Feminist Art

Q & A

Conversations between Aviva Rahmani and Felicity Stone, Art Thinker:

1) You’ve been involved with feminist art since the late 1960s—for example, your 1972 work, Ablutions, with Judy Chicago, Suzanne Lacy, and Sandi Orgel. When did you first identify as a feminist artist?

I think my work has always been about a different relationship to land than the patriarchal entitlement I grew up with. As I got older, I could better articulate that divide. My work on the elements I brought to Ablutions began in 1969, when I first became sensitized not only to my own experience of sexual violence but its pervasiveness and normalization throughout the culture. Rape is analogous to land colonization, as land colonization and racism are forms of wholesale rape. In 1969, I already identified as a feminist, though we called ourselves Women’s Liberationists then. The label “feminist artist” was slapped on all of us who were proactively dealing with content that revealed sexism and sexual violence. Arguably, that labelling artificially segregated the work from the art world’s mainstream. It actually highlighted how narrowly confined the range of art themes the artworld decreed acceptable. The art world was the segregated population, not the artists who were feminists and dealing with gender realities.

2) Your feminist art has often taken the form of performance rather than the media of paint or film. Why is that?

All my work has performative elements. Although I feel very engaged with formal painterly questions, I experience painting and drawing as a mnemonic research practice. The performative aspect of my work is a holistic response to problems that transcend boundaries between peoples and disciplines. Painting and drawing often culminate in a performance, or at least a new performative direction based in a fresh question that has emerged for me. For example, in the eighties, I did a series of paintings about dysfunctional relationships. That culminated in REQUIEM (1987-1990), a work that embraced a transition from mourning to joy. That project tracked my father’s passing in 1987 and concluded as I moved to Maine in 1990 and began Ghost Nets (1990-2000). REQUIEM included a great deal of painting and drawing. The question that emerged then from considering that dysfunction was, “How can restoring a small degraded site impact a greater region?” That is a sculptural question. It led in turn to the development of my idea model, trigger point theory as aesthetic activism. I could not have gotten there without my more traditional studio practices.

3) A woman’s rape is still a taboo subject for many and something that many survivors of rape do not feel able to discuss due to trauma, feelings of shame, or other complicated emotions and circumstances. Somehow, through your art and your writing, you’ve been able to discuss your own experience of rape. Do you hope that by communicating openly about your experiences you will help other rape survivors to cope or communicate? Have other rape survivors reached out to you as a result?

I always feel my task as an artist is to embody art as the outcome of filtration for my life experiences. Whether that is rape or environmental degradation is an historical question about my evolving interests. In the late sixties, rape was a ubiquitous topic in feminist consciousness-raising circles. I think when anyone opens a taboo topic, it opens doors and windows to the fresh air of honesty by giving permission for others to reveal painful secrets. That is about owning reality. My experience is that it is the rare woman who has not experienced some form of sexual assault. And importantly, many men are now coming forward to tell equally devastating stories of sexual coercion. However, many others have normalized or even colluded in that deeply personal subjugation to violence. Most frequently, the responses I’ve had to my work on rape have been about people volunteering to compare experiences and thoughts. When that becomes discourse, it is a form of research for us all.

4) How has the feminist art movement developed over the years?

Sexism is a system of exploitation and extraction. That is why it is impossible to separate sexism, patriarchy, racism, and fascist capitalism. The greatest change I’ve seen has been the erosion of “us” and “them” perceptions. For many years, feminists expressed pity for those underprivileged “others” who had experienced domestic violence, rape, incest, or discrimination while being quick to identify their “own men” as the shining exceptions to that behavior and their own lives as immune to those traumas, humiliations, and limits. Slowly, it has emerged that international power over other people is concentrated in the hands of a 1 percent oligarchy, heavily represented by aging white-supremacist men. It has taken the youngest recruits to feminism, for example in the MeToo movement and in discussions of toxic masculinity and rape culture, for people to begin to be more open and introspective about these challenges.

We have finally moved along to where people make connections between patriarchy and ecosuicide. The issues feminists began talking about in the last century are finally having a trickle-down mainstream effect on awareness and as we have seen in recent politics, that awareness is still far from as accepted as entrenched sexism still is. The battle for progress has coalesced around judicial skirmishes to limit abortion and family planning. At the core of sexism and fascism is the determination to control women’s sexuality. Our bodies and reproductive autonomy are the proxy war for that extractive control. The real war is over extracting profit from all life, the entire Earth. I have the impression that more and more young people are connecting those dots.

5) Does a feminist viewpoint still feature in your ecoart? If so, how does it manifest?

As long as sexual injustice remains, it’s hard for me to foresee a time when it would not inform my work, but the shape that might take today is far more subtle than it was in the sixties. One way I think feminism continues to find expression in my work is in my discomfort with artworld tropes such as the lone artist creating monumental works bled of human agency. I continue to be interested in the gentle, the vulnerable and fragile, the earthy and empathetic, the intersectional and the transparent Those qualities are not solely iconic feminine or feminist qualities, but they DO seem to oppose fascism and patriarchy.

6) A disproportionate number of ecological artists still seem to be women. Why do you think that is?

The corollary to that question is why wildly disproportionate fees still overwhelmingly go to male artists who engage with environmental topics, often artists with far less perspicacity and originality than the women who may have paved the way and often disproportionately struggle to survive. The professional gap for remuneration in ecological art is far more dramatic than in more recognized genres such as painting. That creates a closed loop: closed opportunities and support equals more closed opportunities and eventually a closed life. But women are passionately committed to this work, often in spite of those challenges.

The question of WHY we might be so much more driven and prominent than the men despite lack of support arguably goes to definitions of ecofeminism. Many people believe that various biological and familial realities predispose women to care for the Earth. The art world always reflects the wider culture, especially over public art. It comes as no surprise then that the more cutting edge the work, the more the work represents monumental or import insights and realizations, the more women would be cut out of the opportunities, kneecapped by gatekeepers for fascist capitalism. I think many women in the field of ecological art feel a visceral sense of mission that makes our work that much more powerful when we can get through the cultural noise.

7) Who are some emerging feminist artists that resonate with you? Are there any recent shows you found particularly relevant?

During my residency with LMCC on Governors Island, I met several intriguing artists, including Tessa Grundon working with native plants at the Soils Institute and Bebonkwe Brown, working with Native American themes in her installations at the American Indian Community House 

The show I found most interesting lately was “ecofeminism (s)” curated by Monika Fabijanska, which featured a work of mine from 1972, “Physical Education,” about our cavalier disposal of water in then-drought-stricken Southern California. Fabijanska had to deal with a number of challenges, including opening immediately after lockdown. Feminist art is her special topic and in this case, she dove into ecofeminism as a question of validation. The show included works by a number of indigenous artists or about indigenous conflicts. That continued a discourse many of us have about our relationships to other cultures and other ways to look at the rest of the natural world. There were a number of younger artists in that show with whom I’ve continued conversations and whose work I will follow, such as Hanae Utamara and Eliza Evans.

8) If you were to do a new art project focusing solely on a feminist angle, how would you approach it and what kinds of topics do you think you might want to highlight?

A characteristic of sexism is to confine women’s physical presence. Rather than consider feminist topics, I see my work as an ongoing affirmation of a world that defies ecosuicide and includes an expansive perception of our interconnections across geographies. This is not about homogenizing cultures and habitats, but it is about contiguity and interdependence, which is far more complex. As I mature in my work, that vision of an alternate reality that reflects feminist ideals both broadens and narrows. For example, as I concluded my recent residency with the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, I documented my work in two shoots that explored different spatial relationships to ecosystems. In one, I explored a tightly choreographed relationship to space in in indoor venue (LINK). That came on the heels of another shoot that used a drone to contextualize my work in a vast vista (LINK).

9) While the feminist movement has achieved a lot since the 1970s, what do you see as the main inequalities that women face today? While some issues may have been diminished or even resolved, do you see new ones emerging?

I see minimal change in the real world. What might be different is the permission to discuss inequities and there are more women in visible positions of power. But for the vast majority of women, tolerating casual abuse, lower fees for equal work, narrowed opportunities for professional advancement, the socioeconomic abandonment of women past menopause, and lack of adequate child care for younger women, all of which have been recently exacerbated to the breaking point by the pandemic and the rise of fascist politicians, is in many ways even more striking than it was when I was a young feminist. In my own work, that contributes feelings of deep sadness to what I create.

“It is striking how many pioneers of Eco art are also deeply committed feminists. They pursue a feminism that is less about breaking the glass ceiling than about reordering the systems that perpetuate inequity.”

— Eleanor Heartney, discussing Aviva Rahmani, Agnes Denes, Helen and Newton Harrison (The Harrisons) Betsy Damon and Bonnie Ora Sherk, 2020

“I always feel my task as an artist is to embody art as filtration for my life experiences. Whether that is rape or environmental degradation is an historical question about my evolving interests.“

— Aviva Rahmani, 2020

“I think many women in the field of ecological art feel a visceral sense of mission that makes our work that much more powerful when we can get through the cultural noise.”

— Aviva Rahmani, 2020