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A methodology is a body of practices,
procedures and rules used to engage in
an inquiry – it is a set of working methods.
Establishing a methodology helps us to
understand the process of
enquiry.

If my outcome is intersectional feminism, what are my methodologies?

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Curatorial Materialism. A Feminist Perspective on Independent and Co-Dependent Curating.

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The late 1960s and early 1970s witnessed the emergence of a new type of work that was about to radically transform the art world and, maybe even more importantly, how art relates to the world. This transformation concerned the production, distribution, dissemination, study, and reception of art.

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What methodolgies are integral to feminist curation. How can I improve on them to make them more intersectional and accessible

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Is autotheory applicable to feminist curation. Should a curator be an omnipotent presence of an exhibition. Can the personal experience of the curator add depth of understanding to the exhibition.

Being omnipotent being stems from the colonial masculinist nature of the institutions.

"Personal is political" unifying the experince and point of view from the curator, artist and audience in order to reach a range of narratives, opening new perspectives.

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Dual meaning in curation: disturbing for the content of the exhibition. Disturbing the institution to uncover the colonial and maculinist narrative prevalent.

Examples:

My Bed, Tracey Emin

WACK!

Uncomfortable Art Tours

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WHAT A FEELING! ACT I

Reimagining the space as something else

Anti-white cube gallery

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Maura Riely.

Activism as a methodolgy

Works with distrubing and reimagining to be activist methodologies

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Museums are hiding their imperial pasts - which is why my tours are needed | Alice Procter

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The Daily Mail doesn't like my Uncomfortable Art Tours and their focus on slavery and colonialism, writes art historian Alice Procter

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Christian Noelle Charles, GESTURE I, screenprint, 2023. Image courtesy of the artist.

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Disturping the contemporary art space

Activism

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Tatlin's Whisper #5 is a performance work by the Cuban artist Tania Bruguera. During the performance, two mounted policemen in uniform (one on a white horse and one on a black horse) are brought into the museum or exhibition space. They patrol the space, guiding and controlling the audience by using a minimum of six crowd control techniques. These include actions such as closing off the gallery entrance or entrances, pushing the audience forward with lateral movements of the horses, manipulating the audience into a single group and encircling it to tighten the group, frontal confrontation with the horse, and breaking up the audience into two distinct groups.

The techniques used by the mounted police are common at major public events. However, the artist is keenly aware that the experience of such forms of control changes radically according to the context in which they are encountered; a sporting event staged in a Western liberal democracy, for instance, is quite different from an unauthorised political demonstration under a more authoritarian regime. In the context of its performance at Tate Modern, the action has revealed certain particular characteristics, including the use of jocular humour by the British police as an additional method of keeping the crowd and situation under control. This was interspersed with more direct commands, with the crowd playing along or becoming more wary accordingly. Examining choreographed performance and experiences embedded within reality, the work reflects on the complex relationship between agents of authority and the people they aim to control.

Bruguera was born in Cuba in 1968 and lives and works in Chicago, Paris and Havana. She makes performances and installations that use silence and self-censorship as a means both to impose and resist power, addressing the relationship between art, politics and everyday life. Bruguera uses performance to create direct experiences of, and commentaries on, political structures, appropriating the tools used by systems of power themselves. She does not simply represent political situations but creates them by putting into motion some of the same strategies used by political authority. Her work frequently addresses Cuba's social, political and economic history and expresses the resulting experiences of alienation and disorientation through the body in action.

Tatlin's Whisper #5 is part of a series of works in which images familiar from the news 'become real life experiences ... by [their] placement inside a museum or a centre intended for art exhibitions' (Tania Bruguera, 'Certificate of Authenticity and Ownership Conditions', Tatlin's Whisper #5, 2008, Tate Acquisition File, Tania Bruguera). The series references the Soviet modernist artist Vladimir Tatlin's Monument to the Third International (1919-20), which was conceived as the working monument for the Communist International but never built. Bruguera's project produces unconventional monuments through the experience of live events, using memory as the means through which the monument survives.

Further reading
Roberto Pinto (ed.), Tania Bruguera: Esercizio di resistenza, exhibition catalogue, Franco Soffiantino Arte Contemporanea, Turin 2004.
Stephanie Schwartz, 'Tania Bruguera: Between Histories', Oxford Art Journal, vol.35, no.2, June 2012, pp.215-32.
Jonathan Wallis and Tania Bruguera, 'Interview with Tania Bruguera', Art & the Public Sphere, vol.4, nos.1-2, December 2015, pp.31-8.

Tanya Barson
June 2008
Does this text contain inaccurate information or language that you feel we should improve or change? We would like to hear from you.

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'Tatlin's Whisper #5', Tania Bruguera, 2008 | Tate

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Tatlin's Whisper #5 is a performance work by the Cuban artist Tania Bruguera. During the performance, two mounted policemen in uniform (one on a white horse and one on a black horse) are brought into the museum or exhibition space. They patrol the space, guiding and controlling the audience by using a minimum of six crowd control techniques.

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Questions the hirearchies we hold within the gallery sphere.

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‘Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk‘, Andrea Fraser, 1989 | Tate

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‘Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk‘, Andrea Fraser, 1989

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With My Bed, Tracey Emin turned one of her life's great low points, a bedbound drinking spree, into a theatrical arrangement worthy of Jacobean tragedy: a violent mess of sex and death. Amid the yellowing sheets there are condoms, a tampon, a pregnancy test, discarded knickers and a lot of vodka bottles. It's also very kitchen sink. That blue slab of carpet speaks of lonely rented rooms.

Supporting role

Historically, beds have largely had supporting roles in art: all those rumpled sheets on which nude women have flirtatiously turned their backs. Emin doesn't turn coyly away here.

All hanging out

Her work always wears its heart, and more, on its sleeve. Lovers' spats are lit up in neon. Everyone she ever slept with had their names embroidered inside a tent. It's the bed, however, that's the modern icon, partly thanks to its headline-grabbing inclusion in the 1999 Turner prize roundup.

Messed-up sheet

Its current pairing in a show with Turner's paintings plays up both Emin's formal sensitivity and her work's expressionist lineage, the tousled sheets and stormy mood matching the Victorian artist's emotive skies.
Tracey Emin: My Bed/JMW Turner, Turner Contemporary, Margate, to 14 January

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Tracey Emin's My Bed: a violent mess of sex and death

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Beds tend to have supporting roles in art, but not here. In this confessional work, Emin doesn't shy away from bringing theatre to one of her lowest points

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How Mining the Museum Changed the Art World - BmoreArt

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A couple of weeks ago, I was listening to a longtime educator describe the trajectory of her career. She summarized her years as a fledgling instructor in the early 1990s,…

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Last week, "My Bed," a 1998 work by Tracey Emin, the British artist, went on display at the Tate Britain gallery, in London. Consisting of a rumpled, unmade bed surrounded by very personal detritus-newspapers, a half-squeezed tube of K-Y Jelly, a used tampon, soiled tissues, empty vodka bottles, cigarette cartons, underwear stained with menstrual blood-"My Bed" caused an uproar, critical and popular, when it was first exhibited at the Tate after being nominated for the prestigious Turner Prize, in 1999. Its reinstallation at the Tate after a fifteen-year interval confirms its status as a landmark work of contemporary British art; it has been loaned to the gallery for at least the next decade by Count Christian Duerckheim, who paid £2.5 million-about $3.7 million-for it at auction last summer.

In 1999, "My Bed" was shocking to reviewers and gallery visitors, whom it helped to draw in record numbers to the Tate, not just because it presented what was an incontestably squalid mise-en-scène_.__ _In contrast to other women's beds as represented in the Western artistic tradition-such as that of Titian's Venus, with its suggestively mussed sheets-Emin's bed bore the marks of blood, sweat, and, most likely, tears. The bed could certainly be interpreted as having served as a site of pleasure, but it was also suggestive of a psyche steeped in doubt, self-neglect, and shame. The bed looked like the residuum of a lost weekend, yet it also intimated that the bed's occupant felt herself to be lost, too.

By the time Emin created "My Bed," she had become well known for blending the conceptual and the confessional. Her first show, at the White Cube gallery, in 1993, was called "My Major Retrospective"; in it, she covered one wall with diary entries from her childhood, which had been spent in the working-class seaside town of Margate, as well as letters to family and friends, including one sent to her twin brother while he was in prison. In 1994, Emin published a limited-edition book, "Exploration of the Soul," in which she recounted her life from conception to the loss of her virginity, through rape, at the age of thirteen. Emin's contribution to the notorious "Sensation" show at the Royal Academy, in 1997, was "Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995": a tent embroidered with names of friends, lovers, and her grandmother, as well as Fetus Number One and Fetus Number Two, signifying her abortions. In interviews given in advance of the 1999 Turner Prize-which was won that year not by Emin but by Steve McQueen-Emin said that "My Bed" actually was her bed; it was in a state that resulted when, sunk in depression, and at the end of a relationship, she didn't leave it for several days. "I got up and took a bath and looked at the bed and thought, 'Christ, I made that,' " she told one interviewer at the time. A bed without a body, it was nonetheless a naked self-portrait.

Emma Sulkowicz, a senior at Columbia University, has since last fall been engaged in an art project also built around a bed. In "Mattress Performance: Carry That Weight," Sulkowicz has committed herself to carrying a twin mattress with her whenever she is on campus. The work, which Sulkowicz, a visual-arts major, is submitting as her thesis project, includes several "rules of engagement," among them Sulkowicz's determination that, whenever she is inside a building owned by Columbia, the mattress must be inside, too, and that, whenever she leaves campus, she must find a safe place to stow the mattress.

Like Emin's bed, Sulkowicz's project is, she has explained, based upon a very specific experience: that of being raped by a male student, a friend, in her dorm room, which was equipped with a mattress very like the one she is now carrying. Several months later, Sulkowicz filed a complaint against the student with campus authorities, but the subsequent hearing found him not responsible, and no disciplinary action was taken against him. Sulkowicz ultimately decided against filing police charges, but she conceived of the art project as a protest against the university's position. She has committed to carrying the mattress for as long as the student in question remains on the same campus. (The accused student has publicly denied the rape charge.)

"Mattress Project: Carry That Weight" has garnered important critical accolades: writing in the Times, Roberta Smith called it "succinct and powerful," while Jerry Saltz, in New York magazine, described it as "pure radical vulnerability," a work that not only spoke to Sulkowicz's own experience but demanded a reckoning with the issue of sexual violence on campus, and with the responsibility of academic institutions to confront it. As a political gesture, the project also has drawn considerable attention. Sulkowicz was Senator Kirsten Gillibrand's guest at the State of the Union address in January.

One of Sulkowicz's rules of engagement is that she may not ask for help in carrying her mattress, which weighs fifty pounds, but she is allowed to accept help from anyone who offers it. This has given the work a powerfully generative force: offering to help Sulkowicz with her burden is not just a gesture of simple human empathy, like helping a mother struggling with a stroller on the subway stairs, but has become a means of protesting sexual violence and expressing solidarity with those who have experienced it. Supporters have organized "collective carries," in which groups have rallied to help to bear Sulkowicz's mattress aloft. And on campuses other than Columbia, students protesting sexual violence, or institutional tolerance of it, have incorporated mattresses into their demonstrations. Carrying the Weight Together, an alliance of activist groups, has called for a national day of action on April 13th, to demand policies "to end gender-based violence and rape culture at our schools"; participants are encouraged to carry a mattress or, failing that, a pillow, around with them all day.

Last month, students at Northwestern University held a mattress protest against an individual who, at first glance, would appear to be an unlikely target: Laura Kipnis, a professor in the film department and a feminist cultural critic. The protest was prompted by an essay Kipnis had written for the Chronicle of Higher Education_ _concerning regulations limiting romantic or sexual relationships between students and faculty at her university. She made reference to a case at Northwestern in which a professor had been accused of engaging in "unwelcome and inappropriate sexual advances." (I reviewed Kipnis's anti-monogamy polemic, "Against Love," in 2003; thereafter, we became friends.) Kipnis makes it clear that she is not defending perpetrators of unwanted sexual advances, or worse: "For the record, I strongly believe that bona fide harassers should be chemically castrated, stripped of their property, and hung up by their thumbs in the nearest public square," she wrote, in a rhetorical gesture of overstatement. But she did seek to question the response of some contemporary campus feminists to the issue of sexual harassment. In the essay, she wrote that the feminism with which she had identified as a student stressed independence and resilience, and she suggested that contemporary modes of feminism-relationship codes such as that at Northwestern, and the increasing use of "trigger warnings" to alert students that material being studied in class might contain representations of rape or other forms of violence-rendered students less powerful, not more. "What do we expect will become of students, successfully cocooned from uncomfortable feelings, once they leave the sanctuary of academe for the boorish badlands of real life?" she asked. "What becomes of students so committed to their vulnerability, conditioned to imagine they have no agency?" The students who marched in protest against her called upon the administration to do something about the "violence expressed by Kipnis's message."

Kipnis, who went to art school in the late seventies and early eighties, belongs to a generation whose members grew up expecting that consensual sexual relationships, and the power dynamics they involve, would often be as messy as an unmade bed. ("Sex, even when not so great or when people got their feelings hurt, fell under the category of life experience. It's not that I didn't make my share of mistakes, or act stupidly and inchoately, but it was embarrassing, not traumatizing," Kipnis wrote in her Chronicle essay.) Emin, who is now fifty-one, belongs to the same generation. "My Bed," when it was first made, conveyed not just the specificity of Emin's own experience of depression, but also spoke to the experience of any woman who came of age in a similar cultural climate. Its implied occupant was an autonomous sexual actor-Emin's birth-control pills were part of the installation-as well as someone who risked emotional pain with every relationship willingly entered upon, and who knew to expect external and internal judgment. We'd made our beds; we'd have to lie in them.

Emin's bed was an interior, self-critical work, but it also enabled its creator to assert her power and self-reliance. "By realizing how separate I was from it, I separated myself from the bed. I wasn't there any more," Emin explained at the time. Sulkowicz has not separated herself from her bed. Rather, she has taken it on as a visible burden. She has devoted her strength, in a very literal way, to bearing it publicly, and, by permitting others to help her bear its weight, she has suggested that the threat of sexual violence might itself be alleviated through a shared, lifted consciousness. If "My Bed" turned blame and responsibility inward, "Mattress Project: Carry That Weight" directs them outward. For all the parallels that may be drawn between the two works, they do not derive from identical experiences: Sulkowicz's unadorned mattress signifies a rape, a stark violation, while Emin's bed suggests a multiplicity of more ambiguous stories. At the same time, Sulkowicz's project is a far more idealistic work than Emin's: it demands a social and political response. Sulkowicz's mattress, in its plain blue cover, is a sanctuary restored. Emin's lived-in bed is consecrated by hard-won knowledge.

Emin was interviewed recently about "My Bed," and she spoke affectionately of it, explaining that she regards the work as "a portrait of a young woman, and how time affects all of us." Last fall, Emin showed her latest work at White Cube: a collection of paintings and bronzes representing the curves and lines of a female body, her own. She told one interviewer that the work constituted an attempt to understand what had happened to her between the ages of thirty-five-the era of "My Bed"-and fifty. "As you get older, life feels heavier, more cumbersome," she said. "Things get harder to carry around, literally and spiritually." Perhaps women of Sulkowicz's generation, having grown up with a form of feminism that nurtures mutual protection through community more than it stresses individual self-reliance, will find themselves better-equipped than Emin and her peers to bear the accrued burdens of age and experience. Or perhaps they will, after all, discover that the muscles they have developed are still insufficient to the weight of the world.

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Rebecca Mead on the British artist Tracey Emin's "My Bed," the Columbia student Emma Sulkowicz's "Mattress Project," and the experiences of feminism that informed the works.

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Art21 Magazine - An online space for insightful writing on contemporary art and artists

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Nancy Spero’s Torture of Women - Art21 Magazine

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“In our day, [when] we came back from war,” said Seymour Hersh to Bill O’Reilly in 2004, “We would take our pictures and hide them behind the socks in the drawer and look at them once in a while.” But this generation is different, Hersh lamented, appearing on Fox just after his infamous Abu Ghraib expose debuted