Season 2 Episode 4: Imaging Feminism: Sarah Charlesworth and Celia Alvarez Muñoz

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Sarah Edwards Charlesworth: So to begin to say, "Wait a minute, what kind of sense of self would serve me, you know? I maybe don't want to wear those high heels because it makes it harder for me to climb around in the studio." I think that there's a way that women began to really take on a critique of representation because it didn't work for them. They weren't – you know, they didn't want to be fashion victims. They didn't want to be hanging on guys. They wanted to create a space or place for themselves, for ourselves.

Celia Álvarez Muñoz: I think it’s the ability to speak two languages–not only to speak but to think in two languages.

Marisa Bourgoin: Welcome to Articulated, I’m Marisa Bourgoin, Head of Reference Services here at the Archives of American Art

Erin Kinhart: And I'm Erin Kinhart, Head of Collections, Processing, and Digitization. This podcast receives support from the Alice L. Walton Foundation.

Marisa Bourgoin: The glossy pinnacle of print advertisement and the rise of color television made for a media maelstrom in the 1960s United States. Alongside civil rights and labor activism, what came to be known as the second wave of feminism gathered steam as women sought economic, social, and domestic equality.

While the first wave of feminism focused on issues including the right to vote and property ownership in the early 1900s, the second wave addressed systemic legal and cultural barriers to women's opportunities. But feminism, like other forms of activism, was never monolithic, and a diverse range of women adapted an array of strategies to strive for equal treatment in a system that was not designed for equality.

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Erin Kinhart: In this episode, we will explore how women artists interrogated the concept of the image and its relation to feminism throughout the latter half of the 20th century, spending time with two artists in particular: Sarah Edwards Charlesworth and Celia Álvarez Muñoz.

Sarah Edwards Charlesworth was born in East Orange, New Jersey in 1947, and her projects probed the ways in which the photographic image conditions, constrains, and connects us. During her career, Charlesworth co-founded arts magazines including The Fox and Bomb, and she often created works in series with archival or appropriated images in surprising contexts. Charlesworth graduated from college in the late 1960s when many women started to challenge assumptions of and restrictions on their career options, here's how she described it in her 2011 oral history with Judith Richards:

Sarah Edwards Charlesworth: I hadn't thought about "being" something at all. You know, I was just being me. And so the – this idea that I was going to have to figure out what it was I was going to be didn't appeal to me at all. I had always thought of myself as an artist, but I didn't think that that was another role I had to take on in some way.

I just sort of was an artist. And so I ended up getting kind of depressed by this whole concept of having a career. And I was pretty blue that whole winter. I decided to ditch the boyfriend that went to Yale and got rid of him and feminism was beginning to be very present at the time.

Erin Kinhart: One of her breakthrough early works was the print series, Modern History, which imports the layouts of newspaper pages while only retaining the pictures, with bright blank spaces replacing the text. These selective erasure prints, which she made in the late 1970s, were provoked by the power dynamics unveiled and propagated by popular media. Charlesworth details the advent of the series in her 2011 interview:

I used the International Herald Tribune as a base for the work in part because I was traveling a great deal in Europe at the time, and that was sort of "my" newspaper.

Sarah Edwards Charlesworth: So it was sort of like the classic American point of view. What I was noticing was that at the main picture at the top of the page every day was some male authority figure – a king, a president, a general, a pope. And down below were various missiles and rockets and bombs and military hardware.

What I recognized is that you didn't need to know President Who, King Who,

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General Who–that there was a pattern even more deeply rooted in our culture, both of a power structure but   that in terms of visual culture there was a way to see that instead of getting all involved with what General So-And-So said, they took away all the text and didn't worry whether it was General So-And-So or so-and-so else; you could see that there was some big guy with a big gun and lots of badges telling us what's happening every day, and so I decided to make a piece based on that recognition.

Marisa Bourgoin: From 1983 through 1988, Charlesworth created a five-part series of prints, Objects of Desire, which appropriate images as cut-outs atop colorful, glossy backgrounds in matching lacquered frames. From a stag’s head with ten-point antlers imposed over scarlet to a crop of blond curls against a black background, the slick surfaces propel their subjects out of the frame.

Charlesworth printed these as cibachromes, a process that deeply infuses dye to forestall color deterioration. Radiating with their backgrounds, the images feel iconic, and Charlesworth takes these “objects of desire” as lines of inquiry into our associations with everyday things. In the push and pull of the symbol and the vibrant negative space around it, the works measure the force of the images that emblematize and embody our social realities.

Charlesworth outlined the project in her oral history with interviewer Judith Richards:

Sarah Edwards Charlesworth: I had been interested in the sense that I was interested in how formal qualities affect meaning. I was beginning to be interested in color. So what I did was I began collecting–I had colored boxes in my studio, and one box was red and one box was black and one was white. And I just began tearing all the white things out of different magazines and putting them over there and tearing all the red things out of magazines and putting them over there and tearing black things and putting them over there.

And so I decided that I would do a subseries about gender and sexuality first. And that was the Objects of Desire 1. So what I did was I took all the things that – you know, I decided, "OK, my palette's only going to be red and black." And then I ended up throwing one with a white background in, but I was always sort of kind of setting a rule and then just at the last minute breaking it. But – so one of the things I was looking at in that series was I felt that before any individual adopts an idea of self or identity that they're in negotiation with a visual culture around them and a culture at large, but – that says, "Hey, you know, it'd be really nice if you could someday marry your true love and be a bride." And another part would say, "Hey, it would be really nice if you could, like, be sexy in that slinky sheath sand wear some high heels."

 And I put a glossy laminate on them because I was sort of mimicking that cheesy seductiveness of a fashion magazine or a porno magazine – I mean, they're different cheesy seductiveness – but the kind of, "Come on, come in here, how – what do you think of this" kind of – and so some of the images actually even came from strange porno magazines.

And so I wanted the viewer to be able to kind of go, "Well, that looks pretty good to me," or, "Yuck!" you know. And so you could sort of see how these images affect you and how you think about these things.

Erin Kinhart:  Several diptychs and pairs converge within the Objects of Desire series. In one couple, a golden bowl swims in the bottom third of a velvety blue, which sits next to a canvas on the same blue now supporting a Greek column. When taken together, the works invite the viewer to imagine their interplay: how do our symbols shape one another, how does context affect their meaning? Rather than pure subjectivism, though, Charlesworth was interested in the complex interactions between ourselves and our means of representation—what does it mean to make representation work for you?

Sarah Edwards Charlesworth: The two panels are interlocking meanings. In a duo, the meanings are meant to reflect off of each other but not be codependent. So, for instance, there is a work called Bowl and Column from 1986 – [inaudible] – with Objects. During that during that period, there was a lot of talk in feminist circles about women not wanting to be associated with the earth and with vessels and with some essential idea of the feminine. And literally, there were articles written

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saying women shouldn't be considered vessels, you know. And so – who cares, you know? In what sense are we vessels, what sense are we not vessels? I don't know, but every skyscraper was a phallic symbol – a skyscraper, a gun, a pencil, a cigar.

And so in this piece, I'm just – I'm just saying, here's a bowl; here's a column. Now, you can associate what you will with a bowl or with a column – [Laughs] – but they just – there they are. They're two shapes and – you know.

That's the way visual language works; you see one thing next to another, and they become part of another, larger whole.

A lot of the play between parts of images and diptychs has to do with visual similarity with something. You look at something else, and then you think about what the things have to do with each other.

The whole pictures generation, postmodern, whatever – I mean, "postmodern" was a word that was in play a lot at that time, And I had a lot of disdain for the word. I just didn't think it was very useful. But then I began to realize that there was something fundamentally different about the practice that my friends and myself were engaged with that was different than painting hitherto fore than fine art –

 – photography hitherto fore. Even in minimalism and pop, there was something about exploring ideas of representation that took us into a larger and more complex world. It was almost like the globalism of art; we were, you know, speaking many languages there. And I think one of the reasons why women became so important in that period is because women to a certain extent had been excluded from language.

When I was doing the Objects of Desire, I remember, you know, in tearing things up I'd see the – you know, what's this white thing here? What – it's a guy in a white linen jacket holding a Dewar's scotch; and standing behind him is some sexpot girl who's leaning over. He's the prime mover, he's the guy, he's the one who has the dream, he's the one who has the linen jacket, and she's just hanging on him.

So to begin to say, "Wait a minute, what kind of sense of self would serve me, you know? I maybe don't want to wear those high heels because it makes it harder for me to climb around in the studio." I think that there's a way that women began to really take on a critique of representation because it didn't work for them. They weren't – you know, they didn't want to be fashion victims. They didn't want to be hanging on guys. They wanted to create a space or place for themselves, for ourselves, within our culture, a space where it was possible to be a prime mover and not just be hanging on a prime mover.

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Marisa Bourgoin: Celia Álvarez Muñoz was born in El Paso, Texas in 1937, and her artist's books, texts, installations, and photographs contemplate the nature of memory, language as a medium, and the duality of her Mexican-American heritage. For Muñoz, art and activism are inseparable, and her work welcomes her audiences as interlocutors as she encourages critical reflection, action, and solidarity.

In her 2004 oral history with Cary Cordova, Muñoz recalls her growing awareness of women'

Cary Cordova: How would you say your consciousness of becoming a feminist emerged, if you would call yourself a feminist?

Celia Álvarez Muñoz:  Well, I was brought up in a home of strong women, number one, and the ‘60s of course has to play a strong role in shaping most anybody who went through that period. But atypical because Latinas at that point were slowly emerging, armed now with the art process and that spirit of exploration guided me, propelled me and fed me. Early on in graduate work, too, I started examining my role, my own immediate role, and the juggling act that homemakers women, married women

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have had to deal with, and that became a commodity for the work.

I mentioned the fact that my mother was part of the labor force. That informed it too. And Gloria Steinem and all the feminists that I watched avidly during that period in history, during the late-night TV – [laughs] – talk shows, and starting to pick up the writings were of course very necessary, I think, if you were of that age. I came in a little late because, I think, Steinam might be maybe about my age or a bit younger, but again being that observer, yet, wanting to become a part of, a participant, and examining the injustice connected to that. Yes, I wanted to burn my bra at that time – [laughs] – and did.

Cary Cordova: And did

Celia Álvarez Muñoz: And did.

Erin Kinhart: Lucy Lippard is an influential critic and curator who has championed women's work for decades and who has helped to build a community and critical mass for women in the arts.

Celia Álvarez Muñoz: When I first met Lucy Lippard I had to pick her up at the airport for a conference here at UTA. And I asked her about her evolution and she responded – I think I asked her maybe about her role as an art historian and she said she was more politician than historian when she presents the art activity that is a social event, more communal. She wrote the brochure statement for my Roswell project and placed the project in the Lure of the Local.

Erin Kinhart:  In Her 1990 book, Mixed Blessings, Lippard linked Muñoz's work with that of other contemporary Latina, Chicana, and Native artists, rethinking the force of multiculturalism in the arts. In their 2004 conversation Cary Cordova, a scholar of Latin American art and culture asked Muñoz to unpack her relationship with heritage, tradition, and progress:

Cary Cordova:  Maybe you could talk about sort of being just an artist or being a Latino artist and the challenges or opportunities that are part of that experience.

Celia Álvarez Muñoz: Yes, I was not aware – in graduate school, I was not aware that this wave was being shaped, that this wave was rolling in. No, and I did not make the works with that in mind because I knew, and I think about it – I mean, I was exploring, like I told you, these other theories and these other forms. But timing – timing, you know, positioning is so important too in how you fall in a wave of history, during a period of history.

I finished graduate school in 1982 and continued exploring the book form, very deliberately wanting to expose the books on both coasts.

So, the book works went in through a feminist group, which was Women and Their Works, but extended into this new dialogue. And I found out that I had to send my slides to different people on the West Coast that were looking for Hispanic, Latinas, Chicanas – Tomás Ybarra-Frausto and Sifra Goldman. And so I did, and then these other exhibitions started rolling in – all these were precursors to 1992, which was the quincentenary celebration of – or addressing, not celebrating – depends on which side of the fence you are on – of the Conquest, okay? [Laughs.]

So – it was very exciting, too, and before I knew it, this word, “multiculturalism,” appeared, and I said, “Well, I think I have been doing that for a while” – unknowingly, and maybe the works will fit there, too.

So, these exhibitions started surfacing and opening doors.

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The dialogue was fascinating because it went back to the ‘60s activism. I started to do my research on the movement – and where was I during that time, you know? But I saw that it was leading up to something and that that had to end, too – had to, you know, and let’s see how much life that had and whether it could live beyond 1992, all right? I knew that it was the big, grand sweeping fashion and the large institutions were embracing that dialogue.

An exhibition titled the “Ceremony of Memory,” funded by the Lannan Foundation, opened more doors, the work, not being derivatively Chicana, but having an element of it. But being more conceptual, I think, was accepted in some of these exhibitions because of the makeup of the panel selection that had a wider view, okay? Not only was it the Chicana dialogue, or Hispanic dialogue, or ethnicity and identity issues but the works were conceptual.

Marisa Bourgoin:  Muñoz's work pulls concepts like threads throughout our social fabric, finding connections through the intimate, the familial, the communal, the historical, the mythological, and beyond. In her oral history, she talks about her work's examinations of femicide and misogyny:

Celia Álvarez Muñoz: I picked that up later in another installation called Fibra y Furia – Fibra was the original installation – done for the Center for the Arts in San Francisco – a critique on the fashion industry, again, examining advertising. The fashion industry and how it constructs women or the image of women. Since the Drawing Center project and the “Embassy Project” – I had been exploring the feminization of poverty.

I had been reading a book on, we’re beginning to see teen suicide on the rise and young girls became important. My daughter was around that age too. So, yes, life is an ingredient, that’s part of a bigger picture, and we are a product of our times, as I have said.

So this book on young girls’ testimony and Shakespeare’s Ophelia who, ultimately drowned herself assisted by the weight of her garment she was wearing. I wove this strange tale and used fabric per se as an element, bolts and bolts and bolts of fabric–many donated by the fashion industry in San Francisco. So, you know, it’s like the snake eating its tail, and I design a series of garments that speak about the sexualization of the female.

The Center hires a seamstress from the San Francisco Opera to construct the dresses. And I know that in fashion, what is shocking? Nothing. Everything has been done, so then I center on maybe the rites of passage and starting with like very sexy Pampers, through a toddler in very seductive fabrics, to the teen years, with G-string sequin cut-offs, to the prom dress strategically emphasized in the breast, the crotch and the pompís in the back–then the picture becomes more expanded. And we go into –there’s a rise–I mean, it’s always happened but there’s more exposure to child abuse. And one of the garments….And transsexual and transgender issues are addressed too, some of the garments are ready-mades that are embellished, which are like briefs that are treated like tutus

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or a man’s suit with lapels made of like tiny pajama– this is arrested development. And then a candyman’s cape, a large cape, has hundreds of pockets and lots of candies stuck in them. The big gallery which had been for group exhibitions was offered as the first solo show. It was immense, a big challenge, but it became so experiential, in that it wasn’t something you went and looked at but something you walked through. The viewer becomes part of that scene. I saw the garments and the fabrics as bait, the design as bait, as lures, in this underwater,  this Ophelia thing. And the viewer could walk through the installation and become part of either the fish that swam in that ambiance and later part of the installation was turned into a digital photograph where we go more overtly into this fire and water–life thing, but it still is a lure.

Erin Kinhart: One of Muñoz's signature works is Which Came First? Enlightenment #4, a 1982 artist's book that features images of eggs above grade-school grammar and handwriting exercises, as well as Muñoz's reflections on the dynamic between education, photography, language acquisition, and self-awareness. Here's how she recounted its development:

Celia Álvarez Muñoz: Well, it wasn’t conceived for that. It’s a work that deals with perception and lies, lies of photography. What is truth, what is real, and the role the camera plays in that argument. I just used that story, as the vehicle.

Cary Cordova: And your grandmother’s statement – how did she put it –

Celia Álvarez Muñoz: It’s sex education, and dealing with this generational thing, which is really outmoded by now. When I was curious as to how a chicken laid an egg, and she would tell me that it came from its mouth, its beak, and the story says that I would sit attentively for hours to see if I could witness the event and that is reality, that’s the eye in operation, and that unfortunately, they were just too fast for me.

The photographer is behind the lens, okay? So it’s constructed. The picture presents a row of eggs that are in line, one behind the other, and you take it for granted that you are seeing a row of eggs of equal size. Here,  perspective comes into play. You see – objects that are closer to you appear to be larger when in actuality they are not. If you take your hands, when you put one in front of your face the other one looks smaller. You know, they are the same size. And you think you are looking at just a line of eggs that come from one carton, but in the last image, you will see that they are, in actuality, of different sizes. So, you know, what is real? Which came first? And the language issue. The verb. The lie. Perfect. For that, it’s just perfect.

 I have a practice when I am problem-solving, or when an idea comes. Sometimes it’s before opening my eyes, like the first waking moment, and this problem is arranged there in space and I can see the pieces, and then in motion they fall. They start to fall and then they start to find a place. And then they fit. And then I don’t dare stir until they all fall into place. And then I wake up. And I write it down. Sometimes they come that way, but it’s this place, this arrangement of things, and then it’s locking.

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And I loved puzzles as a kid, too, three-dimensional puzzles.

Cary Cordova: Sometimes you seem to treat language like a puzzle, and where did you sort of build that skill for signs and language and then the multiple meanings of words?

Celia Álvarez Muñoz: I think it’s the ability to speak two languages–not only to speak but to think in two languages, and each language brings its own set of rules, and inferences and I think it’s the ability to think that way – and then all that wit and cleverness, you know, from my – the family was language bent and they’re articulate, maybe the reading, the early reading, the respect for the written word, and just that natural tendency to write, and the copywriting – all of that. Like I told you, nothing is lost. Which came first, what is it – what is it?

No, it’s just the love; it’s just the natural respect for the word. That’s it. That’s it.

Then there was commentary about what it was like for kids to grow up in suburbia, what it was like being a soccer mom, you know, wanting your children to be individuals yet putting them in these groups where they’re patterned and programmed to a degree. By the time the “Enlightenment” series I knew there was material that I could use, that I could work with, but in order to elevate these concepts, for me, they had to be really formalized, and so the packaging, the lettering, had to be text – not written, but printed, still spinning off from the printmaker–yes, advertising plays a part, but I was a printmaker for many years, and that response to the ink, the impression, on the paper, is still very seductive to this day. I still am in love with prints.

These pages became as close to a print as I could bring it exploring, but letting photography come into the picture. So it was this whole mixture using everything that I had been exposed to and just utilizing those areas that I responded to. It’s thrilling still for me to see paper with the mark from the press. It’s still in my blood. [Laughs.]

 In duplicating – once you begin to enlarge, the image begins to break down, okay? And that is advertising information. Old lettering that has been small but then once it’s duplicated and enlarged, you begin to see those – the roughness of a curve or a line and that’s romantic, too, but at the same time, it’s telling. It’s giving the history of the work as well as the impression, you know, and it’s all about impression. [Laughs.]

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Marisa Bourgoin: The impression women gave and left was on Sarah Edwards Charlesworth's mind as she took a moment during her oral history to press on its importance and how oral history can be a tool to retain and protect stories that might be overlooked otherwise:

Sarah Edwards Charlesworth: You know, I've been thinking since we've been doing these interviews – [Laughs] it's like some kind of narcissist fantasy to have somebody listen to you talk about yourself with some apparent interest for hours on end. It's also a very strange kind of process of self-reflection to be thinking

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about all these significant moments in one's life. And I think that the experience of women of our generation in general is quite different than that of our mothers, whatever class we came from, whatever area geographic area we lived in, that women's lives of our generation were quite, quite different than the generation before us. And as a young artist, I found – I felt like I was entering a territory that had been primarily owned by men in previous generations, with a few exceptions, that women if they were artists were either anonymous or folk artists or not able to really enter the public sphere, not really able to exhibit widely. So women make different choices for themselves and juggle different issues, but I think the possibility of having a family and children and a career and an income, an independent income, and being able to be fulfilled in a multitude of different ways is now a possibility for women. And I think the women of my generation have contributed an enormous amount to art.

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Erin Kinhart: For show notes, work cited, and additional resources visit aaa.s.edu/articulated.

This podcast is produced by Ben Gillespie and Michelle Herman for the Archives of American Art.

It was edited by the team at Better Lemon Creative Audio.

Our music comes from Sound and Smoke, composed by Vietcong and performed by the Peabody wind ensemble with Harlan Parker.

Marisa Bourgoin: If you enjoyed this episode, please consider rating it or sharing with a friend or family member.

The Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian Institution is a nonprofit organization that relies on donations from individuals like you to sustain our ongoing operations and special programs like Articulated. To support our work, please visit aaa.si.edu/support. Thank you.

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