California Feminists: Cheri Gaulke and Linda Nishio

In the 1970s Los Angeles was the heartland of feminist performance, much of which had grown out of the Women's Studies program headed by Judy Chicago and Miriam Shapiro in the early days of CalArts, and the Women's Building in downtown L.A., a hotbed of feminist art activities. In addition to having presented several of L.A.'s first-generation feminists—Barbara Smith, Leslie Labowitz, Nancy Buchanan—and in keeping with a policy of supporting the work of emerging artists, the Furnace featured works from the next generation, including Cheri Gaulke and Linda Nishio.

Cheri Gaulke
Broken Shoes, 13 March 1981

As a member of the Feminist Art Workers (Nancy Angelo, Cheri Gaulke, Vanalyne Green, Laurel Klick) and as a solo artist, Gaulke participated in the 1981 L.A./London Lab performance series, conceived by Martha Wilson. "I felt Feminism was the most important issue of the '70s, and it was high time to see how women artists from different sexual environments presented their work, and how they dealt with their local conditions," Wilson stated in the catalog introduction (in Wilson 1982).

Curated by Suzanne Lacy (L.A.) and Susan Hiller (London) the series served as a vehicle for bringing feminist artists from two different cultural environments together. An articulate leader in the L.A. feminist community, Lacy had already received widespread attention for her own community-based work. Her criteria for selecting artists was to highlight different aspects of California performance and to represent women who had not had much exposure in New York.

Gaulke's appearance—she was a young, beautiful lesbian—in many ways defied the unglamorous stereotypes of '70s feminists, while at the same time her work was firmly rooted in the feminist principles and politics of her California predecessors. In retrospect her performance at Franklin Furnace, Broken Shoes, represents an aesthetic bridge between the generations of the '70s and the '80s. Originally performed in the Los Angeles series Public Spirit, Broken Shoes was an exploration of women's feet and shoes as a metaphor for female sexuality and mobility in society; high-heeled shoes, often referred to in the common fashion vernacular as "fuck me" shoes, were a central visual feature. The sexual implications of these shoes and the fetishism that accompanies them played off of vivid descriptions of the ancient Chinese practice of footbinding, which is also associated with a fetishistic sexual aesthetic. In both instances women not only pay the price of easy mobility for the pleasure of the male gaze and male sexual arousal, but suffer pain and injury in the process.

The performance used the entire space of the Furnace—the entryway, the downstairs performance area, and the mezzanine loft. As the audience arrived, they were greeted by women dressed in loose white pants and shirts and red high heels. They carefully and with intensity removed each audience member's shoes and placed them in the performance space. Later in the performance, the audience's shoes were attached to strings from the balcony and made to dance like marionettes.

The accompanying soundtrack was comprised of various first-person stories: a young Chinese woman's account of having her feet bound from the age of seven; a contemporary woman's harrowing tale of injuries incurred when she tripped in her "sexy, tough, shoes with attitude" and fell down a flight of stairs. The Chinese woman's story is a model of women's psychological and physical oppression across centuries and cultures:

I was born at the end of the Manchu Dynasty. In accordance with custom, at age seven I began binding. Mother showed me a new pair of phoenix-tip shoes and beguiled me with these words: "Only with bound feet can you wear such beautiful shoes. Otherwise, you'll become a large-footed barbarian and everyone will laugh at and feel ashamed of you." I felt moved by a desire to be beautiful [ . . . ]. Every other day, the binding was made tighter and sewn up, and each time slightly smaller shoes had to be worn. The sides of the shoes were hard, and I could only get into them...