey it"?
Is the definition of Real Art really something that is incomprehensible, that communicates only indirectly, if at all?

An overlapping issue, crucial to page art, is that of “high and “low art, in this case not the usual distinction between paintings and crafts, but between “fine and commercial art. Maybe the difference between progressive page art and advertising (or propaganda from the oppositional and from the dominant culture) is the way the audience is selected. The more politically sophisticated artist considers the differences in her audiences and codes her work accordingly, so as to avoid condescension and to increase the possibility of exchange. Advertising selects an unthinking audience and tells it what to buy, without thinking. Progressive art tries to provoke an audience into perceiving and thinking
for itself. (An artist’s book by Don Celender called Opinions of Working People on Art includes interviews giving these definitions of art: “It brings us closer to what we really are." "It makes the world seem brighter." "It's fun to see what people are capable of producing. And even, surprisingly, "It has high social impact on a lot people.")

Audience is also an issue for Heresies. We hope our readers are as broad-based as the themes of our 14 issues and their editors and contributors. But we don’t get as much feedback as we’d like. We’ve included a blank page in this issue. We had two ideas about it. First, we thought it would be great if women made their own page art on it and sent it to us, both as feedback on the work in the issue and for possible inclusion in future issues. (We also thought we’d put it on the back of our subscription blank, so you and we could have both!) Then we realized it could also serve as a way of literally inserting one’s art into the magazine, seeing one’s own work in the media. Once that’s been done, every issue of Heresies #14 ironically becomes a unique item—through the mass-reproductive process.

Mass-reproduced art is a means to combat cultural exclusion. It is sometimes criticized for not being pretty enough. We hope this issue contradicts that idea, even if we can’t afford color. We see #14 as a kind of visual laboratory. If it works on a page of Heresies, it might work on the walls of your neighborhood, or on the page of a local newspaper. (There’s a history of artists using the mass media as unwilling host, such as Adrian Piper’s use of miniature posters in the Village Voice in the early ’70s to convey her rage about American racism.) “Graffiti, as one wall artist put it, “is the people's art. Artists “defacing” billboards and subway ads have taken up the cause. For better or worse, our society believes what it sees in print, in the media, on the billboards. Knowing this, the small press network has taken on the responsibility for seeing is believing from a different viewpoint. All oppositional art is graffiti to some extent, scrawled across the surfaces of society as resistance to oppression, exploitation and misrepresentation, as a way of naming our own selves, of forging an identity apart from that imposed
on us. That’s what feminism is all about.