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Emily Pethick talks to Annie Fletcher and Frederique Bergholz about their current exhibition at De Appel, Amsterdam, ‘Feminist Legacies and Potentials in Contemporary Art Practice’; part of their ongoing project ‘If I Can’t Dance I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution’, which was initiated in 2005 (with Tania Elstgeest) as a flexible curatorial platform focusing on performative practices in the visual arts.

Emily Pethick: Your ongoing performance project ‘If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution’ has been going for two years now, and has a particular structure, which you have described as an ‘agile experimental curatorial platform’. Can you talk a bit about the origins of the project and the way that you work?

Annie Fletcher and Frederique Bergholz: I guess we try and reflect on and adjust to the cirumstance in which we have been invited [to make a project] in quite a performative and exploratory way. We try as curators to explore certain questions as openly and inquisitively as possible by providing the artists with the maximum space and flwxibility, in order to generate their answers to our inquiry. We might work with a group of artists again and again in the same year or for a particular period constantly adding to and extrapolating on the conversation we are trying to have through the specifics of art practice. On a practical level we tend to work with two or three partners a year, this year that was Festival a/d Werf in Utrecht and De Appel in Amsterdam. This allows us to think about being in reparatory rather than only expressing an idea as a finite exhibition. We also run a reading group along side projects, in order to collectively explore the ideas with other interested people in a more thorough and gradual way. We got sick of the speed and limited mode of display which most exhibition structures and art institutions offer. We wanted to try and find more discursive and collaborative forms for working with contemporary art.

EP: It is quite appropriate that you picked a quote from Emma Goldman for the title of the project, as in 2006/2007 it moved towards specifically looking at feminist legacies and potentials in contemporary art. Could you talk a bit about how you developed towards this subject?

AF & FB: We love this title too because it expresses so many ideas which we are interested in. Actually, we thought bit would be just the title for last year’s programme (2005), in which we tried to explore the ideas of performance and agency in the context of performance and theatre, but it has now (kind of) become our motto. We revisit it and find new meaning each time. In fact it’s not even, apparently, a real quote from Emma Goldman rather a synopsis of a longer statement she made when a rather humourless activist ticked her off for having fun at a dance instead of concentrating on the revolution. We are interested in the simultaneous critical and celebratory implications of such a statement. We suppose it pertains in Goldman’s case to the search (and the difficulty of finding) a kind of agency, or her own power and potential as an individual woman within an organised and collective quest for political change. The statement for us also encapsulates the meaning of performativity – that all of ones life and all of ones actions are constituent of one’s political agency – it’s not something that you can switch on and off.

I think our shift towards exploring feminism came quite organically from this inquiry into performativity. The quest for a sense of agency and an insistence on understanding the lived experience of women is, of course, key to feminist rhetoric. We also simply noticed that many contemporary artists like Frances Stark and Paulina Olowska, or Jutta Koether were happily thinking through these issues in their work in complex and intelligent ways that weren’t so obvious and wanted to explore that. We wondered why now? And how is this contemporary expression through art practice different or connected to the past and indeed what potential might it have for the political imagination of tomorrow?

EP: It seems that there is something of a feminist revival in the air, with recent shows at the Migros Museum, Halle fuer Kunst Lueneburg and the Norwich Gallery, as well as upcoming shows at MOMA, New York, and the Brooklyn Museum, to name a few. Having been part of the reading group that you set up in the lead up to the show, it was clear that there was a lot of ambivalence towards feminism amongst some of the participants of the group. It also became clear that one can speak of multiple feminisms. You choose the title ‘Feminist Legacies and Potentials …’ thereby positioning it between past and future, so I am curious about the kind of feeling you have about feminism now?

AF & FB: It’s really interesting … In fact this Thursday (7th Dec) we have invited a series of curators for a symposium as part of ‘If I Can’t Dance …’ in Amsterdam, which asks exactly this question so maybe we could give you a better answer next week! These guests include Heike Munder, Bettina Steinbrugge, Miriam van Westen and two new curators of the City of Women in Ljubliana called Katja Kobolt and Dunkja Kukovec.

I think they are many reasons one could point to in answering why feminism is the subject of exhibitions and artistic discourse right now. Perhaps it’s to do with the general feeling of political disempowerment we feel post 9/11 and as global capitalism infects every area of our lives. This has manifested itself notably in the commodification and sexualisation of people – men, women and children in a really extreme way in popular culture – perhaps revisiting feminism as a discourse which actively refuted this commodification of the body is a reaction to that? Also we are living in what might be termed as a post secular age where the extreme fundamentalisms of both Christianity and Islam have really regressive things to say about women – something which is quite depressing. Thirdly there has been a real movement within contemporary art practice recently to re-evaluate certain tenets of 20th century history like Modernism and Communism so perhaps Feminism is also part of this re-excavation of history. The danger of this particular perspective, however, is that one nostalgically categorises something as an interesting relic. Therefore, for us, it was very important to talk about the legacies and potentials of feminism in contemporary art practice.

EP: On the surface the show does not appear overtly ‘feminist’, but seems to profile works that have a more latent or oblique political content, as well as quite personal relationships to particular histories. Perhaps you could talk a bit about your approach to curating the show and how you came to bring some of these particular works together?

AF & FB: Well, we didn’t want to proffer a determined survey or cohesive statement in the form of a single exhibition. We also felt it was quite important not to frame artists per se, so we asked for their reactions to our inquiry. We asked them this they wanted to contribute and left it quite open as to what that might be. It was important not to sum up a Contemporary Feminist Art or to collate an aesthetic for feminism, but rather to explore how feminist thinking on all levels (social, artistic, political, theoretical, ideological or structural) may be important in our cultural life. It seemed to us that there is currently a rich artistic discourse, which taps into this legacy and manifests itself in the materiality and language of visual art itself, but also interrogates how artists choose to produce themselves within this visual economy. Artists like Falked Pisano, Daria Martin, Sarah Pierce, Jutta Koether and Karl Holmqvist, for example all dealt with the legacies of art history and thought about how they might inscribe their own critical practice within it. Others like Pascal Gatzen Maria Pask and Paulina Olowska emphasised their relationship to an intense collaborative practice that might be understood as (amongst other things) feminist in its organisation, but its hard to get descriptive here without being reductive…

As curators we tried hard not to have art pieces in mind which we wanted to select and exhibit. Haegue Yang reacted with a complex reinvention of her own family history through an installation and also a witty group of photographs of a clothes horse in a series of poses which perhaps could even be read in the context of Martha Rosler’s ‘Semiotics of the Kitchen’. Instinctively we got into conversations with all of the participants about what it could possibly mean, right here and right now to think about feminism in relation to contemporary art practice. Indeed many issues emerged within these conversations which permitted us, on a variety of levels, to re-think visibility, the idea of process, authorship and collaboration. Even the certitude of an art object and the exhibition structure as viable model for representing practices which in themselves often refute the consensus of what visibility, art and strategies if representation (traditionally prescribed by Western art practice) are, are being questioned within this exploration.

So on that level each artist answered this inquiry very individually and in a wide variety of ways, which we agree was not particularly explicit in terms of a classic feminist aesthetic. Indeed the whole question is how such things would be expressed presently by artists and that’s what, I hope, we all collectively tried to answer and explore in this project.

EP: What struck me about the show is that it identifies particular approaches and practices, rather than follows a thematic thread. In the exhibition guide you quoted a recent email from Isabel Nolen in which she stresses ‘how to think about what work ‘does’ rather than what it ‘is’. Similarly, in Francis Stark’s ‘Structures that fit my opening and other parts considered in relation to their whole’ there is a relection on the multiple roles that she performs in everyday life – teacher, mother, artist, woman … I think it is this sense of consiousness about the way one practices – be it collaboratively, in relation to particular histories or the context in which one works – that emerges as a strong presence in the exhibition and can also be seen as part of a historical feminist trajectory that to me is more powerful than the more radical feminist waves.

AF & FB: This is something which has emerged strongly in the show: the examination of one’s singularity, questioning of ‘Where am I in all of this?’ whether that is art history, the art system or just expected methods of production and representation. What is so interesting about Frances Stark’s piece is not only her incredible writing which is incisive and witty, but that she manages to put her finger, somehow, on precisely all those messy crossovers between the roles every one has to occupy at different moments and finds a really fruitful way of enjoying how one informs or crashes into the other. To me it is a very clear articulation of the idea that the personal ALWAYS has the potential to be political all the time everywhere … Which is classic feminist thinking. Isabel Nolen’s quote also points to a key tenet of the project in that it tries hard to think about practice as something bigger and more extended than just art work. We want to represent the ‘unfinish-ability’ of it all, thought in an exhibition format is all about concise display but what made it interesting is that so many of the artists worked in a very intense process based way too. That’s why the design group Bless were quite important – their cable jewellery was place randomly (wherever other artists agreed) on the cables of all the audio visual material. It’s really fun and celebratory how they drag something so mundane and ignored as the wires that stick out of all of our contemporary technology, in to the sphere of decoration.

EP: Similarly, your curatorial process incorporates a sense of openness, collaboration and a quest for new working methodologies that is not unlike some of the practices that you profile. I can see that to an extent you let certain artistic practices guide you, so I am curious about how you will take the next step given that you plan to continue this investigation through into 2007 with presentations in Utrecht and MUHKA, Antwerp. It may be too early to ask, but do you have a sense of where the project might go now?

AF & FB: As usual with us yes and no! We are determined to be led by practice again and to some extent this will allow us to develop quite elaborate on-going projects with certain artists, like the Otolith group with whom we are currently collaborating on producing a new film. Working with the MUHKA is exciting because the museum context will let us really develop this whole idea of a legacy in an intense way. Our second question – or maybe conundrum – related to our own awareness of the fact that the practices we have worked with were, in the main, founded within our own western-centric context. It was partly because we thought that feminism is grounded in a located experience that it seemed important to explore our own context first, but now we want to think (with the help of correspondents) about how we might open up the project to a more global experience. There’s nothing like ambition … We want ‘If I Can’t Dance…’ to think about the whole world!