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

Smith and Watson's extensive body of previous work established the study of women's literary life-writing. In Interfaces, they turn to autobiography through visual and performance arts, exploring how European and North American women artists juxtapose words and images to enact life narration. For Smith and Watson, these artists establish an interface between the traditional texts (diary, memoir, autobiography, letters) that constitute most life-writing and the referential self-portraiture of pre-twentieth-century women artists. This interdisciplinary collection, solicited from leading performance theorists, art historians, and cultural studies scholars, includes essays on such figures from the feminist art history canon as Adrian Piper and Frida Kahlo, as well as lesser-known artists such as Erika Lopez and Faith Ringgold. Both in range of artists and theoretical perspectives (including psychoanalysis, feminist theories of embodiment, and close readings of the artists' biographies and works), Interfaces has much to offer art historians, performance scholars, and feminist art critics; because the essays posit autobiography as inherently performative, they are particularly useful to advanced undergraduates, graduate students, and scholars in feminist performance studies.

Smith and Watson's introduction is the collection's most useful essay. "Mapping Women's Self-Representation at Visual/Textual Interfaces" develops a theoretical typology of autobiographies by female artists who take their bodies and histories as subject matter, exploring "women's self-representation as a performative act, never transparent, that constitutes subjectivity in the interplay of memory, experience, identity, embodiment, and agency" (4). Because women's autobiographical art is often dismissed as narcissism or transparent summation of the artist's verifiable biography, they argue for a more nuanced understanding. Women have so often been the object of art, displayed for the (male) artist and audience; thus, they suggest, women as subject, especially those who use their own bodies and experiences, marks a space "for negotiating the past, reflecting on identity, and critiquing cultural norms and narratives" (9). Smith and Watson offer

four primary ways in which artists may texture the interface to mobilize visual and textual regimes: (1) relationally, through parallel or interrogatory juxtaposition of word and image; (2) contextually, through documentary or ethnographic juxtaposition of word and image; (3) spatially, through palimpsestic or paratextual juxtaposition of work and image; and (4) temporally, through telescoped or serial juxtaposition of word and image.

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Each is illustrated with salient examples. As they suggest, this model is particularly useful for teaching; the introduction (as well as some chapters) offers pedagogical suggestions, and the useful appendices include a sample syllabus and Internet resources.

After the cogent introduction, the book lacks a coherent through line. Smith and Watson reject their own typology as organizing principle (too restrictive); they reject chronology (inadequate to the postmodernism of some modern artists); they reject medium (many artists work in a variety of media); they reject theoretical orientation (for no explicit reason). Instead, Smith and Watson group the essays under four fuzzy rubrics: the embodiment of subjectivity; the use of space and time; explicitly juxtaposed images and writing (an especially weak category that could include nearly all essays found in other sections); and multimedia subjectivities. The book lacks focus, and while many of the individual essays are provocative, they speak little to one another, or to the collection's stated interest in the interface between word and image.

Whether or not they explicitly focus on word and image, the best essays place the artists within an institutional and historical context. For example, Lesley Ferris's "Cooking Up the Self: Bobby Baker and Blondell Cummings 'Do' the Kitchen" reads the performers within the tradition of female autobiographical performance art, the historical gendering of theatrical space, and cultural understandings about performing women. In "Paging Self-Portraiture: The Artists' Books of Susan King and Joan Lyons," Renée Riese Hubert with Judd Hubert underscore how typography, binding, and experimentation with text and image "cater to a restricted audience of avant-garde bibliophiles" (431). Against this background, they argue that King...