Interfaces: Women/Autobiography/Image/Performance (review)

For editors Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, British artist Tracey Emin's 1998 installation My Bed exemplifies the fundamental premises about autobiographical work by women artists that inform the fifteen essays that comprise their volume Interfaces: Women/Autobiography/Image/Performance. While My Bed is not self-portraiture in the traditional sense of "painted or photographic representations of head and torso" (5) or autobiography in the traditional sense of "the retrospective narration of 'great' public lives" (8), Smith and Watson note that Emin "works at the interface of multiple modes that encode the autobiographical, including video, installation, written and visual diary, [and] photography" (4). As well, Emin's work "both mimics and questions the notion of autobiography's authenticity, teasing the public as well as the art establishment about the limits and possibilities of the artist's re-presentation of the 'real' life in autobiographical acts and about the woman artist's essentialized narcissism" (4). Finally, Emin "exploits and flaunts norms of gendered modesty about self-disclosure, testing the limits of decorum that women artists confront as they situate themselves and their work within and against the traditions of a masculinist art-historical practice" (4). With Emin's My Bed as "a fitting prelude" (4) and with further examples drawn from the fields of visual and performance art, Smith and Watson's introduction theorizes "self-representation as a performative act" through which women "claim their authority as artists and […] contest the history of art's representation of woman" (4).

Focusing on twentieth-century women artists, Interfaces covers a lot of terrain and will be of interest to art historians and performance studies scholars alike, with essays on Jo Spence and Hannah Wilke; Cindy Sherman and Laura Aguilar; Orlan; Jenny Saville, Faith Ringgold, and Janine Antoni; Louise Bourgeois; Bobby Baker and Blondell Cummings; Lorna Simpson and Adrian Piper; Lorie Novak; Claude Cahun; L.M. Montgomery, Elsa von Freytag- Loringhoven, and Elvira Bach; Frida Kahlo; Charlotte Salomon; Laurie Anderson; Erika Lopez; and Susan King and Joan Lyons. Together, the essays in Interfaces consider "women artists as makers of their own display in relation to the history of woman as an object of speculation and specularization and the kinds of intervention they have deployed to disrupt that specularity" (5).

The range of critical approaches to the autobiographical dimensions of the work of these women artists varies considerably. In "Autotopography: Louise Bourgeois as Builder," for example, Mieke Bal is critical of the biographical tendency in analyses of Bourgeois' work, finding it "authoritarian, as if the artist rather than the public was the master of its meanings," and "paraphrastic, reiterating the artist's words – […] primarily her writing and interviews – time and again, saying thus, about the work, what concerns its maker and what we already know" (164). At the same time, Bal acknowledges that the "personal quality" of Bourgeois' work encourages this critical biographism, but she argues, with reference to the series of installations known as the Cells, that "Bourgeois's visual rhetoric is geared toward a fiction of autobiography that is shaped through a domestic environment that literally surrounds its content – the Cells are round. Thus, autobiographical reading ought to yield to reading these works […] as autotopographies" (164). By "autotopography," Bal means "a spatial, local, and situational 'writing' of the self's life in visual art" (164), but in Bourgeois' work, the self that is "written" is ultimately that of the viewer rather than the artist. Functioning architecturally, the Cell entitled Spider (1996), for example, "uses the structure of the dream to turn a place of the fictional self […] into a stage for the viewer's dreams" (168).

In marked contrast with Bal's complex reading of Bourgeois' use of autobiographical elements to create works that transcend the autobiographical significance that the artist herself ascribes to them, Georgiana Colvile, in her essay "Self-Representation as Symptom: The Case of Claude Cahun," sees "symptoms of mental frailty" (269) in Cahun's self-representations and reads Cahun...