Woman's Reappearance. Rethinking the Archive in Contemporary Art - Feminist Perspectives

105 woman’s reappearance:rethinking the archive incontemporary art—feministperspectives

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Giovanna Zapperi

abstractRecent debates in the field of contemporary art have underlined the political importance

of creative reworkings of the past, especially for those subjects that have been tradi-

tionally marginalised. A feminist perspective has been nevertheless quite absent from

such debates. This article addresses feminist uses of archival documents in the visual

arts through the analysis of three works produced in the past two decades: The Fae

Richard’s Photo Archive (1997) by Zoe Leonard and Cheryl Dunye, Some Chance

Operations (1998) by Renee Green and Queen of the Artists’ Studios (2004–2007) byAndrea Geyer. These works share an interest for women’s histories and representations

by composing a series of documents (both factual and fictive) into complex narratives

where history and subjectivity intersect.

keywordsarchive; feminist genealogies; women’s history; visual arts

feminist review 105 2013

(21–47) © 2013 Feminist Review. 0141-7789/13 www.feminist-review.com

How can a relationship with the past exist in which memory functions as an active process,

allowing continual reconsideration, rather than as a form of entombment, to which archives

and museums are sometimes compared? (Green, 2006b: 54)

introduction

History—considered as a sum of texts, practices, enunciations and writings—hastoo often marginalised women. This essay looks at this simple assumption througha discussion of three artworks produced in the last two decades. These artworksraise a number of questions concerning women’s history and its representation,primarily in aesthetic and experimental ways. They make use of archival documentsas visual matter, and locate themselves in a liminal space between therepresentation and production of the past, between the factual and the fictive,the private and the public, the objective and the subjective. In their ambivalence,they participate in the critique of truth and objectivity prompted by feminist andpost-colonial revisions of knowledge.

The use of archival material—including found footage, textual and visualdocuments, and sound assembled through montage—now has a long history, bothin the visual arts and in experimental or avant-garde film, where the creative workof memory through recollection, retrieval and mourning has been widely explored(Russell, 1997; Skoller, 2005). However, it has acquired a specific relevance for thevisual arts at a time marked by the unprecedented dissemination of imagesthrough digital media.

The ‘documentary turn’, promoted by the Documenta 11 exhibition curated byOkwui Enwezor in 2002, describes a number of practices that use ‘the tool of thedocumentary and the function of the archive as procedures for inducting new flowsand transactions between images, texts, narratives, documents, statements,events, communities, institutions, audiences’ (Enwezor, 2009: 101). According toEnwezor, as the pre-eminent forms of archival material, photography and film areprivileged media for the investigation of the archive in the visual arts. Theircapacity to establish the direct relationship between time and event demonstratestheir imbrication with issues of memory, history and identity (Enwezor, 2008:11–13).

Critical discussions of what has been defined as an ‘archival impulse’ incontemporary art (Foster, 2004) have examined these practices from a number ofpoints of view: in particular, the emergence of the new figure of the ‘artistas historian’ (Godfrey, 2007); the changing media and technological environ-ment (Spieker, 2008); and questions of authority and authenticity in theproduction of historical narratives (Enwezor, 2009). However, although thesewritings sometimes discuss works that deal with gender, little attention has beengiven to feminist perspectives. In what follows I will study three artworks that

feminist review 105 2013 woman’s reappearance22

question the significance of archival research for feminists while at the same timeproducing feminist archives themselves. My intention is to explore the ways in whichvisual arts are able to articulate the relationship between memory and temporality,and to point out art’s significance for feminist historiography. Moreover, theentwining of gender, race and sexuality will also emerge in my discussion as acrucial concern.

My analysis will focus on works by Zoe Leonard and Cheryl Dunye, Renée Green, andAndrea Geyer that are concerned with feminist rewritings of history, and thatreflect upon what I tentatively call ‘feminist time’.1 With this term I intend todescribe a notion of temporality that comprises returns, accelerations anddiscontinuities, where the subjective and collective dimensions are related to anumber of historical, social and cultural conditions. Such a notion of time might bea useful tool with which to interrogate the ways in which our perception ofhistorical time is inextricably bound to gender.

My reading of the artworks that form the core of this paper will focus on theirefforts to unveil repressed histories in ways that are both critical and formallyexperimental. Each work is based on the archival reconstruction of a woman’slife through a combination of historical investigations and fictional narratives.Despite their focus on a single woman, none of these works is a biography:the documents are edited and assembled in order to shape a series of possiblenarratives, and the archival fragments emerge as traces of forgotten stories.Through the process of montage, these artists reconsider the role of sexualdifference in historical narratives, while excavating histories marked by differencesinscribed into gender, sexuality and race. Time and history intersect: since theyinterrogate the process of memory, these works ponder the relationship betweenthe present and an imagined past. Their methods and tools share with feministand queer historiography a concern to uncover that which has been overlookedor repressed, as well as to point out the economy of visibility on which thearchive is predicated. In a similar way, these works are investigations intothe formation of historical knowledge, but their uses of the archive asvisual matter also open up the possibility of imagining a feminist temporality(Figures 1 and 2).

Feminist and queer scholars have considered the archive from a variety ofperspectives, investigating archival research from the point of view of thehistorian’s (gendered) subjectivity. The archive has been explored in relation toits ambivalence for women, as a site where women’s agency is rendered both visibleand invisible (Farge, 1989), or as a gendered space where the private and thepublic are conflated, especially during research on women’s experiences in colonialand post-colonial contexts (Burton, 2003). Analysis specifically dedicated to thearchive in connection with creative practices and the visual arts has underlined thetransformative potential of archival recollections for queer elaborations of memory

1 Needless to say,feminist approaches toarchival materials incontemporary art have notbeen limited to theseartists. Other examplesinclude MarysiaLewandowska’s Women’sAudio Archive, http://www.marysialewandowska.com/waa/, and PaulineBoudry and RenateLorenz’s queer archeology,for instance in thework Salomania,http://www.boudry-lorenz.de/salomania/,last accessed 5 August2013.

Giovanna Zapperi feminist review 105 2013 23

Figure 1 Zoe Leonard, The Fae Richards Photo Archive, 1993–1996. Created for Cheryl Dunye’s film ‘TheWatermelon Woman’ (1996). Seventy-eight black and white and four colour photographs and notebook of typedtext, installation view, Whitney Museum of American Art, 1997 Biennial, NYC.

Figure 2 Zoe Leonard, The Fae Richards Photo Archive, 1993–1996. Created for Cheryl Dunye’s film ‘TheWatermelon Woman’ (1996). Seventy-eight black and white and four colour photographs and notebook of typedtext, installation view, Whitney Museum of American Art, 1997 Biennial, NYC.


and trauma (Cvetkovich, 2003), as well as the opportunity to rethink the museumas a feminist-virtual archive where representation, modernity and femininityintersect (Pollock, 2007).

Despite its evident connection with these scholarly works, this paper takes adifferent path. It seeks to interrogate the archival document as visual andhistorical material, trying to look at the ways in which feminist artists haveelaborated the entanglement between a document’s historicity and its imaginarypotential. Woman’s reappearance across documentary reconstructions reminds usof the constitutive relationship between time and the image: it is when it isvisualised that the past becomes tangible and recognisable.2 To a certain extent,the writing of history always implies the act of seeing: the works I discuss in thispaper describe possible ways to rethink women’s histories through the use ofimages. Their operative mode is based on a desire to think the present through thepast, to address time and history from a perspective that is both subjective andcritical.

feminist time

If we consider that histories intersect in archives in ways that can be fragmentaryand contradictory, how can we approach single characters through discontinuousnarratives? Is it possible (and if so, how) to reconstruct a woman’s trajectory whenwe know that it has already vanished in a complex intermingling of events, narra-tives and people? In a recent essay, Pollock has observed that feminist temporalityin the writing of art history might take inspiration from Walter Benjamin’s notion ofthe Jetztzeit (‘now-moment’), a sort of retroactive, anachronical gaze that refusescontinuity in order to ‘bring a formerly indecipherable past into view andrecognition’ (2009: 325). According to Benjamin, images of the past only existwithin a present perspective that is able to recognise them. The present gaze is ableto fix the past of the image, to make it exist: ‘For every image of the past that isnot recognized by the present as one of its concern threatens to disappearirretrievably’ (Benjamin, 1968: 255).

This distorted historical view might be able to reveal meaningful aspects thatinclude culture, subjectivity, history and struggles through aesthetic practices.Pollock suggests that such a history might take the form of an elliptical traverse oftime, like ‘a criss-crossing, backward and forward, as well as a distorted, circlingmovement across the terrain of aesthetic practices’ (2009: 324). The point is notjust to add names to an already constituted history, nor to propose alternativeviews of it, but to uncover genealogies that suddenly become visible in a givenhistorical time and context. The invisibility of women from the past can turn intovisibility under specific historical, cultural and subjective conditions.

2 Historians haveunderlined the structuralrelationship between thewriting of history and theact of seeing. As Hartogpoints out, rhetoricalstrategies in historicalaccounts have tendedsince antiquity to turn thereader into a spectator, asif history were happeningin the present (2007: 181).


In this perspective, a feminist temporality would be an anachronical one,consisting, as Loraux puts it, of making productive the clash between the present,which always orients the gaze of the historian, and the past, which can open newperspectives on the present (1993: 28). Both the present and the past are thus heldin suspension. Fractures and discontinuities (often erased by historiography, butconstitutive of historical temporality) come to the fore, and new meanings becomevisible. In Loraux’s terms, an anachronical procedure in historical research is asnecessary as it is challenging: the historian must consciously decide to pose a setof questions to an epoch that did not formulate them, or at least not in the sameway. This ‘controlled anachronism’ does not imply that the past foreshadows thefuture, but it challenges the very notion of time as an uninterrupted continuum,along with the position of the historian as disinterested and objective. The point isnot to learn lessons from or to experience the past, but more importantly toquestion the chronological time of history, with all its repetitions and disconti-nuities (ibid.: 36).

In her discussion of Loraux’s notion of ‘controlled anachronism’, Wahnich draws ananalogy with Benjamin’s understanding of the present as the only time of thepolitical, when the relationship between past and present ceases to resemble a‘positive automaton’ and becomes the substance of political knowledge (2000:224). In this respect, the historian who is willing to accept a certain anachronismwhile relating to the past must also be willing to be situated within her ownemotions, intuitions and subjectivity. These are also significant elements in theworks discussed here, in which the artists’ imagination and subjectivities are notobstacles, but rather are constitutive elements of a knowledge production that isalso political (Figure 3).

In her reflections on feminist temporality, Pollock refers to the work of thehistorian and the curator. A similar set of questions might be posed in order toinvestigate what happens when the process of reconfiguring historical time is at thecore of an artwork. Fictional narratives play a crucial part in how such artworksappropriate the historian’s methods and tools, but the search for historical truth isalways held in suspension. In mixing fact and fiction, representation and desire,these artists experiment with the possibility of an elliptical temporality thatengages sexual difference and a present-feminist desire for different writings ofhistory. What is at stake in these works is not just the reconstruction of a repressedhistory, but, more importantly, a desire for memory, which is also a desire forknowledge.

With the term ‘desire’ I wish to underline the work of imagination and intuition thatlies at the heart of these works. Archival reconstruction is not intended as a formof cold knowledge, and it does not convey the detachment of historical proof. Inour subjective involvement with the archive, the documents drive us affectively,opening up the artist/historian’s emotions and thus helping to situate her within


her own specific historical conditions. Desire here is what mediates the relationshipbetween past, present and future, positioning the artist’s subjective voice in theprocess of constructing alternative forms of knowledge.

The process of assembling images and texts strongly involves the artist’s sub-jectivity in ways that constantly recompose possible narratives across associationsbetween disparate fragments. Thus, each image/text is displaced towards theuncertain terrains of interpretation, appropriation and invention. The formaloperation of editing or montage is crucial to the ways these artists shape adifferent type of temporality.

In his analysis of Brecht’s Arbeitsjournal, Georges Didi-Huberman emphasises thatthe techniques of montage can be productively reinvested outside of cinematicillusionism. In this respect, historical knowledge can be viewed as a non-lineartemporal assemblage that includes anachronisms, ruptures and movements:

Since it works as an explosion of chronology, montage exhibits the anachronisms. It cuts

across what is usually merged together and connects what is usually separated. Montage thus

creates a jolt and a movement […] endlessly running, migrating from one temporality to

another. (Didi-Huberman, 2009: 133; my translation)

As a formal procedure based on the separation, movement and migration ofimages, montage is an operation that opens space up to differences, conflicts andconfrontations. Revealing the montage as such means that the image is

Figure 3 Renée Green, Some Chance Operations, 1999. Video still. Courtesy of the artist and Free Agent Media.


understood not in terms of illusionism, but in terms of knowledge (ibid.: 67). In theworks I am going to discuss, this visual procedure produces a form of non-linear,anachronical temporality, in which images migrate from one context to another,and time is understood in terms not of continuity but of returns that engage theartists’ subjective desires. The process of putting history’s visual language underdiscussion generates a series of questions about subjects that have been excludedfrom historical representation. Appropriating history’s procedures from an aes-thetic-feminist perspective involves the artist’s subjectivity through the simulta-neous processes of identification and distancing. The mode of these works is bothexperimental and interpretative, and the real/fictional woman emerges as adiscourse that exceeds her historical representation.

The imprecise, impure and temporally ambivalent nature of the images involved inarchival reconstruction composes the past as a psychic, anachronical andinevitably inaccurate representation. According to Didi-Huberman, standing beforean image brings one into anachronical confrontation with the past, because pastand present coexist and constantly reconfigure each other every time we look atthe image (2000: 10). In much the same way, the women in the artworks can onlyemerge from the past through the impulse of a present desire. Like ghosts emergingfrom a hidden past, they incarnate conflicting forces activated in the present as ameans to open up the possibility for a different kind of knowledge.

a simulated archive

Between 1993 and 1996, Leonard produced an amazing installation in collaborationwith the filmmaker Dunye, called The Fae Richards Photo Archive, also documentedin a book (Leonard and Dunye, 1997). The work was created for Dunye’s film TheWatermelon Woman (1996), the story of the filmmaker’s search for Fae Richards(née Richardson, 1910–1973), an African-American lesbian actress and singer ofthe 1920s and 1930s who actually never existed. This fictional documentaryrevolves around Dunye’s rising consciousness and her need to reclaim a blacklesbian legacy in twentieth-century American cinema. Fae Richards acts as a mirrorfor an untold history in which the young filmmaker might be able to recogniseherself (Sullivan, 2000). During the film, a number of photographs of the blackactress are shown as a means to attest to her existence—and yet they wereentirely made up by Zoe Leonard, in collaboration with a number of actors listed atthe end of the film.

The Fae Richards Photo Archive is an assemblage of these images as a way torestore Fae Richards’ biography by documenting her life, loves, friendships andcareer (Figure 4). This project embodies a set of issues that are at the core ofLeonard’s photographic and artistic practice, and of her participation in social andpolitical activism in America. An artist mostly using photography, Leonard has beeninterested in the photographic image’s implication in the production of sexual


difference, as well as in the ways in which photography is concerned with thepassing of time. As Lebovici writes, ‘Her images show the way life erodes objects—orrather, they show the afterlife, the revival of recycled, reused objects’ (2007: 73).

Imitating both the visual language of a private diary and the procedures ofhistorical reconstruction, the archive—a collection of photographs, captions,explanatory text, and a cast and crew list—recollects traces of Fae Richards fromher beginnings in the 1920s, throughout her activities in and out of Hollywood, andinto the early 1970s. The Archive is conceived as a small historical museum displayin which an admirer might have assembled a number of documents chronologically.Typewritten captions give lacunary information about the context and the people in

Figure 4 Zoe Leonard, The Fae Richards Photo Archive, 1993–1996 (detail). Created for Cheryl Dunye’s film ‘TheWatermelon Woman’ (1996). Seventy-eight black and white and four colour photographs and notebook of typedtext. Digital Image, © Whitney Museum of American Art, NY.


the images. Because it imitates both a diary and an archival reconstruction, TheFae Richards Photo Archive enacts not just a woman’s trajectory, but also anadmirer’s desire and passion to recollect documents and information—a roleperformed by Leonard and Dunye themselves. The admirer’s intense desire affectsthe viewer, and enables the complex processes of identification that make thetemporal strata coexist.

Following the Archive’s narrative, Fae Richards’ life and career are reconstructedacross a number of lacunae. We see her in her twenties, when she was working as amaid in a white upper-class household in Philadelphia, or with her sister andfriends. The photographs then describe Richards’ relationship with Martha Page, awhite filmmaker she met at her employer’s house, which helped her to start acareer in Hollywood. The separation from Page marks her decision to leavemainstream cinema and engage in black film production. The last sections of theArchive are focused on Richards’ relationship with June Walker, an African-American passing lesbian. Each picture is like a window opened onto a life thatwe strive to reconstruct. The form of the archive is imitated with realism andvirtuosity, particularly in the simulation of a number of photographic genres, fromthe photo booth to the family snapshot, film still, press photograph and portrait ofthe diva. In this respect, The Fae Richards Photo Archive contains an archive withinthe archive, retracing the history and uses of photography from the 1920s until theearly 1970s. More significantly, the Archive reveals photography’s entanglementwith a collective history, the imprecise memory of which strongly involves class,sexuality, race and gender relations (Figure 5).

What does it mean to produce the fake archive of an entirely fictional character?Who is Fae Richards? Or rather, who could she have been? What is the absence thather invention tries to redeem from the past—if not in history, then at least infiction? According to Foucault, the archive is primarily the law of what can be said,but it also regulates our relationship with the past, rendering some things morepresent than others:

The archive is first the law of what can be said, the system that governs the appearance of

statements as unique events. But the archive is also that which determines that all these

things said do not accumulate endlessly in an amorphous mass, nor are they inscribed in an

unbroken linearity, nor do they disappear at the mercy of chance external accidents; […]

that which determines that they do not withdraw at the pace in time, but shine, as it were,

like stars, some that seem close to us shining brightly from afar off, while others that are in

fact close to us are already growing pale. […] [The archive] is that which, at the very root of

the statement-event, and in that which embodies it, defines at the outset the system of its

enunciability. (1972: 129).

Accordingly, the function of the archive relates ambivalently to accessibility andregulation. From this point of view, The Fae Richards Photo Archive appearsparadoxical: it recreates a past that cannot be said, but it does so through the


appropriation of the archive’s modus operandi, and in a very ambivalent way withrespect to its regulatory function. As Foucault (2001) suggests in his laterreflections on ‘Lives of Infamous Men’, the archive can be precisely the site ofambivalence in as much as it provides access to a number of existences that werenot meant to be included in history. Police and detention archives record traumaticand violent encounters, allowing the historian to collect unexpected voices.Therefore, the term ‘infamous’ might be a useful one with which to reflect uponFae Richards’ absence from the archives of film history: according to Foucault, the‘infamous’ refers to documents that reveal fragments of minuscule, obscureexistences whose visibility depends entirely on their encounter, at some point oranother, with the historian in the archives.

Accordingly, the Archive’s starting point is the consideration that, even if she hadexisted, Fae Richards would hardly have found her way into the history of Americancinema. Race and sexuality play crucial roles in the historical processes of visibilityand invisibility. However, the Archive’s effectiveness lies in its avoidance of thequestion as to whether a real Fae Richards could have existed. Its fragmentarynarrative instead presents us with a puzzle from which a number of repressedhistories might emerge between the lines, thus providing information aboutoverlooked aspects of American film history, such as the black films—so-called



race movies—that were popular with black audiences until the 1940s. The Archivealso offers a glimpse into the racial divides of Hollywood cinema, where it wasvirtually impossible for a black woman to obtain a leading role, or indeed to playanything other than the stereotyped figures of the maid, the mammy or theJosephine Baker-like cabaret dancer and singer (Figure 6).

Within the Archive’s multifarious narrative, historical elements are entwined withfiction, and a number of details raise questions for the reader. For example, onepicture shows Richards shaking hands with ‘J Liberty Wells, President of […]Liberty Pictures, a “black cast” film studio in Philadelphia’. On the same page, wesee her with two members of the NAACP (the National Association for theAdvancement of Colored People, founded in 1909 by W.E.B. Dubois and others).These pictures reconstruct a history in which the formation of African-Americanimagery within the entertainment industry parallels the beginnings of the civilrights movement. Even within this history, the Archive adopts a feministperspective, as Richards’ leading role as ‘the watermelon woman’ (which also givesits title to Dunye’s fictional documentary) anachronically alludes to MelvinVan Peebles’ Watermelon Man of 1970. This reference to a legendary figure ofBlaxploitation cinema implicitly underlines the double marginalisation of blackwomen, both in American society and within black cinema.



Incompleteness is another key element of the work that resonates with the broaderhistory of black women’s absence from American culture. The Archive both providesinformation and highlights the difficulties of writing a history marked by gender,racial and sexual differences. At the same time, the impossibility of determiningwhether what we see could really have happened opens up a liminal space betweendocumentation and desire that engages the reader’s imagination. Sections of theArchive show moments of intimacy, depicting a complex network of relationshipswithin the black and lesbian communities. These images in particular suggest thepossibility of interracial relationships in which issues of race, class and sexualityintersect in a very complex way; as such they provide the uncanniest aspect of thisArchive, which has to do with the impossibility of restoring a vanished life.According to Solomon-Godeau (2007: 395), absence is crucial to Leonard’s work:the Archive inherently refers to something that is no longer there but is stillhaunting the present, like a ghost that refuses to go away. Haunting is a complexexperience in which memory, subjectivity and social life are deeply entwined.However, as Gordon has argued, haunting also has a constitutive relationship withknowledge:

The ghost is not simply a dead or a missing person, but a social figure, and investigating it

can lead to that dense site where history and subjectivity make social life. […] The way of

the ghost is haunting, and haunting is a very particular way of knowing what has happened or

is happening. Being haunted draws us affectively, sometimes against our will and always a bit

magically, into the structure of feeling of a reality we come to experience, not as cold

knowledge, but as a transformative recognition. (1997: 8)

Leonard and Dunye’s recollection refers to the figure of the ghost through theindexical quality of photography, through which each photograph implicitly atteststhat something was there. In his seminal essay on photography, Barthes stronglyemphasises the frightening thing he calls ‘the return of the dead’ (1981: 9). What isat stake in photography is not so much memory (a term too closely related tosubjectivity to be compatible with photography’s documentary value) but, morecrucially, the certainty of the represented event (ibid.: 85). Photography representsthe moment when the living subject becomes a dead object: once photographed, ‘Iam truly becoming a spectre’ (ibid.: 14). This is even truer in the case of the familysnapshots or private albums on which The Fae Richards Photo Archive is predicated:as Sontag points out, processes of memorialisation and actualisation take place insuch photographs (1977: 9). Photographs are memento mori (ibid.: 15); theyconjure up vulnerability, disappearance and melancholia. The images are oftendamaged, cut or stained, reinforcing their meaning as witnesses of past events. TheArchive’s fictional method of memorialisation captures the reader between thereality effects of the images and the awareness that the entire operation is asimulation. In a way, Fae Richards can only exist thanks to a present-lesbian gazethat is looking at her through the lenses of the liberation movements that have


transformed the lives of black lesbians in America. In this sense, anachronism playsa crucial role in defining the Archive’s feminist queer temporality: Richards’fictional reappearance is bound to a notion of historical time in which the strugglesto find one’s own voice are understood as moments of acceleration and disclosure.In the process of crossing images, narratives and the desire for a history that couldhave—should have—happened, The Fae Richards Photo Archive materialises adesire for self-determination that strongly affects the reader.

tactics of history

‘Who is narrating the present and how is it being described? Again and again thequestion arises: Why is this included and that excluded?’ (Green, 2006a: 22). Suchquestions are related to Renée Green’s preoccupation with memory as the outcomeof a compromise between subjective representations and culturally producedimages. Geography is equally crucial in her work, which often revolves aroundwanderings and displacements. Green’s practice can be located somewherebetween the legacy of conceptual art and a post-colonial critique of culture. Herwork addresses issues of transculturation, travel, colonialism and place in waysthat reflect upon identity as something that is unstable and constantly negotiatedwithin the changing conditions of displacements, connections and encounters.Subjective narratives and fragmented documents are both sources and materialsfor her work: instead of producing new objects, Green prefers to reassembleexisting ones, deploying a personal vocabulary that combines text and image,appropriation and archival research, fieldwork and video (Figure 7). History isregarded neither as an academic practice nor as a distant narrative, but rather assomething that needs to be considered from a present perspective, since the



present is always negotiated in relation to the past (Alberro, 2001: 20). Green’soperations can be compared with what I would call a tactical use of history, makingreference to Michel de Certeau’s distinction between strategy and tactics.According to de Certeau (1984: 36–37), the term ‘tactics’ refers to ‘the space ofthe other’, where the techniques of the weak or oppressed take place in enemyterritory.3 In a similar way, in Green’s experimental recollections, historicalnarratives are considered from the point of view of the cultural production of theoutsider.

In Some Chance Operations, a video and mixed-media installation from 1999,Green’s concern with the subject of history takes the form of a feministinvestigation into the legacy of an overlooked cultural producer. This work engageswith spatial, subjective and temporal dimensions of memory through a historicalrecollection of a woman from the past: Elvira Notari (1876–1946), filmmaker,actress, and head of the Naples-based production company Dora Films (Figure 8).Although Notari really existed, Green mixes up historical material about her life andactivity with other documents that are either fictional or relate to parallel topicssuch as cinema, travel, public space and her own search for Notari’s role in earlyItalian cinema. Notari actually produced and directed about sixty films betweenthe 1910s and the early 1930s, before the Fascist regime obliged her to close downher activity. Her marginalisation at the time echoes her exclusion from film historyand archives: only three of her films survive today, the rest having vanished.


3 In de Certeau’sformulation, the term‘tactics’ is opposed to(and inextricable from)the notion of strategy,which is associated withthe apparatuses of powerthat operate toappropriate and master.


Notari’s realism in the depiction of Neapolitan street life, poverty and classinequality was unacceptable in Fascist Italy, but her films were popular among theItalian communities of New York, where they could provide immigrant spectatorswith an imaginary return to Italy. This geographical dimension to Notari’s receptionis crucial for Green, whose archival reconstruction focuses on travel and urbantopography.

Notari’s lacunary history is the subject of Bruno’s (1993) scholarly book, whichlooks into a number of interconnected topics such as cinema’s connection to urbanspace, its role in the shaping of Italian modernity, and the relationships betweencinema, desire and displacement. Taking documentary lacunae as a starting point,Some Chance Operations is not exactly a documentary about Notari, as it does notprovide information about her as a historical figure. Green’s film reflects on cinemaas archive, and formulates a number of questions about the historical and culturalconditions of memory, the role of the image in remembrance, and the reasons whysome histories are rescued while others are ‘partially buried’ (2006a: 20). Thecontingent and arbitrary nature of historical knowledge clearly emerges from aconsideration of the reasons for Notari’s erasure from film history. Some ChanceOperations reflects on possible ways to visualise memory, particularly in relation tocinema’s operation of montage.

As has been stressed, the cinematic image’s ability to visualise time is at the coreof Green’s enquiry, particularly in its aesthetic and political implications(Zabunyan, 2005: 235). Some Chance Operations experiments with alternativerepresentations of history and memory, using image and sound montage to signifydiscontinuity and fragmentation. The film juxtaposes archival fragments—Notari’srescued films, films shot in Naples or elsewhere, television footage, images filmedby the artist—with sections showing Green’s alter ego, an Italian woman calledClara who travels to Naples in search of Notari (Figure 9). Superimposing temporal



and geographical strata, the film moves back and forth between different timesand places. Notari’s historical character intersects with Clara’s wanderings in thestreets of Naples, as well as with a number of anecdotes about Naples collected inVienna, where Green lived at the time. The city as a real and imaginary location isat the centre of Green’s journeys, much in the same way as it was at the heart ofNotari’s cinema. In these movements between here and there, Green focuses ondiverse displacements that echo the primacy of the street scenes in Notari’s films(Figure 10).

Green’s filmic wanderings in and out of Naples and film history strongly suggest afemale version of the fla neur, a historically male urban figure. As Bruno hasargued, in early twentieth-century Italy, women’s presence and agency in publicwere very limited; cinemas represented liminal spaces between interior and exteriorwhere a female gaze, imagination and desire were permitted (1993: 53). Thecinema was a place where women were able to spend their leisure time and, mostimportantly, to look without being looked at. The possibility of a female gaze anddesire that was otherwise denied shows how spatial and visual operations suchas looking, walking, remembering and imaging are deeply entwined with sexualdifference. Bruno and Green understand cinema as a space for female experience,against the paradigmatic theory of spectatorship in 1970s feminist film theory(Mulvey, 1975). Wandering is central to Green’s ‘chance operations’, and functionsas a way to experiment with relationships between cinema and urban space, thegaze and images, imagination and desire, gender and space.

Figure 10 Renée Green, Some Chance Operations, 1999. Video still. Courtesy of the artist and Free AgentMedia.


In Some Chance Operations, cinema is located at the intersection betweenhistory, memory and subjectivity. As Russell has observed, using film asarchive opens up the possibility of engaging with the past in ways that can betransformative:

Found-footage filmmaking otherwise known as collage, montage, or archival film practice, is

an aesthetic of ruins. Its intertextuality is always also an allegory of history, a montage of

memory traces, by which the filmmaker engages with the past through recall, retrieval, and

recycling. The complex relation that the real unfolds in found-footage filmmaking lies

somewhere between documentary and fictional modes of representation, opening up a very

different means of representing culture. (1997: 238)

There is no linear narrative in Some Chance Operations: memories, documents andfictions are assembled anachronically, each of them opening up a number ofdirections for Green’s research on the ways in which memory relates to visuality. Asa visual operation, montage defines a non-linear temporality composed of multiplemovements between here and there, now and then, that strongly conjure a spatialmeaning. In her editing and collaging of different types of images, Green producesalternative forms of temporality and history. Memory thus emerges as a complexnegotiation between different sites and epochs, between personal remembranceand visual documents. The search for something that has been lost and forgottenbecause of sexual difference unfolds the possibility of producing a feminist kind ofknowledge in which history and subjectivity are entwined. In its circulation betweendifferent times, spaces and images, between reality and its representations,memory becomes a critical tool, and visual representation becomes a feministtactic of history.

a feminine topography

Geyer’s (2007) Audrey Munson Project is a work-in-progress, developed in differentphases between 2004 and 2008, culminating in a series of presentations andexhibitions and in a book published in 2007.4 The project consists in archivalresearch on Audrey Munson (1891–1996), who modelled for a great number ofpublic sculptures in early twentieth-century New York. Looking out of her window inLower Manhattan at the statue of the Civic Fame on top of the Municipal Building,the artist slowly discovers that the allegorical figures decorating the city’sbuildings and monuments all represent Audrey Munson (Figure 11). From the NewYork Public Library and the Manhattan Bridge to the entrance to Central Park or thehall of Madison Square Garden, the same face and body conveys the city’sallegories: liberty, peace, verity, purity. Munson’s features were the embodimentof the city’s self-representation as New York established its national and inter-national prominence (Figure 12).

4 See Geyer’s website formore detailed informationabout the different stagesof the project: www.andreageyer.info, lastaccessed 26 September2013.


Figure 11 Andrea Geyer, Intaglio (Audrey Munson), 2008. 11×14″, digital archival print, engraved glass.

Figure 12 Andrea Geyer, Intaglio (Audrey Munson), 2008. 11×14″, digital archival print, engraved glass.


Geyer works at the crossroad between aesthetics and politics, on projects whereresearch and collaboration are often pivotal for inventing alternative modesof knowledge production. The question of how historical memory is established is acrucial concern for Geyer, whose installations explore the constitutive hetero-geneity of historical narratives. For the Audrey Munson Project, she uses theform of the artist’s book to produce a woman’s archive, thus echoing The FaeRichards Photo Archive’s use of this medium as a way to recall a minor history.The book assembles different materials, including texts, images, quotations andother documents, as well as a series of scholarly essays. The materials usedare mostly historical documents, but the narrative often takes unexpected direc-tions as the speaking voices proliferate, alternatively focusing on issues suchas women’s labour, urban space, early cinema, the New York avant-gardeand bohemia, the artist’s studio and its gendered inscriptions, or insanity.In her montage of visual and textual sources, Geyer adopts a subjective perspec-tive that is strongly interpretative and ambivalent with respect to historicalfacts.

Geyer’s starting point is an aporia between visibility and absence. Munson’somnipresence in public space parallels her absence from the city’s history, in whichher name is barely mentioned. This aporia suggests an opposition between historyand allegory as two distinctive and gendered modes of historical representation. Inher function as a sculpted image, woman belongs to the realm of allegory andsymbols, and as such she is silenced and petrified. History, on the other hand,means narrative, action and conflicts involving thinking and acting subjectivities.One could argue that Geyer’s operation consists in undoing this genderedopposition and its effects in rendering Munson paradoxically invisible. This paradoxis at the core of the work, the aim of which is not to restore Munson’s biography,but to elucidate her historical invisibility.

The project seeks to replace Munson within the history of New York City, andparticularly within the context of the feminist movement and struggles of the1910s. Geyer’s archival research draws the portrait of ‘another’ Audrey Munson—not just a muse and a model, but an actress, a women’s rights advocate, a writerand an artist in her own words. Recomposing the fragments of her displacements,love affairs and commitments, the artist reinvents Munson’s biography up until hercommittal to the psychiatric hospital where she spent most of her life (from 1931onwards), and where she died in 1996 at the age of 105. Against the fixity of hersculpted image, the archival reconstruction shows a complex world of conflicts andrelationships that exceeds the biographical reconstruction.

Geyer’s enquiry particularly points at the ways in which the female nude isspatialised in public space, musing on how sexual difference operates in the city’sfabric. This Site of Memory (Audrey Munson) (2006) is a map of Manhattan onwhich the artist has signalled the places where public sculptures for which Munson


modelled can be found; other signs indicate a number of sites related to importantpeople and events in New York’s public life during the same period, from EmmaGoldman’s apartment to the Armory Show or the Café Brevoort, where the Frenchartists Francis Picabia, Marcel Duchamp and other members of the avant-gardeused to gather (Figure 13). In this double cartography, allegory and history areentwined: the woman’s petrified body is connected to women’s strikes, NAACPprotests at the premiere of D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, or Baroness Elsa

Figure 13 Andrea Geyer, This Site of Memory (Audrey Munson), Multiple, offset print, edition unlimited. 2006,30×23″.


von Freytag-Loringhoven’s wanderings across the city. In the opposition betweenthe fixity of the sculpted image and the conflicting historical narrative, themap sketches possible encounters between a singular trajectory and a multipli-city of voices. Geyer’s cartography constructs a topographic space marked byfemininity: she reinvents the city’s space from a feminine/feminist perspective,positioning herself against mainstream practices of geography and space theorythat tend to expel sexual difference as if space itself were a male territory(Deutsche, 1996). This Site of Memory is an attempt to render the city’s genderedgeography visible, a cartography in which the allegorical function assigned to thefemale body in public space can emerge. By crossing Munson’s petrified pre-sence with a multitude of sites where events involving women took place, Geyerconstructs a different kind of historical space, one that is open to subjectivity,differences and conflicts.

The fragmentary narrative of Munson’s life is always thought in relation to acontext that exceeds her singularity, as part of women’s struggles for a voice andfor recognition in the history of New York. The collage and assemblage of disparatedocuments provide the possibility to think Munson’s (imagined) subjectivity withinthe conflicting dynamics of history (Figures 14 and 15). Geyer’s formal procedureintroduces a strong interpretative dimension; this enables a subjective form ofhistorical knowledge that strongly engages the viewer, as Munson’s story remainsopen. In describing her project, the artist emphasises the way in which her

Figure 14 Andrea Geyer, Research Materials. The Audrey Munson Project, various newspaper clippings, 2006.


operation produces meaning, a term she opposes to notions of historical truth andobjectivity:

Audrey Munson’s gaze returned in her writing, in her sculptures and in the story of her life,

represents for me a line of demarcation that inserts into the everyday, not another truth, but

meaning. Meaning that does not add up to a coherent story, a biography that can be written

and shelved, but instead in its present fragmentation, and as a screen for our current and

past desires it unfolds along the lines of a complex struggle of young women to have a voice

and to be heard, to be respected, to be acknowledged, that Audrey Munson shared and shares

still today with many others. For me and you, passing by, now and again now, always only in

the present moment, these quiet sculptures can be a gentle reminder of this presence of

endless moments, of many radical condensations of personal and political struggles woven

into the fabric of New York City. (Geyer, 2007: 30)

The aim of this project is thus not so much to search for the reality of Munson’sexistence as to attempt to draw, across the meaningful space of the montage, atemporality in which past and present can coexist. Munson’s time is thus as muchthe conflicted past in which she lived as it is the feminist present that is able torecognise her. In Geyer’s research, Audrey Munson’s real-fictional character isappropriated as a palimpsest, in which the traces of a minor subject intersect with

Figure 15 Andrea Geyer, Research Materials. The Audrey Munson Project, various newspaper clippings, 2006.


the ways in which sexual difference structures the writing of history. Her enquiryinto Munson thus implies the undoing of her idealised image as an incarnation ofthe city’s virtues, in order to unveil the power relations, struggles and subjectivitiesthat lie beyond the production of her sculpted image.

conclusion: feminist genealogies

The three works I have discussed delineate complex forms of identification andnarrative across time and space, with specific forms of feminist genealogyengaging each artist in different directions. For Zoe Leonard, Fae Richards’ archiveconveys a desire to reclaim a queer genealogy that is not just a form of mourningover traumatic violence against African-American lesbians, but also expresses acollective aspiration for empowerment and agency (Cvetkovich, 2003: 239–241).While Leonard focuses on fandom, biography and intimacy, adopting the form of aprivate diary, Green and Geyer emphasise public space as a crucial dimension bothof women’s agency and of their own archival research. Munson’s ‘presence’ in citybuildings echoes Geyer’s wanderings across Manhattan in search of tangible tracesof the woman’s existence, while Notari’s filmic gaze on Naples directs Green’sperception and representation of the city. Although in both cases displacement isperformed as a means of experience and knowledge, for Green it also constitutesa way to avoid fixing Notari’s (and her own) identity and history. In SomeChance Operations, the camera’s movement and the artist’s wanderings describethe impossibility of rescuing what is lost, while at the same time proposing analternative form of feminist genealogy—one that is predicated not on identifica-tion, but on displacement.

The three works also share an interest in early cinema and its racial and gendereddivision of labour from the points of view of three women who, in different ways,occupied exceptional and yet marginal positions within it: a woman filmmaker, ablack lesbian actress and a nude model in a time of censorship. All these real-fictional lives are strongly entwined with the production and consumption ofimages, but Geyer’s enquiry in particular stresses this link between woman andimage as a constitutive element of women’s history. The status of woman both inthe image and as an image was a crucial starting point for the elaboration of afeminist critique of art history, institutions and practices, for both artists andtheorists.

In this perspective, the three works are suggestive of the renewal of art practicesinformed by feminism that has emerged in recent decades. Reclaiming women’sagency through the work of history has become an increasingly crucial concern forwomen artists: archival research, re-enactments and other creative reworkings ofpast events have gained a decisive role in the redefinition of critical feminist artpractice, up to the current re-evaluations of the history of 1970s feminism in


contemporary art (Grant, 2011). At a time marked by an ongoing historicisation ofsecond-wave feminism (in and outside of the art world), the need to reimagine thepast within the present is politically significant.

It is certainly no coincidence that artists’ concern with feminist genealogies andhistories has been paralleled by institutional revisions of the history of twentieth-century art. The past decade has witnessed a series of large-scale exhibitionsfocused on women’s and feminist art in museums in the US and Europe.5 However,while for museums and institutional spaces this process always implies a certainneed to historicise, and thus to confine the works exhibited within a definite timeand space, for these artists the point is not the past as such, but its actualisation.Leonard, Green and Geyer share a similar understanding of archival research not asa nostalgic operation, but rather as a powerful form of reactivation. The feministtemporality elaborated in these works eludes nostalgia as a form of entombment,as a sign of irretrievable loss. As I have argued, the factual documentation ofthe women in the artworks is entirely made up, reinvented or recomposed in waysthat can be appropriated by a present reader or spectator, so that the artwork’stemporality is the past as much as it is the present, and a possibly feminist future.

acknowledgementsMy deepest thanks go to Andrea Geyer, Renée Green, Zoe Leonard, Jocelyn Davis,Free Agent Media and Javier Anguera. I thank the anonymous referees and membersof the Feminist Review editorial collective for their thoughtful suggestions on theprevious versions of this paper. Thank you also to Xabier Arakistain, ElisabethLebovici and Ilaria Vanni Accarigi. I would also like to acknowledge that the writingof this paper was made possible by a grant from the Centre National des ArtsPlastiques (France) and the Montehermoso Research Grant (Spain).

author biographyGiovanna Zapperi is Professor of Art History at École nationale supérieure d’art inBourges, and research associate at École des hautes études en sciences sociales(Paris) working at the intersection between art history, visual studies and feminism.She has published two books: L’artiste est une femme. La modernité de MarcelDuchamp [The Artist is a Woman. Marcel Duchamp’s Modernity] (PressesUniversitaires de France, 2012); and—with Alessandra Gribaldo—Lo schermo delpotere. Femminismo e regime della visibilità [The Screen of Power. Feminism and theRegime of Visibility] (Ombre Corte, 2012). She has also co-edited Narrations post-coloniales (Multitudes, 2007), among other publications. Her articles have beenpublished in various European languages and journals (Art History, Kritische Berichte,Multitudes, Oxford Art Journal, Parachute, Rue Descartes, Studi Culturali, and so on).She is currently a fellow at Villa Medici – French Academy in Rome, working on thewritings of Italian feminist and art critic Carla Lonzi.

5 See the exhibitionWACK! Art and theFeminist Revolution,curated by Connie Butler,which toured significantAmerican museums in2007, including the LosAngeles Museum ofContemporary Art and theMuseum of Modern Art inNew York, or GlobalFeminism, curated byLinda Nochlin and MauraReilly at the BrooklynMuseum in 2007. Europeanevents include, amongmany others, the restagingof the Centre Pompidou’scollections in 2009–2011under the titleelles@centrepompidou:Women Artists from theCollection of the MuseéNational d’Art Moderne(curated by CamilleMorineau), and theexhibition Gender Check:Femininity and Masculinityin the Art of EasternEurope at Mumok inVienna in 2010 (curated byBojana Pejic).


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doi:10.1057/fr.2013.22


Woman's Reappearance. Rethinking the Archive in Contemporary Art - Feminist Perspectives

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