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Although I have given several
commencement speeches, I became quite nervous at the prospect
of composing remarks
to present
here at Smith, the reason being -- and my apologies to
the male students who are here today -- I care passionately
about
female education and I wanted to say something meaningful
to you. In my previous talks at various co-ed commencements,
I had to be careful about what I said because I didn't
wish to exclude the male graduates, something that would
have
been easy for me to do given my overwhelming desire to
address the young women.
In preparation for composing
my remarks, I spoke to your beloved president, Ruth Simmons,
who urged
me to share with
you some of what I have learned during the nearly four
decades of my career. Let me begin by saying that I have
lived the
life I wanted to live and even though it has often been
difficult, I have no regrets about the path I chose. However,
I do not
quite know how much of what I have learned should be shared
with you, in part because I am still not sure whether my
parents' failure to warn me about what the world was like
helped or harmed me in the end.
From the time I was a young
child, I wanted to be an artist and to be a part of art
history, a history that I saw represented
at the Art Institute of Chicago, which I visited every
Saturday from the time I was 5 years old in order to take
art lessons
and wander through the galleries. From childhood, I was
encouraged in this goal. I was raised in a family that believed
in equal
rights for women, which was quite unusual at the time,
though I did not know this as my parents never told me that
their
beliefs were not shared by most other people of their generation.
So it should come as no surprise
that no one ever pointed out to me the lack of women artists
in the Art Institute's
collection -- even less than the 5 percent that comprise
our nation's art collections today. At any rate, in addition
to being raised to believe that I could be and do what I
wanted, I was also taught to believe that the purpose of
life was to make a contribution to a better world, an attitude
that today, in what is sometimes described as a "post-feminist" world,
is often seen as quaint, particularly if one's idea of making
a difference concerns the status of women.
Many of my friends
bemoan the fact that too many young women are unwilling
to call themselves feminists, all the while
benefiting from the hard work of our generation. I, however,
have a different view, one based upon my own experience.
When I was in school at UCLA, there were two tenured female
faculty members (two more than there were for a good many
years thereafter). In fact, one of them had a collection
of women's art.
I would imagine that many people
here who are familiar with my career are thinking that I
must have
really been inspired
by these women and by the art collection. On the contrary,
I wanted absolutely nothing to do with either of them, nor
was I interested in the collection as I could not imagine
why anyone would collect "women's art" exclusively.
Like many women of my generation,
I was brought up to believe that what men did was important,
a perspective that was not
conveyed overtly, but rather through the fact that almost
everything we studied was by men. That this was a contradiction
to my own desire to do important work did not deter me
from pursuing my goals with determination and incredibly
hard
work.
Also, I absolutely did not want
to be called a "suffragette," which
is the term that was thrown at me whenever I -- who might
have been described as a young, proto-feminist -- tried to
challenge the overt sexism of my male teachers and later,
that of the L.A. art scene of the '60s, which, if described
as macho, would be considered an understatement. It took
me ten years to realize that even if I didn't wish to identify
with other women, in the eyes of the art world, my gender
figured prominently -- and negatively.
My singular goal was
to be taken seriously by my "fellow" artists
(there were few women artists who were visible then). In
order to achieve this, I felt compelled to move away from
my natural impulses as an artist, impulses that revealed
my gender. For even if art has no gender, artists do, and
it is often the case that one unconsciously reveals aspects
of oneself when one creates art. In my case, my forms tended
to be biomorphic and feminine, which was definitely a no-no
at that time, the end of the heyday of Abstract Expressionism
and the beginning of minimal art. It took me a decade of
denying my natural impulses to decide that it wasn't worth
it, that I had best be who I was. Would
it have helped me if my parents had told me that even though
they believed in equal rights for women, not everyone shared
their beliefs? Would I have been spared the years of moving
away from myself? Or would it have only made me give up before
I had even tried? There is no answer to such a question,
for who can predict what "might have happened," but
it did trouble me when I was working on these remarks, as
I didn't want to be discouraging to you in any way.
In my
conversation with President Simmons, she told me something
that surprised me, that many students work for a few years
before entering graduate or professional school. This is
quite different from my own experience, which involved going
directly to graduate school and then into the rough-and-tumble
Los Angeles art scene of the '60s.
I must say that almost
nothing I learned in school prepared me for the reality of
professional life -- with one exception.
During my first year in graduate school at UCLA, one of the
local art stars came for a year's residency. He was quite
different from the rest of the faculty, who tended to be
more teachers than artists. Moreover, he was handsome, dashing
and tough.
He allowed me to visit his studio
and to see, for the first time, what a "real" artist's life
was like, thereby exposing me to not just the glamour of
the art world, but
to the many challenges involved in an artmaking life -- for
example, the need to support a studio and a lifestyle that
seemed both frightening and exciting in its level of risk.
It was he who first introduced me to the "something's
going to happen" way of living, which involved never
getting a full-time job because one's studio work was full-time
enough.
This meant living from month
to month on meager earnings and hoping that "something would happen" so that
the next month's rent could be paid. Many of you will be
surprised to know that I have lived this way for most of
my life, only recently moving into a home of my own and with
it, having to deal with the responsibility of a mortgage.
Of course, things were quite
different then; the international art market was just developing
and had certainly not yet
extended its reach to the West Coast. There was no notion
of reaping any real financial success from art, which was
good for art but bad for artists. This is in very great
contrast to today, when everyone thinks they are going to
be art stars
or make a fortune on the Internet. Last fall, I taught for
a semester at Indiana University in Bloomington, my first
formal teaching job in more than
25 years. Although my studio class was open to both men
and women, only women enrolled. They were from 26-60 in age
and
all of them had experienced leaving school and facing the
void of having no studio, no equipment, limited money and
a lack of context and stimulation in terms of being around
other people who were vitally interested in art. Before
very long, they all stopped making art. Their solution to
this
problem was to re-enroll in school, sometimes repeatedly,
which only served to put off the moment of truth, as it
were.
My class was a project class
aimed at addressing this very problem, that is, the gap between
art school and art
professional
practice. My students were provided with a group studio
and my course was structured to help them move from concept
to
artmaking to exhibition in the I. M. Pei-designed university
art museum, an intense process that involved long hours
of work on their part.
Along the way, I learned something
very important. Without meaning to, most of our educational
institutions infantalize
women. Although it is difficult for all students to
make the transition from school to life, it is harder for
most women students because, no matter how excellent
their education,
few of them are schooled in how to become independent
in the sense that I am describing; that is, feeling
able
to
generate what they need for themselves rather than
being dependent upon others, be it family, husbands, significant
others, friends or even alumni.
Once I recognized this, I
encouraged my students to find a way to make their work without
depending upon the facilities
of the university so that they would have some experience
of what it would be like after they left school. I spent
a considerable amount of time during class discussing what
was involved in art professional practice, something I had
only learned by accident, thanks to the happy accident of
the residency of the aforementioned art star. Unfortunately,
my education in the art world came at the price of having
to endure many comments like "you cannot be a woman
and an artist too."
When I met this fellow, I --
like any of my students at IU -- had no idea that becoming
a professional
artist involved
establishing and supporting a studio, generating money
for supplies, sustaining myself in the face of the world's
general
indifference to art, and most of all, being able to stand
up to criticism, which is particularly difficult for women
as most of us are raised to want to be loved -- I know
that I was.
Regarding criticism, another
thing I learned from my artist mentor was the following: "Never read reviews," he
told me. "Just count the column inches of the article
and note how many reproductions of your work are included.
Then go back to work. That's what counts -- to keep on working,
no matter what." Had I not been given this advice, given
the piles of bad reviews I've received, there is no way I
would be standing here before you, presumably because of
my "success."
But how was I able to achieve
such self confidence that I could overcome my need to be
loved,
learn to generate the
money I needed to make art and run a studio, and, most
important, disregard what others thought and continue with
my own vision,
even when it was publicly ridiculed -- as it has often
been? My explanation rests in my childhood and the love and
support
I received from my parents and also, the lessons I learned
from my father about the crucial importance of history,
although I cannot recall his ever including women's history
in his
lessons.
I was fortunate in having received
such an upbringing. However,
it would have not been sufficient had I not applied my father's
lessons about the importance of history by investigating
my own heritage as a woman. A few years back, I was at the
Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, where
I was engaged in discussions about their becoming the repository
of my papers, which, happily, has occurred.
Mary Maples Dunn,
then the director (and a former president of Smith) asked
me whether my archives should not be in an
art institution. My answer was that my art belonged in such
institutions but that I would not have survived as an artist
had I not known about my female predecessors and that, consequently,
my papers belonged with theirs. It was only through my discoveries
of the stories of such women as Elizabeth Blackwell, Susan
B. Anthony and Sojourner Truth that I was able to overcome
the many obstacles I encountered.
When I experienced rejections
or disappointments, I thought about Elizabeth Blackwell's
experience in medical school
in Rochester, New York. For the two years she was there,
no one ever invited her to dinner and she was sometimes spit
upon by women in the street. And I thought: "If she
could do it, I can do it." When I became discouraged,
I thought about Susan B. Anthony and how she had stood firm
for 50 years, helping to change many of the discriminatory
laws against women that allow us to stand together in this
place today. And I thought: "If she could do it, I can
do it." When I felt hurt by the attitudes of my colleagues,
I thought about Sojourner Truth and how she had stood up
to ridicule, humiliation and prejudice in order to bring
her message to the world. And I thought: "If she could
do it, I can do it."
I mentioned young women's discomfort
with the word "feminist" --
I hope that, like me, many of you will come to see that in
disowning that word, you disown the history that will allow
you to do what you want to do. For only by standing upon
the shoulders of your foremothers is it possible to achieve
all that you are capable of doing, a lesson I learned painfully
and which I would like to pass on to you. In terms of learning,
I should like to again talk about something that I learned
-- also at IU last fall -- in order to share
another lesson with you. A male graduate theater student
enrolled in a seminar class I team-taught entitled "Feminist
Art: History, Philosophy and Context," asked if he could
add a performance section to the exhibition of my project
class. He wanted to recreate some of the performances I had
done with my students during the '70s at "Womanhouse," one
of the first openly female-centered installations. Also,
he wished to employ my pedagogical methods to create new,
more up-to-date, performances with a group of female theater
students.
I was quite enthusiastic about
this idea and looked forward to seeing what the students
might come up with. As
it turned
out, a number of the original performances involved the
theme of conflicting desires. The most effective of these
pieces
focused on one young woman and a clown, who kept bringing
her balloons which she first blew up, then attempted to juggle. These
were labeled "education," "friends," "career," "relationship" and "baby," all
important parts of life but too much for anyone, no matter
how able they might be.
I believe that one of the pernicious
lies that has been told to your generation is that one can "have
it all." Although
I can't explain how I knew it, I always knew that this was
not possible.
Again, I looked to history and
discovered that those women who had achieved at the level
at which I had
set my sights had been childless and those that were not
had suffered constant guilt at not being able to meet the
demands of both their work and their children. And, believe
me, I understand the irony of bringing this up on Mother's
Day. Although I would be the first
to say that this situation is not a fair one, I must also
state that I would hate for
you to discover that choices must be made after you had
already made those whose consequences will shape your life
for years
to come. I believe that it is important to be clear about
your goals and to be willing to shape your life in a way
that makes them possible to achieve.
I realize that I have
said some things that probably are not popular and that
if you follow my advice, your choices
will not always be popular either. But if I am truly
to pass on lessons about what I have learned and also, what
I have
done to achieve my own successes, I would be less than
honest if I did not include some uncomfortable facts.
In
closing, let me congratulate you on your graduation, wish
you success in your chosen careers,
and wish for
you the
sense that you have made a difference in whatever
sphere becomes your own. Last but not least, I feel obliged
to tell you that feeling that my life has had a purpose
has
brought
me the most intense satisfaction, a satisfaction
I
hope that you all will experience in the years to come. |
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