As much as Womanhouse tried to aid women in redefining the home, we can see a lack of discussion on race within the exhibits in the piece, making the message inaccessible to certain groups of women. As we read in the bell hooks’ Sisterhood: Political Solidarity Between Women, white feminists at the time neglected their role in perpetuating racism and discounting the role that race plays in gender oppression. In Womanhouse, the creators were all straight, cisgender, white women, which may explain the lack of discussion on race throughout the exhibits: they may not have been thinking about race, or they had believed that their experiences as women would unite them together. However, as bell hooks addresses, white feminist need to actively address their own racism in order to creating a lasting change within the feminist movement. In Accion del Encierro, Graciela Carnevale works to empower the Argentinian public into understanding their role in politics at the time, and advocating for revolution through violence. For her exhibit, Carnevale had plastered the inside windows of the exhibit with advertisement posters, and then allowed a group of people in. She locked the door behind them without any instruction. Creating her own performance piece, she watched from afar, as the participants inside the gallery tore down the posters, and looked through the glass exterior of the exhibit space out into the street. Carnevale’s intention for the piece was for the group to understand that they were trapped, and to understand that the only way to enact change is to break out of the walls imposed by the oppressive dictatorship by literally breaking from the glass in which Carnevale has enclosed them in. By seeing another participant in the group break the glass, the audience will be motivated by their ‘exemplary violence’ and understand their ability to create change. She had changed the meaning of the gallery into a locus for political action. Carnevale requires the participants to convert the violence perpetrated by the state into revolutionary violence.

individual experience

Graciela Carnevale, an Argentine artist, once said that ‘only the artist can grasp the interconnected totality of violence within modern society’(The Sound of Breaking Glass, Part II: Agonism and the Taming of Dissent, Grant Kester, 3).

Recontextualizing space- Womanhouse and Accion del Encierro

Both projects work to destabilize systems of violence, and try to make them accessible to the public. Though Womanhouse emphasizes healing and Accion del Encierro emphasizes revolutionary violence, both are forms of resistance. Both aim to free people, or women and the Argentinian public, from oppressive system that continue their subjugation. Both work by providing examples of revolutionary acts, such as breaking the glass or a woman working as a conceptual artist. Revolutionary art changes space, and the way it is used to empower people.

A Cultural Battleground, The Politics of Black Esthetics

Nonetheless, other approaches such as dialogical art and the avant-garde also add a degree of complexity to the cultural battle between the dominant and subordinate.

a black cultural nation

Neal’s 1969 piece was written during the climax of the Black Power Era, a cultural and political movement in the United States that advocated for a black revolution and liberation founded on self-determination and self-definition. The Black Power Era was a response to the increased political and physical violence from white Americans who felt threatened by the recent Civil Rights gains of the 1960s. The Black Power Era’s essence vibrates through Neal’s text which asserts the need for black liberation, a radical and militant reimagination of a world where black communities are emancipated from the subordinate role that systemic and racialized violence forced onto them. For Neal, the Black Arts movement was the locus of a new radical cultural paradigm that fiercely advocated for black liberation. He argues that in the cultural battlefield, the dominant white culture invisiblizes black experiences by neglecting to acknowledge the impact of systemic oppression: “Europe and America are unable within the confines of even their ideas of art to deal with the real issues confronting Man today. And the most important of which is the liberation of the majority of Mankind.” (Neal, 40) In this case, the dominant culture prefers to omit the struggles of non-Western peoples and instead opts for a culture fixed on an exploitative relationship between art, sex, and the body (or as Neal phrases it, “Andy Warhol madness”).

avant-garde

Nonetheless, it is important to keep in mind that radical change involves a cultural revolution that reenters the experience of the marginalized. Hall’s framework reminds us that this is achievable because culture is constantly changing.

A collective’s imagined sense of identity infinitely evolves through a series of sedimented experiences.

In 1994, Austrian arts collective Wochenklauser brought together several different groups of journalists, politicians, sex workers and social activists in Zurch on three hour long boat cruises on Lake Zurch. The group was tasked with having a conversation about the difficult situation that many drug-addicted prostitutes were facing on the streets of Zurich at the time. Many prostitutes were homeless or lived in conditions close to homelessness and they were often harassed by the police and their clients. Furthermore, they were heavily stigmatized by Swiss society, making conversations about change difficult and imposing another barrier in the way of political action. This boat trip was one of many organized by Wochenklauser over a few weeks as part of an intervention and convention on drug policy. At the conclusion of these boat cruises, the participants were able to reach a consensus on a modest solution to the problem at hand. They agreed upon the creation of a boarding house in which sex workers could have a safe place to sleep and access to needed services.

Secondly, the work sought to create the ideal situation in which a consensus could be reached.

Bloc 1 Response

. However, this operation diverges from that of Confinement Action in that the Tupamaros left a note explaining what the plan had been and why it was now being abandoned. To the audience, which in this case can be considered the general public, the Tupamaros’ intentions and the purpose of the piece were clear.

Lastly, it is important to evaluate the emotional and physical toll these works took on their participants in order to understand their capacity for enacting social change because addressing social problems by inflicting a large degree of violence on an audience in the name of change is dangerous.